Forty books on preferans

These days most people get into preferans the same way: you get curious, install an app, play against bots and pick things up from the hints (when to pass, when to whist, what to lead), and after a couple of evenings you can confidently play a game to the end. But the longer you play, the more often questions come up that the hint does not answer: why this particular discard, how to play all-pass well, how to catch a misère properly. You want explanations, and for explanations people turn to books.

That is where it gets strange. A search turns up a dozen shop listings with identical blurbs, half the editions have not been reprinted in thirty years, and no listing tells you what the book actually teaches or whether it fits the game you play in the evenings.

We have collected every book on preferans published in Russian since 1990 and sorted them by year. There are forty of them in all. The picture speaks for itself.

This is a closed list: nothing is being added to it, and almost everything in it was written before people started playing preferans online. The list is short enough to make sense of, and that is what we will do: first, what to look for when choosing among these books, then an order of reading, then the full catalogue.

Which game are these books about?

It is important to understand that preferans is not one game but a whole family, split into local conventions. Tricks are taken the same way everywhere, but scoring is often so different that a contract that pays in one convention is an unjustified risk in another.

Take all-pass. In Sochi, tricks score 1 point each for the whole game, with no progression. In Leningrad, the progression is 2-4-6 or 2-4-8. The same situation, you are on the third round of all-pass with a hand that takes a couple of extra tricks, costs you two points in the first case and sixteen in the second, where it would have been better not to go into all-pass at all. The advice "in all-pass, take the minimum at any cost" from a book about Leningrad will, in Sochi, make you give up contracts you could have played. The differences are covered in detail in the article Sochi, Leningrad or Rostov.

The trouble is that most books don't say on the cover which convention they cover. In our catalogue below, the convention is given where we could tell it from the content, and there is a dash where the book does not say; that is more than half of them.

Physicists and lyricists

Another way to bring order to this list is to split the authors into "physicists" and "lyricists". The division is an old Russian one, and it fits preferans authors surprisingly well.

Lyricists write about the game as a cultural phenomenon: history, the card table, anecdotes about players, cardsharp stories, quotes from the classics. They are fun to read but help almost nothing at the table. That describes a good half of the books with history sections and the whole memoir line, from short stories about players to essays on preferans and superstitions.

Physicists try to derive correct play from calculation: the probabilities of layouts, whist tables, the expected value of a contract. That is closer to the point, but book maths has a common flaw: the working takes up pages, and often there is no practical conclusion at the end, or it boils down to one line that could have been given without so much detail. Besides, everything was calculated by hand, without solvers (programs that work out layouts), so treat individual numbers as rough guides, not the truth.

Pure textbooks, the ones that simply tell you what to do with the cards in your hand, are a handful in this list. Those are the ones to look for first; add the physics and the lyrics later, to taste.

Order of reading: four steps

The catalogue: forty books on preferans

Everything published in Russian on preferans since 1990. Collections covering several card games are included if preferans has its own section in them. The "convention" column is filled in where it can be determined from the content of the book. Titles are translated; the original Russian title is given under each one.

Which of these can you find today

As a rough estimate for mid-2026: only a few are still sold in ordinary bookshops, the reprints from the 2000s, that is Lobeeva, Matyukhina, Rebrin and the books from the Skifiya publishing house. Everything else is second-hand: market stalls, flea markets, the odd online listing. Yet the most useful books for a player are from the first wave, the early nineties, and that is exactly how you will have to hunt for them.

No new books on preferans have come out since 2012. The only things to reach the shelves since then are reprints: in 2021, for example, a pamphlet from the late 19th century on preferans, two-player preferans and whist-preferans was republished. It is a monument, not a textbook: the game has changed beyond recognition since then.

A pity, really. A whole genre stopped mid-sentence: the authors who argued with each other about discards and whists went their separate ways, and nobody was left to carry on the conversation. The books listed above were written by people who played in kitchens and on trains, and you can feel it on every page, but these books never got a next generation.

And one is needed. If someone does write a new book on preferans, it has to have a chapter on online play and on playing bots in apps, because that is how the vast majority of games are played today. In our app, hundreds of live online games and tens of thousands of games against bots are played every day; kitchen tables have not seen that many in a long time. Everything the old books lack (house conventions at online tables, playing against strangers, how bots behave, relying on the hint) is everyday preferans now, and so far it is only described in articles like ours.

What these books don't have

• A side-by-side comparison of modern conventions. Each book describes its own and does not say how it differs from the others. Separate pamphlets on Leningrad, Rostov and Classic exist, but you will have to compare them yourself.
• Rostov. In the whole list, Rostov all-pass gets literally a few paragraphs in one book. Book literature helps Rostov players least of all.
• Online play. The last book was written before most games moved to apps. Neither the house conventions of online tables nor the quirks of playing against strangers are covered in books.
• Statistics from real games. Book probabilities were worked out by hand, on paper, for individual configurations. The authors could not check them against tens of thousands of played deals. We can, and we go through some of the findings in the articles on deal probabilities and on the talon.

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