So I’ve gotten back into playing hearts on Yahoo. Now, one of the most fun aspects of hearts is the impromptu teaming-up that goes on, when the people who are behind team up to try to get the queen of spades to whoever is winning. That is, in fact, the absolute core of hearts when played at a high level. Anyone can try to avoid taking points and sometimes shoot the moon. But reading the texture of the table to figure out how to get into the lead to lead the right suit to spank the low man, now THAT is a real skill.
But there’s a class of people on Yahoo who got far enough to understand the above, but then treat it as a preposterously absolute rule, particularly when they themselves feel victimized.
A characteristic example: The score is something like 51-49-42-40. I have 49. In this situation, I will happily give the queen of spades to the guy with 42 points, with a slight preference for the guy with 40 points. I will certainly try not to give it to the guy with 51 points. And (given that the game is close and not about to end), I will above all else try not to take it myself. So, I give it to the guy with 42 points, and he goes into a huge whiney rant about how terrible I am, and then he starts eating all the points deliberately so that he loses, but I lose also.
The point of getting the low man is that when the score is 50 to 50 to 50 to 20, none of the people at 50 have any chance of winning if the guy at 20 doesn’t take some points. It is not that when the score is 50 to 50 to 20 to 21, the guy at 21 is on the same team as the two guys at 50.
And people who whine and throw games out of spite are just babies.
I had a person accuse me and the others at the table of collusion. This was at a msn game zone impromtu game where players are randomly chosen. Basically, this person didn’t know a damn thing about strategy and dug his own grave. I think he even tried to shoot the moon even though I’m holding 2 aces. I absolutely LOVE burning people on the last card. I can almost hear him yelling “FUCK!!!” when my ace of hearts pulls the last book. Dickweed.
Wow. What an idiot. (Although you can certainly shoot the moon lacking two aces with a combination of luck and an extremely long suit). I used to play years ago on Yahoo! Games but have long since given up because it’s simply not fun for me to play online and because of idiots like this. At any reasonable level of skill, you should assume that somebody is going to hold a high heart to thwart any shooting attempts. Hell, isn’t even Microsoft Hearts smart enough to do this?
I don’t know. I’m on Mac these days, so I don’t remember.
I did love playing Hearts against Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev, and Margaret Thatcher on my Commodore 64 on a game called “Card Sharks.” In fact, that’s how I first learned the game.
I’ve seen card playing pretty bad elsewhere. On Puzzle Pirates, I was playing a pickup spades game. My partner and I blew our first hand, so we went into an extended series of nil and blind nil bids. Unfortunately, my partner didn’t know what a nil bid meant, and DEFINITELY didn’t know what to do with a blind nil bid. On one hand, I bid blind nil, and my partner passed me a top spade and a side ace!
I believe we lost by the mercy rule, falling to the negative score target.
If I hadn’t made a point of forgetting the person’s name, I would’ve hunted them down and tried to sink the next ship or two that they were on.
I’ve been playing for two days, and I’ve already seen players refer to other players, in apparent total seriousness, as both “nigger” and “kike”. Good times.
Precisely my point. In the variant I play, a player who bids blind nil passes two cards to their partner, who passes two cards back. The intent is to ditch top cards and take on low cards, hence my problem when I received top cards.
If you’re third to follow and forced to play the King Spade and the Ace plus Queen of Spades are both in the fourth hand (Pauline) the Ace will always be played.
You’re right, it IS easy. I’ve scored a 0 on a round before. But all 3 computer players play against you, never against each other, with seemingly full knowledge of all cards in each other’s hands as well as yours.
I mean real example. Go play a hand where this happens and describe the cards play. I want to see it.
The algorithm that MS Hearts uses is braindead. Nothing like that goes on.
It’s such a funny thing about random processes. . .people always find cheating patterns in randomness. . .they believe it about blackjack, backgammon, any card game against the computer. It’s a massively widespread example of reinforcement bias.
