Barry Rigal - Card Games For Dummies

One pair: Two of a kind

Two pair: Such as two 5s and two 10s

Three of a kind: Also known as trips

Straight: Five cards in consecutive order; for example, ace through 5 or 7 to jack

Flush: Five cards of the same suit

Full house: Combination of three of a kind and a pair

Four of a kind: Also known as quads

Straight flush: A straight with all the cards in the same suit

Aces can be either high or low — your choice.

The objective of the game is to lay out 25 cards to form a square, five cards by five cards. In the process, you want to make ten poker hands (five across and five down) and score as many points as possible.

Scoring 200 points (using my scoring system) counts as a win. Various scoring systems are shown in Table 2-1.

The U.S. scoring system has a major flaw (which has been corrected in the U.K. scoring method), based on the fact that although flushes are rarer in Poker, they’re considerably easier to play for in Poker Patience than straights. To fix this problem, you can reverse the scoring table, as in the version that I recommend.

TABLE 2-1Scoring Systems for Poker Patience

To start, turn over one card face-up and then go on to the next, building your grid in any direction you like — up and down or right and left.

Although you can put any card anywhere you like in the grid, and you can expand the cards out in any direction you like, each card must touch another card. Whether you put it adjacent to another card or link it diagonally by touching the corner of another card is up to you.

After many years of playing Poker Patience, I’ve decided that the best way to play (particularly when using my scoring table) is for straights to be set out in one direction (vertically or horizontally) and full houses or four of a kinds in the other direction. If you take my advice and decide for straights to go in the horizontal rows, you have excellent reasons to put the cards in columns either with themselves or with numbers five less than or five more than themselves. By making this separation, you help the formation of straights.

When playing Poker Patience, sooner or later you run into a useless or unplayable card. When this happens, don’t panic; all you have to do is start a junk row or junk column. Inevitably, at least one row or column won’t score as much as you want it to.

Look at the layout in Figure 2-10 to see the game theory at work. The matrix is updated after every two cards, although each card is turned over individually. After ten cards, the basic structure is going well. The nucleus of the straights is fine on the horizontal lines, and all the pairs are matched up.

In Figure 2-11, you can put the ♠9 on the bottom row, but completing the straight and collecting points always produces a warm, fuzzy feeling.

FIGURE 2-10:A hand of Poker Patience after ten cards.

FIGURE 2-11:Don’t be tempted by the bottom row. Go for the points!

Play continues in Figure 2-12. The ♥8 could’ve gone under the ♣3, but it seems premature to abandon the right-hand column. The ♠Q scores the full house, so abandon the straight in the fourth row.

FIGURE 2-12:Dumping a straight to go for the higher-scoring full house.

In Figure 2-13, the bottom row has become a junk pile. One row or column normally does.

FIGURE 2-13:Creating a junk pile is a normal thing for Poker Patience.

In Figure 2-14, a lucky last card allows you to scramble to respectability; two straights, two full houses, and a three of a kind are 160, and having three pairs takes you to 166.

FIGURE 2-14:Sometimes you have to get lucky to make something out of this big mess.

After you finish playing, you can further exercise your mental agility by trying to rearrange the cards to score as many points as possible. A rearrangement is really only worth doing, however, if you have a straight flush so you can rack up big numbers. Using all the cards in high-scoring combinations (flushes or higher) is a real coup. I’ve managed this feat about five times, and on one memorable occasion, I discovered that my initial arrangement was the highest possible with the cards I was dealt. Unfortunately, a game that successful may never happen again.

Some people also count the long diagonals (from top right to bottom left and vice versa) in the scoring. Planning the scores on the diagonals too carefully is pretty difficult, but it can be done — or you can just regard any score on them as a bonus. You can also play Poker Patience as a competitive game for two players or more. One player calls out the cards they draw at random, and then both players try to arrange their own grids to maximize the scores. The highest score wins.

You may legitimately grumble that Spite and Malice (also known as Cat and Mouse) is wholly out of place on the Solitaire roster. Not only does it technically not count as a Solitaire, even though its play is similar, but it also doesn’t feature a single deck of cards. No matter: Spite and Malice is one of the finest competitive card games I know.

You can play the game with any number of card decks; surprisingly, it really doesn’t matter whether the decks are complete or not. The alternative is to play with just two decks, but that leads to unnecessary reshuffling. You generally play the game with two players, although in theory there’s no player limitation. It works for three or four players equally well or as a partnership game with four.

The object of Spite and Malice is very similar to Canfield (see the section “ Reserving Your Time for Canfield,” earlier in this chapter): You have a reserve pile that you want to get rid of before your opponent can.