Using a 6 Suited Deck For Hearts

An interesting version of Hearts involves six or more players and requires a six suited deck. The only deck I’ve ever used or even seen for that matter was manufactured by Empire. I found a deck a long time ago in a specialty game shop and thought this would work for a mega game of Hearts. The extra black suit was ‘anchors’ and the extra red suit was ‘crowns’. There were 78 cards in total so if you wanted to play with more than 6 players you would have to remove some cards from the deck.




Examples:

7 players:
78 / 7 = 11 cards ea. remove 1 card (2 of crowns for example)

8 players:

78 / 8 = 9 cards ea. remove 6 cards (2, 3, 4, 5 ,6 ,7 of crowns)
or add the 2 jokers - 10 cards. ea (jokers can be discarded when you can’t follow suit i.e. they can never capture a trick)

9 players:

78 / 9 = 8 cards ea. remove 6 cards (2, 3, 4, 5 ,6 ,7 of crowns)

10 players:

add the 2 jokers - 8 cards. ea (jokers can be discarded when you can’t follow suit i.e. they can never capture a trick)

We ended up making some rule changes to spice the game up a bit.

1) All 3 black queens are worth 13 pts. ea.

2) The 2 of diamonds leads the first trick. (This was necessary due to the fact that the 2 of clubs could potentially draw the queen of clubs now designated a penalty card, on the first trick.)

3) The card passing sequence begins with passing to the player on your immediate left then one more player to the left each hand into you are ‘passing to yourself’ which would be the keeper. So with 7 players for example the sequence would be: 1 left, 2 left, 3 left, 4 left (same as 3 to the right), 5 left (or 2 right) 6 left (or immediate right) then keeper.

Shoot the Moon

In Hearts, when you capture all the hearts and the queen of spades you score 0 points and all your opponents score 26 points. This of course is commonly referred to as ‘shooting the moon’. In some versions of the game if your current score exceeds or equals 26 points you have the option of subtracting 26 points from your score while your opponents score nothing.

Quite often, even after passing cards you can end up with what you might consider to be a bad hand. In these situations you may decide that you are probably going to score a lot of points anyway, so you might as well just go for them all. It can be sometimes difficult however to decide if your hand is bad enough or that you have a reasonable chance of even capturing all the penalty cards. What can complicate things even further is the fact that your hand might look so bad even before passing cards, that you may as well pass cards that will give you an even better chance of capturing more penalty cards. For the best chance to shoot the moon, it is better to make the decision before you pass your cards.

Ultimately, you need some guidelines when deciding whether or not you should try to shoot the moon. Capturing all the hearts is usually the more difficult part of the moon shot. It is fairly easy to find a player that is more than willing to dump their queen on you. And if you don’t get the queen then you are getting off fairly easy anyway, since you will end up scoring 13 or less points instead of 24 or 25 if you fall short of your moon shot. When it comes to assessing your hearts the general rule of thumb is, you need ‘boss’ hearts. No hearts at all qualifies as boss hearts. You need to be able to capture every heart. This means that you won’t be able to throw off any hearts in a discard and any hearts you have must be able to capture the trick they are played in. So if you have the 2 of hearts it is very unlikely that you will capture a trick with that card and your moon shot is over, unless you are ‘long’ in hearts.

When you are ‘long’ in a suit, you generally have 7 or more cards of that suit. If for example you lead the ace of a certain suit and were able to continue leading that suit and winning the tricks, by the time you came to your 7th card of that suit you would have exhausted all the other players cards of that suit regardless of the card distribution. So even if that 7th card was a 2, you could win the trick by leading that card. If you are extremely lucky with the card distribution you could accomplish this with only 4 cards of a suit.
Normally your opponents would not try to capture tricks containing hearts but if they think you are trying to shoot the moon they may try to stop you from doing so. Another difficulty in shooting the moon is the fact that you can’t lead a heart until hearts are broken. So you have to make sure you capture the trick when the first heart is discarded. In many versions of hearts if it is your lead, hearts has not been broken and you have nothing but hearts, you must pass the lead to the next player. You will have to discard a heart and your moon shot is over. (This rule is used on the http://hearts.bagtoons.com/ site.

Odds Of Being Dealt All Penalty Cards In Hearts

957941745812300000000000000:1

One of the rules stipulates that a penalty card cannot be discarded on the first trick. Based on the odds it is very unlikely that a player would not be able to follow this rule. As a matter of fact my online version of the game does not even account for this possibility. So if you are ever playing this game and get an all penalty deal, take a screen shot and send it to me.

There are 5.3645 X 10 28 possible deals in game of hearts. ( I will publish an article on that calculation in the future. )

There are 14 possible hands that contain all penalty cards:

-all hearts
-the queen plus all hearts except the 2
-the queen plus all hearts except the 3
-the queen plus all hearts except the 4
-etc....

There are 4 players who can potentially be dealt one of those hands for a total of 56 possible deals out of 5.3645 X 10 28 total possible deals which gives us:
9.579417458123 X 1026 :1

Hearts Card Game Online Launched

I have launched a beta version of the card game Hearts. This game is played online against 3 AI players ( Try it out ).

The goal of this game is to allow players to learn a simple version of the game of hearts and test their skills against the computer players. In future versions I hope to be able to allow players to select various levels of difficulty and create AI players that play with different strategies.

The current options menu allows you to change the speed at which the computer players play as well as the colour of the graphics. There is also a feedback page allowing players to send information relating to bugs or other possible improvements.

The game site uses cookies allowing your game to be saved in your browser for up to a week at any point in the game including the middle of your current hand.