Link to Round 0 is here
Link to Round 1 is here
Round 0
Not much in the way of tricky decision making. Unless we get a really good round with many turnovers it’s virtually impossible to suggest an egregiously bad line of play without arousing a disproportionate amount of suspicion.
That being said, when no more turnovers were available, Red tried to rot13(shpx) things up by increasing the number of in-suit builds at the expense of “junk-piling” a column with a Queen. Even though Queens were cheap because supply exceeded demand, I believe it is a definite error in the long run.
I’ve played enough games to know that the supply-demand relationship can change drastically. This phenomenon occurs because the rules of the game demand 10 cards to be dealt simultaneously instead of sequentially. This problem is exacerbated when you’re forced to deal two rounds in quick succession. Before we know it there are too many Jacks and Kings in play and the once-hated Queens suddenly become our only hope of salvation. All this trouble just for the sake of one measly extra in-suit build!
Needless to say, IM Bartacus and IM Bug weren’t falling for Red’s shenanigans this early in the piece 😊
Round 1
A fairly good result with three columns containing no face-down cards – thus we have fair chances of getting back at least one empty column on the next deal. We have 10 out of 13 cards in the Diamond suit, but the cards are scattered in various columns and it’s odds-against the Jack, Five and Three appearing soon – therefore now is not the time to think about the Diamond suit, unless we somehow manage to satisfy the proverbial “all other things being equal”.
Decision 19 stands out as a particularly interesting moment when all three Kolourful Kibitzers suggested a different line of play.
Red suggested “hb, he, hf, hg, fh, eh, ef” which I didn’t like because burning the 4 of Hearts costs some flexibility if we need to work on column 9 – not to mention column 2 becomes harder to work on. If we did burn the 4 of Hearts we could at least try to get “compensation” by lining up the 7-6-5 of Spades (as per Blue’s suggestion) and turning over Column 1. Admittedly, but the difference is small and hard for even a GM to argue convincingly. All things considered, the three blobs were well behaved that round.
Edifying Thoughts of a Spider Solitaire Addict 
Thanks for the analysis of rounds 0 and 1. I sided with red in a decision that you didn’t like at Decision 19, and I follow your explanation on the advantages of “not burning the 4 of hearts”, but I guess I’m not sure how I could incorporate that into future play. That would actually be quite a high standard to meet. You’re giving a judgment call and admitting it’s close.
I feel like I let the team down in not suggesting the right bad guy — choosing blue instead of red, and with the aid of the random number generator leading us astray. I don’t know if the bug is being tongue in cheek in saying he chose red more or less at random (it was, wasn’t it?), or if he had other reasons he didn’t say or he thought were obvious.
I didn’t comment on the last few posts and hoped no one thought that was due to lack of interest or being in a sulk. At the end, I thought blue’s line of play was hugely wrong, and I don’t see how that could possibly be the GM’s view if blue is not the mole. On the other hand, if blue’s line of play was hugely correct, and the mole red’s was wrong, that would imply that the innocent party green also went along with a play that was hugely incorrect, which would not make sense. So my preliminary inference is that GM must have thought those two lines of play were roughly equivalent, with the differences between them minor. And I’ll be eager to learn why, hoping thereby to improve my game. But that’s in the future.
“Voting Results Are In! (alternative version)” makes no sense to me. Probably there are allusions to things I know nothing about, which would put me in a better light than if I just missed some obvious connections.
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Esteemed Scholar Bart, I truly based my guess of Red on the graphic that Master Chi-Yuen posted at the start of this hand (Posted 27th Sept) . Nothing more.
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In case you’re wondering, VRAI (alternative version) was aimed at some of my work colleagues (or at least anyone who shares some interests with them).
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