The next time I’m waiting on a long-running process I’ll screen-shot some examples and post a lesson. Although clearly there are others who might have better techniques. 
No it isn’t!
Sometimes.
Some further tips: don’t automatically move Kings to blank columns, remember that you can’t put anything onto an Ace, recognise when you’ve lost control, undo is your friend, and try to get two blank columns. Having two blank columns makes the job of reorganising the other 6 much easier. Don’t be afraid to move columns around either.
My strategy: Your first goal is to uncover a blank column. Get one of these at almost any cost, then liberally use undo to see if you can uncover it in a cleaner way. Try as hard as possible to keep this column clear, put only a single stack on there and work as hard as you can to clear it after every deal.
After that, there are 2 phases I alternate between, tidying and uncovering. Using the blank columns, it’s possible to move around the cards so that same suits end up together and piles get uncovered. Once it’s no longer possible to tidy, sacrifice the blank columns to try and uncover other cards but make sure you end up with only a single pile in each blank column before you deal again.
Exactly. Kings don’t go into an empty slot unless doing so vacates a different column. Suit doesn’t matter much in the beginning - it’s much more important to clear those columns. Also I usually have a “junk” pile - starting with a king, I place cards there that I don’t want anywhere else.
The only real backtracking I do is to find which card is best, if any, to uncover when there are choices. But I’m a person and not a backtracking algorithm. 
Writing code to play Spider wouldn’t be that hard with this kind of brute force approach, so that kills my interest.
Okay, what is considered a good percentage if you don’t do backtracking? I was feeling pretty pleased with my 11% until I opened this thread.
If you’re not doing rampant backtracking (including save / restore) then I think 11% is pretty good.
Let’s summarize:
- Open spots are gold. Do anything to get them. One is OK, 2 is good and 3 is super.
- Once open spots are available, clean up the stacks–get suits together as much as possible, then continue.
- Backtrack to find the best choice. If you have 3 aces and only 2 deuce, try all three (and all cards uncovered thereby) to find the best choice before continuing.
- Put all the junk in one pile. I used to distribute odds-and-ends across all piles to keep things even–that’s less effective than piling everything on one place.
- My rule of thumb regarding matching suits is that (given a choice) I’ll take the non-matching one if it uncovers more than 1 extra card.
A hint for making play easier: look for consecutive numbers that are not together. If you have 4-3-2-A on top of a pile, look for an open 5 (or one that you can make open).
I disagree with this: you mustn’t let piles get too big otherwise it’s too difficult to get at the card you require unless the big pile is well ordered. Think about the number of sequences (not cards) you’d have to move to get that card.
I just checked and I have 34 % playing with four suits. I also think a great game should have no more than 300 moves. A good game should have under 400 and if I’m over 500, I consider it a failure.
This seems less like a helpful hint, and more like the whole point of the damn game to me.
But maybe that’s why I suck at it.
Forgot one:
- Don’t put a king in an open spot until the end of that round. Any other card you might be able to move, but a king kills that puppy as being open forever.
I’ll stand by the “junk pile” strategy. Yeah, it’s tough to un-stack, but it makes the likelihood of the all-valuable open spot greater if you don’t have junk all over the place.
The “look for consecutive cards” hint–yeah, it seems obvious. However, when you’re consolidating suits it’s not as easy to see as one might think. If you’ve got a 6 on the top of one stack, look for a 5 in the middle of some other stack, then work to bring them together.
Not hijack this thread-but how the hell does this game work? Even reading the directions, I’ve never been able to figure it out.