Shooting the moon is an option in single-deck partnership pinochle or hearts that I most likely use less often than I should. My two primary concerns are having a strong enough hand to warrant it and playing the hand correctly. Any guide for hand strength? And how is it optimally played? Is there a set sequence of cards played or do you track the cards already played and adjust accordingly?
Sorry, can’t help you there, I thought this was a Portal 2 thread…
maybe using Deadly Neurotoxin on your opponents would help? no? how about some Combustible Lemons instead?
If either of those fail, you could always try to distract your opponents with some cake…
A solid way to shoot in Hearts is to make sure that you have all the high cards in a suit or at least most of them. So during the “pass to the right, pass to the left…” phases, you want to get rid of cards in a suit that you only have a few of so that you can take the lead and start leading with the suit where you’ve cornered all the high cards. If you have sufficient cards, you can start leading/winning tricks and never stop until you’ve got all the hearts plus the bitch.
Shouldn’t happen in games with 4 competent players except in extremely rare situations. Always pass a heart you can cover, or your lowest heart in general.
I agree with markdash, you’ll only manage to shoot the moon successfully against competant players if you have an absurdly strong hand. Even then you’re unlikely to do it more than once against the same set of players (they’ll change their card swapping strategies with you if you try too often).
As for handstrength, I wouldn’t even consider attempting it unless I had at least nine cards in a single suit, with the top three cards in that suit. Then seize the lead and run through your strong suit right till the end (so try and take the lead in the 4th hand if you’ve got a nine-card suit).
To clarify, the reason you’ll have a hard time against competent payers is because they take steps to ensure they can stop a moonshot (such as retaining one heart higher than one they pass) or they intentionally play to distribute hearts to more than one other player. You should be doing the same.
It’s cheaper to pass out of hearts and lie low and hope someone else plays the hero, so it’s tempting, but after getting shot on a few times, you realize that’s a “passive, hoping” strategy and over the long term passive hope does not win games consistently.
Conversely, if the other players pass you stuff like A-K-Q of hearts, especially repeatedly, it indicates they are lying low and they’re ripe for a moonshot attempt.
When going for a moonshot, if my cards aren’t dominant, I will usually play my weak cards that the enemy can take early. If they take them, I dump as much as I can…if they let me take them, my weaknesses are gone and I can put the hammer down.
I was once dealt a natural moonshot in 4-player Hearts – A-K-Q-J-10-9 of hearts, A-K-Q of spades. I was able to just open with an undisguised moonshot – unless all the remaining hearts belong to one guy, and he’s not my partner, and he plays to take a heart from the first card, he cannot stop that hand.
You can also do it without hearts – a long run of some other suit and the high cards in the remaining suits and a void of hearts will do it. That’s a major reason to pass one heart if you can – so the other guy doesn’t do it to you.
I’d say that shooting the moon in partnership Pinochle is a much more random business than in Hearts, because obviously you don’t have knowledge of or control over all of your partnership’s cards. In addition, if your hand is strong enough to bid you’re probably going to be putting down a significant number of your cards as melds, so your opponents are going to know where some of your strengths and weaknesses lie.
That said, it’s less obvious that you’re going for a “slam” in Pinochle than in Hearts. The first time you intentionally win a trick in Hearts, it’s obvious what you’re doing, but there is no real point in trick play in Pinochle where your opponents realize what you’re trying to do. The bigger problem is for your opponents that at a certain point if they have no trump left and you have all or mostly trump, it’s over for them.
If I were looking for a slam I’d want to have both aces of trump. Yes, you could catch an opponent with a “bare ace” but the chances of a player being dealt one trump and that only being the ace are very slender (and I don’t want to bother figuring out the odds). I’d also want either a long trump suit or high cards in off-suits. I wouldn’t want to depend on my partner for more than one card. It’s a lot harder to do bidding cues in Pinochle than in Bridge. Realistically you have to look at your hand and decide if you’ve got two losers; if you do, don’t count on the slam. Yes, you’ll luck into slams when your opponent also has good cards, but don’t stake your bet on getting it.
Is Bicycle’s Pinochle for PC any good, or are there any good online pinochle sites? Hoyle’s Pinochle is really bad with few options.
It’s usually easier to shoot without hearts then with them.
On a side note, I always found it interesting how in MS-hearts, the bots never try to stop each other from shooting the moon, but will always gang up to stop you.
I also find it interesting that they pass the queen of spades every time they’re dealt it. I’d much rather have it in my hand then floating around on the table. At least with it in my hand, I have some control over where it goes.
Thoughts about single-player hearts: First of all, how likely you are to succeed varies greatly depending on how good your opponents are, but your basic strategy should remain the same.
There are three basic types of hands you might shoot the moon with:
(1) A hand with no hearts. This is easiest
(2) A hand with one or two medium-to-high hearts. This is tricky
(3) A hand with a dominant heart suit. This might seem easiest, but you rarely have this hand, and you can get destroyed if someone else takes an early cheap heart.
And note that in almost all situations, you shoot the moon by just taking all the tricks from point N onwards, not taking some and losing some but managing to take all the ones with points in them. (The exception there is when you just have all the high hearts in hand, in which case you want to “accidentally” get stuck with the queen, then take all the hearts.) (Note that it’s very important to be aware of whether or not you can lead hearts if the QS has been played but no hearts have been played, which varies based on the specific rules you’re playing with.)
In general, with any of these hands, you want to keep a couple of things in mind while considering a moon shot:
(1) keep your options open for as long as possible, and then play all your “maybe” cards first. Ideally you’ll end up in some situation where you’ve taken one or two points (but not the queen of spades), and you’ll lead a card on trick 5 or 6 where if you take that trick, you will then take all the rest and shoot the moon, and if you don’t take it, then you will take nothing else and end up with one or two points (which is a fine outcome). One implication of this is that taking the first heart is almost always a very good thing to do, as (a) it guarantees that no one ELSE shoots the moon, and (b) even if you have no intention of shooting the moon, no one else knows that, so when you take that first heart, and lead something like the eight of clubs, alert players will have to cover it to take the trick when they otherwise might not, etc. Certainly, though, if you get the lead, have taken a point already, have AKQJT9834 of clubs and 7 of diamonds in hand, lead the 7 of diamonds FIRST. Odds are you won’t take it, and then you can just take nothing else, but don’t assume that you will be able to fool people by taking all your clubs and hanging on to the 7 of diamonds as the last trick.
(2) If you have only one (or possibly two) medium to highish hearts, and you get the lead having taken a point or two, lead your heart instantly. Suppose you have only one heart, which is the queen of hearts. If you take a club trick with a heart in it (or even with the queen of spades), you definitely want to lead your queen of hearts immediately, because now is when everyone else HAS to take it or risk you shooting. Usually they just will take it, and you’re not shooting, but you couldn’t shoot anyhow. Sometimes, though, one person has the K of hearts and one has the A of hearts, and both of them are weak fools and don’t take your queen, and you get to shoot when you really shouldn’t have been able to, but if you wait to play your Q much later when it’s far more clear what’s going on, you’re never going to get way with it.
(3) When passing, you want to keep your options open. So if you are dealt a hand with a lot of high cards but also some very low cards, if you pass away the low cards hoping to shoot, and just get passed medium cards, you will end up with a DISASTROUS hand and take 22 points. Really low cards are AMAZING to have in hearts, and you can generally even have a few of them and still keep moon options open. Usually what “passing to try to shoot the moon” means is keeping all your super long suits and voiding yourself in hearts and hoping for the best.
A few other tricky issues to think about:
(1) Because having a medium to low heart makes it SO hard to shoot the moon, you should always pass one to whoever you’re passing to. But once you’re playing with competent players, you start assuming that will always happen, so you can get away with not doing it every once in a while. For instance, if the hand you’re dealt is a very clean and safe hand with no shot of either mooning or getting stuck with points, except that you have 3 high diamonds, I would often just pass them away and gamble, because the benefit of then having all safe suits is SO high. But it depends on the psychology of the situation and many other things. Certainly if you do gamble and not pass a low heart, you have to be on super-crazy alert and remember who it is you passed to and try to give points to someone other than that person ASAP.
(2) When someone starts playing as if they’re shooting the moon and you have the queen of spades in your hand, you might be tempted to think “I should hang on to this to stop them from mooning”, but that is usually wrong, because once you give them the queen then other people will be much more willing to hang on to all their high cards to stop the moon knowing they will have to suffer only hearts, not the queen… although the scores certainly matter. In an extreme situation where someone is at 99, you’re at 0, and two other players are at 50, if the guy at 99 starts shooting you certainly hang onto your QS until the bitter end because if you take it and stop the moon, you instantly win the game, etc.
One other issue to consider is that frequently (although this depends a LOT on the precise situation, the scores, and whether there are “points for coming in second”) people will allow, or even actively help, moon shots. For instance, if the scores are 10-20-70-70 and one of the people with 70 starts shooting the moon, only the person with 10 has an incentive to stop them, and then only if they can do so without taking the QS. But of course you can never quite depend on this happening, etc.
Great advice, everyone. What kind of success rate should you aim for? Is anything less than 100% acceptable from a breakeven analysis standpoint?
Certainly. I mean, even in the very worst case, imagine that there are two outcomes, one in which you shoot the moon and one in which you end up with 25 points. Even in that extremity, it’s still right to try if you only succeed 98% of the time or something (depending on the score).
But more realistically, as I mentioned in my long post, the way to do it is (whenever possible) to set it up so that if you don’t shoot, you are able to escape without getting massively crushed. Or, alternatively, you might be in a situation where you’ve already taken the queen of spades so you already have 13 points. At that point that’s a done deal, and the additional punishment you will get by trying to shoot and failing is small enough that it’s probably worth going for it if your probability of success is low to medium.
There are also metagame benefits. Try to shoot and fail a few times, and even if you lose that game, the people you play with are going to have to be constantly on their toes around you, meaning you’ll be able to get away with things when you’re NOT shooting, etc.
Edited to add: Also, hearts without ever trying to shoot the moon is dull as molasses compared to hearts where you ARE trying to shoot the moon or at least keeping it open as an option…
Not always. I play the XP version, my base tactic is shooting the moon and a good chunk of the time it comes off. They’re dumb, they’ll give you the AH, QS and other high cards. Even you don’t have the AH, one of 'em will stupidly dump it out before you’ve lost a trick.
http://home.arcor.de/bananas02/4hands.png
http://home.arcor.de/bananas02/5hands.png