Game on (8 July 2020)

Continuing from last week

Recall that we can remove a full set of Diamonds. There is a hidden catch I didn’t mention from last week. Removing Diamonds would imply we uncover no less than three Aces. There are exposed Aces in columns d,g,j. Any experienced player knows that too many exposed Aces can kill a game (perhaps even quicker than Kings) because nothing can play onto an Ace. Too many Aces exposed means a restricted set of legal moves at every stage of the game and the only way to fix this is removing a complete suit or dealing a new row of cards. One of these is usually not desirable and the other is difficult to achieve. I’ll let you guess which is which 😊 In any case we know that there will always be a full set of Diamonds exposed no matter what turns up on the next deal of cards. I decided to gamble by turning over a card column c even though I am no longer certain to remove Diamonds. I exposed a Two of Spades.

Next is the Five of Diamonds. We shift that onto a Six and reveal the Eight of Hearts. We are forced to deal another row of cards:

Well that was awkward. We have three Fours and no Fives. Perhaps I should have removed Diamonds while I had the chance, but on the other hand chances are I would not have liked those ten cards no matter what I did.

This raises an interesting point: if you were paying attention you might have noticed I am playing “Spider Master” instead of “Spider Random”. Since Master is the “intermediate level” of all Four-Suit games (the levels are Expert/Master/GrandMaster) we do not expect an easy ride. We started with some good luck in the beginning and therefore we were due for some bad luck. Under normal circumstances, this reeks of “Gambler’s Fallacy”. But given that I did not choose “Spider Expert” or “Spider Random” I will stand by this judgment. Needless to say, Whinging About The Injustice Of It All is not a recognised strategy by the experts, so how would you continue?