Pete's Plan to Win at Solitaire

Solitaire Philosophy

Pete’s history of playing solitaire:
I started playing the traditional (klondike) solitaire, the game where you deal out 7 columns of cards with one on the left stack, two on the next, etc. when I was about 8 years old. I quit when I was probably 12 or 14 for many years, except for an on and off shot at it from time to time.

Then came personal computers at the office. ----Not till many years after MS Windows stuttered into existence (it really wasn’t even a whole program at release 3.1) did I leave the DOS environment for that infamous blanket that covered up everything I really needed to do with inane little pictures and requires three hands to operate efficiently. When it finally got to the point that I was having lots of file transfer problems with others who had learned their computer basics in the Windows environment did I finally fall.

No such luck. I found myself invoking its drug-like power all too often when my brain did not want to apply itself to the task at hand. The thing is: I kept playing solitaire on and off for several years, until I finally retired at the end of 1996. By that time, I had gotten control of myself, so I wasn’t a “slave”. But the point I need to make is this: in all that time, I simply opened the program and played each game as it came to me. I used the simple rules that I had learned as a kid. And, when I finally retired, I used solitaire as a kind of drug for a couple of months while I was getting used to not going to work every morning. Then one day it hit me:

This game is, to a large degree, a Statistics Game.

---First you get the hand that the computer deals you. You have (almost)no way to control which cards are where in the deck. So, already your fate is at least biased. Sure, you have certain cognitive skills at hand, but they may be no match for the “luck of the draw”. Do you want to simply submit to this or do you want to do something about it?

The law of averages is out there to get me every time I play. I would feel bad that I didn’t win a game, or if I dealt a dozen or two or three hands without winning, So, I got to thinking: okay, what can we do to take control of this situation? Answer: decide what my goal is. Answer to that: Win as many hands as possible in the shortest amount of time. (So that I feel good about having won).

See, I always thought that THE goal of the game was to build up the ace piles as fast as possible and so every card that I turned over was immediately evaluated for its fit on the ace piles and that was that. In reality, there are several goals, or priorities to the game, and they need to be addressed in a certain order.
First Priority: Empty 4 columns of cards asap so you are ready to take advantage of any available Kings.
Second Priority: Put up aces asap. The idea here is that the more options you have for placing a card, the more control you have over how to play cards that become available.
But, once an ace is up there on an ace pile and the deuce has been put on it, don’t put a another card on top of it unless there is a good reason to do so.
Third Priority: Empty all the other columns of cards asap, down to the last card (but don’t put that last card anyplace else for a while) so that you have all possible cards available in play.
Fourth Priority: Build the aces piles, but don’t get them out of balance, if at all possible. That is; don’t go building up one suit past the 4 or 5 while another suit is still waiting for a three (see second priority).

How to choose game options:
There ARE no options! THE only real way to play solitaire is to draw three cards.

Why do you play it?
If you just play to pass your time away, then, it doesn’t matter how you play. If you do want to compete with yourself, do you want to test your competency or just your patience? Your competency goes far beyond just taking a chance that the cards will be in your favor.

What I could do better:
I am not very good at remembering all the cards in each “turn over” of 3. If I watched this more closely, then I could “legally” manipulate the deck even more to my advantage. I do, however, look to see if I have a fatally flawed hand in the stack. For instance, if I see that 3 of the columns have 6’s on top and I notice that I have NO 5’s in the stack, I may just abandon the hand, even if there’s still a “dribble” of activity.

Feeling good about playing solitaire is:
Winning as many games as I can in the time I have available to play. So, I don’t mind dealing several hands before finding one that I want to play. The alternative is playing hands that that I don’t win or hands that I’d have a low probability of winning anyway.
So, I divide my time between evaluating the hands as they are dealt, playing only the most promising ones and abandoning uninteresting hands.

Play to win
I have defined “winning” a game as simply getting all four suits evenly aligned on the board, with no more on the aces piles than absolutely necessary. For example; all four aces piles filled to the fours. In that case, all four suits are represented in columns from the King down to the five. As soon as that is accomplished, I declare a “win”.
A win with all fives in the columns is a better win than if I win with all jacks.