SOLITAIRE vs SPIDER SOLITAIRE
By Dave Wallace - RIVER BENDER - August 2011
Everybody has played Solitaire. My wife still plays it on the kitchen table. I used to play it when flying on business trips and got a free deck of cards from the flight attendant to boot. You're probably lucky to get a free cup of coffee now. It seems everyone has their own Solitaire rules depending on how much they want to win. I liked Vegas rules when I was on business trips where I pretended the deck costs $52 and got $5 for each card placed on the pile after dealing cards in my hand one at a time for one round. That way I didn't have to play all the cards to make a profit but if I did I'd make $208 ($260 - $52). Otherwise playing Solitaire just to see if you can play all cards seems boring to me.
So what are the odds of winning at Vegas Solitaire if winning is defined as making a profit? Go to http://www.roziturnbull.com/bill/Solitaire/solitaire.htm and you'll see how someone set up a simulation of a million games using various rules to determine the success rate. It was found that if cards in your hand were dealt one at a time for one round only you'd win only 27.6% of the time, but if you kept dealing the deck for more than one round you'd win 70.3% of the time. Obviously Vegas would never allow the latter rule but I suggested that my wife give it a try it to see if she could win more often. Problem is a win to her is playing all the cards to the pile after dealing those in her hand 3 at a time for 3 rounds.
If you play Solitaire on your computer, you can set up the option to play Vegas rules with either draw 1 or draw 3 cards and also have a timed game. You can even keep track of how much money you win or lose at $52 per game and $5 for each card played on the Aces.
But Solitaire is no longer my favorite card game. I've replaced it with Spider Solitaire that I'm addicted to that's on most computers with Windows XP and beyond. I spend lots of time managing e-mail lists, answering mail and developing web pages so a relaxing moment for me is playing Spider Solitaire. It comes in three levels: Easy (one suit), Medium (two suits), and Difficult (all four suits). Medium (two suits) is all I play since one suit is too easy and 4 suits seem impossible. I'm still trying to come up with a good win strategy since I can't seem to get beyond 16 percent success. Our daughter and granddaughter do better than that. They're also fast Sudoku players. The three of us competed playing the same Sudoku game when they visited and I was consistently the loser on speed, despite my fancy record keeping that I bragged about!
Good old Google can help one play Spider Solitaire better. Search "how to win at spider solitaire" and you'll see lots of good tips. One that I find helpful is to free up a column. After that try freeing up another one. Once you get to 3 or 4 empty columns, they say you can almost guarantee a win, unless you get an extremely unlucky run of cards. Give it a try. If you're getting a higher percentage of wins than my 16 percent playing 2-suit Spider Solitaire, please send me some tips.
All past River Bender computer articles since 1998 are at http://pages.suddenlink.net/davew/dwindex.htm