Moves can be found here
An interesting round. We managed to clear all face-down cards in columns 2 and 5. But our distribution is terrible with a severe deficiency in Vitamin Q and Lucky Sevens. Still, a lot can change with the next ten cards and games are rarely mathematically lost before the last deal.
Bart has done an excellent job in maintaining the histogram of all ranks and performing some wacky and wonderful calculations. Note that one bad game does not an accusation of biased RNG make – especially considering we won the previous game involving Red Blue and Green. In any case, expert-level play is more than number crunching, Excel Spreadsheeting and inventing terms like Dow Jones Whine Index. Hopefully the next round will give Bart the opportunity to showcase his improving skills.
Unfortunately, IM Bug has had a serious accident and won’t be contributing much to the remainder of this game. I will not elaborate on the details – that task is up to IM Bug if he so chooses.
Digressions aside, Bart is playing reasonably well, although it’s admittedly hard to rot13(shpx) things up when our options were limited throughout all of rounds 1 and 2.
Round 3 coming soon – watch this space 😊
Edifying Thoughts of a Spider Solitaire Addict 
Hello to all, especially Esteemed Scholar Bart
I would like to share the letter I wrote to Master Chi-Yuen. I have edited it a bit.
I have moved………it was more than I could handle. Totally exhausted for a week.
And I am again living in the land of the internet connection.
But, Master, I have had a potentially life changing event and don’t know if or when I can rejoin You and Esteemed Scholar Bart in the fun conversations again. I’ll give you the short version here: I took a nasty blow to the back of my head and have some level of Traumatic Brain Injury. Hopefully this is temporary. I am not quick witted right now, can’t concentrate for more than a few minutes and certainly I am not capable of playing 4SSS SansZKey at anything above Spider Monkey’s level. The Doc says this could take up to two months to heal so we won’t know if there is any permanent damage for a while.
And here is the long Drama Queen Version:
On my next to last day at the old house, I think the 28th of Dec, I was sitting in the patio enjoying my last day with the wonderful landscaping when the chair I was in suffered a sudden catastrophic failure. Now, us Full Figured Fellows have had chairs give up the fight before, but not like this. It was a rocking chair with a pivot point just below the seat and four legs descending to a ring. See photo (aftermath). So basically I fell backwards off the pointy end of a pyramid but the seat did not detach completely so my head also gained a bunch of radial acceleration like in Crack-the-Whip.
I was rendered unconscious for who knows how long, perhaps only a few seconds and certainly not more than a minute or two. Anyway I am showing signs of traumatic brain injury, no ability to concentrate for more than a few minutes and irritability being the two changes I notice in me.
This either corrects itself or it doesn’t, so we are going to give it a while longer before hitting the panic button. The Doc says it takes about six weeks for the brain to heal and so after a full two months (end of Feb.) we will know if these things are in passing or if this is my New Mode, “Hopper the Dullard”. There doesn’t seem to be any problem with increased pressure due to intracranial bleeding.
I assume I will be fine, I have folks watching me for more classic signs that things are going further south.
I will be reading here and perhaps making a short comment or two but I am not up to any meaningful contributating.
Perhaps a lurker or two will step up and post in my absence?
IM Bug
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So sorry to hear of your accident, IM Bug. Yikes! I can’t quite picture the geometry of the rocking chair but that is perhaps not of great importance. Here are my fervent hopes for a full and speedy recovery! It’s comforting that at least your ability to write coherent text with subtlety seems unaffected.
I’m ready for the next round. I do feel mildly frustrated that I will only find out much later if you thought putting the king in the space was a reasonable thing to do, or if you had some other better plan. You note that games can be recovered late, which leads to an interesting twist. If you judge your skill level as less high (as I obviously do) then the best play in any given situation might be more likely to be a “Hail Mary” play — if you are judging it relative to how well you expect to play in the future. And in theory GM’s analysis of a play could also either be relative to his skill level for the rest of the hand or the student’s. One parallel example might be in bridge, where you know the experts can figure out more precisely whether 6 hearts is the better contract or 4 hearts, but if you and your partner are shaky on how to interpret information from more refined intermediate bids (or might just pass in the wrong place for a disastrous contract in some other suit) you might do better to keep it simple and guess based on point count alone. OK, maybe it’s not like totally relevant.
If the Whine Index annoys you I can stop mentioning it. It seems that on the whole if you’re trying to evaluate how you did in a game, luck factors into it. You spend less time thinking of better lines of play if you can see you had extraordinarily bad luck (which of course can be measured in various ways). If the deal is 8 kings and 2 jacks, and all the queens are buried in the tableau, you don’t need to think too hard about whether you could have won with better play. I thought it was interesting that our “bumpiness” luck was much worse than average the first time I computed it, though noting how it changes as more cards revealed is entirely tongue-in-cheek (or of interest just as a thing on its own independent of the game itself).
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Hi Bart, a few comments:
I am happy to divulge my thoughts on dumping the K into the space (before round 3). My main concern was giving away an “unfair hint” on subsequent rounds – but now that you’ve committed the King (not to mention 10 new cards coming into play) this concern in no longer valid.
The use of DJW Index is fine. In fact, it might facilitate post-mortem analysis of this hand.
You correctly point out games can be recovered late – in this respect Spider is more interesting than Chess in some sense: if an Among Us Blob gives away a Bishop in three moves against Magnus Carlsen then it really is game over. But the same blob cannot achieve the same in Spider Solitaire after three moves. Similar considerations hold for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory if you pardon the terrible cliché!
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