Passing in Hearts

February 12th, 2012
cards, games
In the trick taking card game Hearts you begin each hand by selecting three cards to pass to another player, and then receiving three to replace those. Every four hands you play one without passing, and I find it almost always less fun than the others. I think what's going on is that the players have more ordinary hands. With passing I've had multiple voids, zero points, a ten card suit, and other hands that are really very unlikely to show up on their own.

Passing should improve related games as well: I've tried to convince Bridge players to play with Hearts-style passing, but they see it as silliness.

(I wonder what passing would do to 7 Wonders. You could pass three times, at the beginning of each age. You'd probably pass cards 'upstream' to your potential future hands.)

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

“We should be more ambitious with the software we build”

Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there…

via Posts on October 24, 2026

The DBT guide to intense negative emotions

This is a guide for handling intense negative emotions, based on dialectical behavior therapy.

via Thing of Things October 23, 2026

Was the HuggingFace hacking incident scheming?

In July 2026, internal OpenAI agents hacked HuggingFace (HF) in order to figure out how their evaluation grader works. This involved a thousand agents coordinating on an improvised message board to carry out an elaborate sequence of exploits. A later grou…

via Victoria Krakovna October 18, 2026

more     (via openring)