Friday, July 13, 2012

MS Hearts is not fair

I'm going out on a limb here, but I am finally daring to voice this publicly. During a several month stretch a few years ago, i kept track of the number of hands in which i received the queen of spades in the deal and in which i received it in the trade. Each of those stats, I figured, should be close to roughly 25%, being there are four of us playing and the deal is random. As I remember, it was more near 40-45% for each. Now that I am playing again, I find I am able sometimes to take all the tricks in say 3 out of 4 tries, win that game, and then for the next 3 or 4 games i won't be able to do anything other than get rid of the highest cards in my hand (the 9 of diamonds, right?) and win by just never having any hearts. THEN there are the stretches where i'll have the queen and maybe one or two other spades - meaning i'm going to have to count that queen at the end of the hand - for like 6 or seven hands in a row. These cycles seem to repeat; sometimes I'll get almost an identical hand two deals in a row.
Maybe 'not fair' is not fair. Maybe 'not random' is better.

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