Barbu - should the declarer pass after every hand?
In France, it's not considered a house-rule, but a variant. It's usually played that way with newcomers because it makes the game more active and seems more "fair" since people don't have to do their contracts in a row.

This way, this make it less of a challenge for the last player who, in the normal game, might be frightened and decide he can't do better than one of the previous score.

This variant is quite efficient to avoid this, that's mainly why we play this way since it also mitigates successive "bad" draws.

The "bad" thing with this is that it's quite hard to read what will come next, I usually don't raise a fuss about it but one of my mates prefer the original way of playingbecause it's more ordered.