Card Games For Dummies by Barry Rigal

Author:Barry Rigal [Rigal, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119880448
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2022-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Scoring: The time of reckoning

At the end of the hand, each player collects all the cards in the taken tricks, and the arithmetic begins. The simple version of the game doesn’t tax your math skills unduly. Each player gets 1 point per heart, for a total of 13 penalty points possible in each hand. However, not many people play that way anymore, and when the ♠Q is involved, Hearts becomes more expensive.

The ♠Q, which has many names (the Black Lady, Black Maria, Black Widow, Slippery Anne, or Calamity Jane, to name a few), costs you 13 points on its own. Not surprisingly, therefore, you need to gear your strategy of both passing and playing to avoid taking this card. For that reason, you may want to pass the ♠A and ♠K, and also the ♠Q, before play begins if you have only a few spades. Conversely, if you have length in spades (particularly with some of the low cards), spades don’t propose a danger to you.

You play to 100 points when 26 points are at stake. At that point, you can play that whoever has the fewest points wins. Or if gambling for stakes, you can play that you settle up with everybody paying or receiving the differences in score.

Passing on low spades before play starts is almost certainly a tactical blunder because you help a player guard the ♠Q.

Because the penalty associated with the ♠Q outweighs that of the individual heart cards, leading spades early (if you can afford to, and as long as you don’t lead the ace or king) often ensures that someone else takes in this card — not you. By leading spades early, you hope to flush out the ♠Q, and with the ♠Q out of the way, you can’t be too badly hurt on a hand, even if you do win a number of hearts. So long as you don’t leave either the ♠A or ♠K insufficiently protected by small cards, leading spades early is usually safe.

You do have one challenging escape if you get a really terrible hand stuffed full of high cards. If you manage to take all the penalty cards and thus collect 26 points, you finish up doing remarkably well: You have the option of reducing your own score by 26 points or charging everyone else 26 points. This accomplishment is called shooting the moon, and just like becoming an astronaut, it’s a great deal easier to do in theory than in practice. The right hand rarely comes along for it, and if your opponents see you trying to take all the tricks, they’ll save a heart or two for the end to take a couple penalty points and prevent you from achieving your aim.

Shooting the moon is more dangerous than it may seem; in my experience, you lose more points in unsuccessful attempts to shoot the moon than you gain by making it. If you have a very good hand, you may choose to take an early trick with one or two points in it just to stop anyone else from trying to shoot the moon.

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