Post-Mortem Analysis – Round 3

A short but highly eventful round. The card gods saw fit to give us Three Turnovers. The card gods also saw fit to give us the Three of Diamonds, enabling us to remove the Diamond suit. Unfortunately, they also threw in that nasty logical disjunction operator instead of the logical conjunction that Spider players and mathematicians so dearly love. To put it in layman’s terms, we were able to take three turnovers or remove diamonds, but not both.

The interesting part of this round was Red suggesting we not remove Diamonds and keep flexibility, thus effectively backtracking on what he said the previous round. As I mentioned earlier, a lot can change after 10 cards are dealt simultaneously instead of sequentially. And indeed, all the signs are pointing to the Diamond suit: we received the Three of Diamonds and plenty of Jacks. Hence the Queen of Diamonds in Column 4 is suddenly a good card. Also, we are nowhere near completing any other suit and the number of cards is dangerously high, so there is little chance we could progress without removing Diamonds.

In the end, we turned over only bad cards in the tableau, achieving only 2 turnovers instead of a guaranteed minimum of 3. But it’s not all doom and gloom if you pardon the terrible cliché. Clubs and Hearts are starting to look promising. It would have been nice if we could “swap the ladies” in columns 8 and 9 but this turned out to be not quite possible.

KNOWLEDGE BOMB: in the latter stages of the game, it’s often wise to think about “how can I progress after getting the next turnover or empty column” rather than “how can I maximise the chances of getting my next turnover or empty column”. In the context of our current game, I would be happy to accept a Backgammon doubling cube centred at 2, despite turning over only 2 cards in Round 3.

After reading the comments, I got the feeling the readers may have cottoned on to the fact Red is the impostor. What should Red’s game plan be? Should he start playing innocent and hope the game will rot13(shpx) itself up by natural causes?  Or is it necessary to sneak just one more bad decision through? I guess a true impostor would have already memorised the official blockchain of suggestions and start thinking about how to convincingly pin the blame on Blue or Green. But as the purpose of this blog is to help improve the reader’s skill at Spider Solitaire I have mainly focussed on that – so the Among Us component plays second fiddle if you pardon the terrible cliché!

Before dealing a new row, the team decided to add the move “cb”. Technically this should not have been allowed but I was willing to let it slide. But it is a good sign that my readers are paying attention to “the little details” since this is exactly what is needed to improve to IM level or beyond.

And the less said about that Spider-GM joke, the better 😊