Card Games For Dummies: 2nd Edition by Barry Rigal

Author:Barry Rigal [Rigal, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Part IV

Scoring or

Avoiding Points

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In this part . . .

When playing games in Part IV, such as Hearts,

points are the hot potato. The focus is on not win-

ning particular cards that rack up points. The bad news

may be limited to a certain suit in the deck, or different

cards may be the plague carriers, designated at the start

of every hand by the dealer.

By contrast, Pinochle and Setback are games where the

objective is to capture high-scoring cards (each game has

its own ranking list, where different cards become more or

less valuable).

Whatever the point of the game — to gain points or avoid

them altogether — I give you the rules, details, and strate-

gies in plain English.

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Chapter 13

Hearts

In This Chapter

Understanding the concept and strategy of Hearts

Reserving a Hearts table for an odd number of players

Breaking Hearts in favor of Honeymoon Hearts, Black Maria, and Cancellation Hearts is a game of skill — to a certain extent. You’re under the sway of whether you receive helpful or unhelpful cards, but good card sense and a good memory make an enormous difference in this game. Keeping track of the cards played in each suit helps you to master this game, and practice and experience have no substitute.

To play Hearts, you need the following:

Three or more players: Four are ideal, but you can play sensibly with any number up to seven.

A standard deck of 52 cards: No jokers or wild cards come in to play.

A pencil and paper for scoring: Make a column for each player.

Getting to the Heart of the Matter

Hearts is a cutthroat game, meaning that you normally don’t play in partnerships, no matter the number of players involved. The game I discuss here focuses on the four-player game, where all the cards are distributed evenly, 13 to a player. Later in the chapter, I discuss how to cope with fewer, or more, players.

The game revolves around tricks. In a trick, everyone takes turns playing one card. Whoever plays the highest card in the suit led (the suit of the first card played) picks up all the cards played. The person who wins the trick leads a card to the next trick, (he can lead anything he likes — with one exception, I discuss in a moment), and the process repeats itself until all the cards have hit the table.

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190 Part IV: Scoring or Avoiding Points

Having a heart to heart on the Web

If you don’t want to play a game of Hearts face

You can find live Hearts play on the Internet at a

to face, you can use a computer program to play

whole host of sites detailed by John McLeod at

against an automated opponent, or you can play

www.pagat.com/reverse/hearts.html.

online against real opposition.

Best known of the sites is the MSN game-

zone at zone.msn.com/en/root/cardand

You can access the necessary shareware at

board.htm.

www.freeverse.com/hearts/, and Thanos

Card Games offers a free Hearts game at

www.geocities.com/thanoscardgames/

main2.html.

Unlike most competitive games, the object of Hearts is to avoid scoring points.

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