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.