It says something that I saw this thread and saw my name under the title, and couldn’t remember posting it.
I can’t decide on whether that’s a bad thing (memory and all), or a good thing cuz I’m sure it’s happened a lot and might be some kind of “rite of passage thing”
I’m sure “always” is an exaggeration, but I’ve seen people with win rates around 75% on Microsoft Hearts, which is pretty darned good. My own win rate was only around 60%, but I’ve never noticed evidence of cheating myself. If it cheats, it doesn’t do so very well.
I suspect glee may have meant he always finishes in first place once someone reaches 100 points, rather than he always wins every single hand - the former is quite believable, the latter not so much for the reasons given. My own overall win rate is just above 50%, I think, but I don’t take it very seriously. I did get one perfect game (as mentioned above) with a score of 0-104-104-104. Sometimes the computer appears to collaborate to stop you shooting the moon, sometimes it seems it misses an obvious opportunity to do so.
That’s what I was assuming, too. A 100% game rate seems pretty high to me, but if that’s true then Hearts really sucks at cheating. My 60% and 75% numbers were for games, not hands. Aren’t the stats given for games usually at the end, not individual hands? Assuming evenly matched opponents, you should expect around a 25% game win rate. I mean, I suppose it can be bad AI and cheating, but it sure as hell sucks at it (and I’ve never noticed any evidence of it when I played.)
I used to play Hoyle Pachisi, cribbage, and games like that, but I grew tired of the computer opponent getting miraculously lucky rolls to come back from far behind and beat me. I have no idea why they would program their games to cheat though. They like their customers to tear their hair out in frustration?
They probably don’t. Read the comments on a fair game of backgammon above. Backgammon NJ was accused of being a cheating game, with people complaining about “lucky rolls” and the such to the point that the programmer had to explain this was not the case and actually provided the seeds and random numbers for each game. That is to say, you can find out that the game you are playing is, say, seed 564576 and you will always generate the exact same rolls of dice. It is so honest you can even select “show next 100 rolls” and you can see what the next 100 rolls of the dice are. Yet people insisted it cheated. I think we just have selective memory.
Here for example is a pretty lengthy response to the backgammon cheating accusations. It’s amazing the lengths this programmer had to go to to explain his game wasn’t cheating. And I am completely confident it doesn’t. It just plays a good game of backgammon. I don’t think a well programmed game of cribbage, either, needs to cheat, but a good AI may make it feel that way, just like when I was less skilled at the game going up against better players. It felt like they always got the right cards, giant runs in the crib, etc. Sometimes, that was the case, but often it was bad play on my part.
I’ve done it once, too. Was kinda fun.
It is all other players against you!
The game will show you who it intends to win by the second hand, you have to aggressively attack that player because the other players will do whatever they can to let the chosen one win. If the chosen one is going to run them they will start dumping all their stop cards if you are going to try and run them just the opposite.
I can beat the game 90% of the time because it always cheats the same way!
Also after playing the game for 40 years I get dealt bullshit hands all the time after I run them a couple of times it will deal me every high heart except one stopper and another player will hold all of the other hearts including the one stopper. It did it 3 times tonight! The chosen one is usual the one opposite you 60% of the time another improbable task! Most of the cheating comes by way of stacking the deck on every deal.
It will pass you high hearts, it will also play high hearts before a potential moon shot has been ruled out.
So just try and shoot the moon every hand (it will come unstuck from time to time though)
The major challenge is winning in “straight sets” or at least remaining on zero.
I have found out that, certainly on Windows 7 Hearts, you have to play a lot differently than if you were to play against human beings. I know this because I used to play Hearts a lot with other people I knew.
When we played as people, we would often “take one for the team” if we saw that someone was aiming to shoot the moon. On Windows 7, you’ll never see that - if you can’t stop them, they shoot the moon and you all get 26 points. Surely it is better to take one for the team, and score 2 or 3 points, than score 26 each?
Don’t pass hearts or spades - particularly high spades - as that will land you in all sorts of trouble. Passing clubs or diamonds can help, particularly if you only have a couple of spades - so that if you are passed any high spades, you have more of a chance of not being forced to gobble the Queen.
Usually, the CPU players will always pass the queen of spades. So if you don’t have it, and you didn’t pass it, chances are it is with one of the other players.
If you are not winning, the CPU players often get one of them (usually the one in last place) to gobble up as many points as possible (without shooting the moon). This means that if you are not winning, then you won’t be able to catch the leading player, as you may get dumped a few points, whereas the leader is protected and the “sacrificial lamb” (whoever is in last) gobbles up all the points. Surely if you was in last place, and you were human, you’d want to avoid scoring any points at all? Because attempting to shoot the moon would be extremely risky - as if it didn’t work as planned, you’d end up going over 100 points and busting the round.
Anyway, rant over… Hopefully someone on here knows how to play against Windows 7 Hearts, and win! 
Spider solitaire repeats games.
I know this is a zombie, but it reminds me of when I was a kid and I first played a card game against the computer. I asked my dad “the computer obviously knows what cards I have since it’s showing them to me, how does it resist the temptation to cheat?” He thought that was pretty funny.
Um, never mind. I already posted this several years ago.
Well, I’ve just had West shoot the moon on me. I could do nothing to stop him (had no high diamonds) and none of the other players put any effort into stopping West from shooting.
Why did they d that?! Surely someone would rather take 1, 2 or 3 points for the team, rather than everyone taking 26?!
edit: Another rigged game - North played the 2H, and East played the QS. My lowest H was the 4. Guess what! West played the 3H! So I ended up winning the QS on a 4H. CHEAT!!!
Id sure as hell cheat if I were a computer. But I’d be all sly about it.
Source: Mrs. B's Brilliant Blog: Does Microsoft Hearts CHEAT?
I am in that situation at the moment. I have a medium points total, and have gained quite a few points in the last 2 hands. West and North have maintained reasonably low points values, with North gaining 1 point over the last two hands, and West not gaining any points at all. I am gaining up all the points not taken by the “sacrificial lamb” in the game, which is East. At the moment, the “sacrificial lamb” is only 17 points away from busting, meaning that another high points round for East will result in either North or West winning. Third place is classed as a loss. MS Hearts really does cheat!
If I was playing a table of humans (like I used to in Year 12/13 of school), anyone in a remotely high score position would try as hard as they could not to get any points at all! They wouldn`t just gobble up loads of points to make another opponent win, that is cheating!
edit: Congratulations, East has just bust (on purpose) to make West win. Boohoo, my win ratio has gone from 33% to 25% in a matter of days!
What a disaster - I’d probably be better off playing Chess Titans!
This thread may end up challenging the Stewart Sandwiches thread for unique bumps.
what is being discussed is known as the “rubber band effect” and used to be well known in console gaming
its where you would hit a certain point in the program while winning and some games would actually have an unknown to you switch in difficulty and had your butt to you …
Take the sega genesis verson of risk … they had a “modern map” version and I had the computer backed up to 1 or 2 tiny central American countries … and it took forever to get my armies there all of a sudden out of nowhere the comp is getting ww2 sized armies and 10 turns later I was done … turns out it had a timer that if you didn’t take it out by a certain round number the computer would clean your clock …