The Blind Pass, and When You May Use It

Sooner or later the Charleston reaches you and you don't have three tiles you can bear to give away. That's what the blind pass is for, and using one is not an admission of anything.

The rule, precisely

You may pass on one, two or three of the tiles you were just handed, without looking at them, as part of your three.

You still pass exactly three. Some are yours, some are blind. The mix is up to you.

Only on two passes in the entire game

Look at rows three and six. First Left and Second Right — the last pass of each Charleston. Nowhere else.

Not on the first pass, not across, not in the courtesy pass. If somebody tries to blind pass on First Right, that's not a house rule, it's a mistake.

Why it exists

By the third pass your hand has usually started to mean something. You've kept your pairs, you've kept your flowers, and you're looking at eleven tiles you'd rather not break up.

Without the blind pass you'd be forced to destroy your own hand to satisfy a formality. So the rules let you launder the problem: whatever just arrived goes straight back out, unseen.

How it actually looks at the table

Three tiles arrive from your right. You leave them face-down. You take one of your own and add two of theirs, or two of yours and one of theirs, or simply push all three straight on. Then that stack goes to your left.

Announcing it — "passing blind" — is polite and not required. Most tables do. Nobody reacts, because everybody has done it.

The edge case: everyone wants to go blind

Occasionally nobody has three tiles to spare and the whole table wants to pass blind at once, which can't work — the tiles have to come from somewhere.

The resolution is that whoever has the most available tiles starts, passing one or two and promising the rest shortly, and the table works round until everyone has passed three. It's awkward for about fifteen seconds and then it's over.

There's also a rarer case in the second Charleston: if nobody has anything available to pass on Second Right, the Charleston simply ends there and the courtesy pass is skipped entirely.

What you still can't do

You can never blind pass a joker. This sounds like it shouldn't come up — you're not looking, so how would you know? — and the answer is that jokers can't be passed at all, so they can't be in the tiles you received either. If one somehow appears, it goes back.

Should you use one?

Yes, when you need it. The instinct to grit your teeth and break up a pair rather than look like a beginner is exactly backwards — breaking your own hand to avoid a legal move is the more beginnerish thing to do.

The one caution: you're passing unknown tiles to the player on your left, which means you might be handing them precisely what they need. That's a real cost, and it's why you use the blind pass when your own hand is worth protecting rather than as a default.