Steve Brown’s Game: Round 4(3)

Continuing our game. Steve’s only possible turnover is in column 2, albeit at the cost of splitting Aces.

In some cases it may be wise to spurn a turnover “for the greater good”, but not today. There is a fair chance of two turnovers, and the alternatives ain’t so attractive anyway.

Steve is able to turn both face-down cards in Column 2. They are the Eight of Clubs and Two of Diamonds. The good news is he has recovered the empty column.

The bad news is – yes you guessed it – this brings the familiar one-hole-no-card. Steve elects to shift the C8:4s into the empty column. Not a great choice, but I’m not seeing anything significantly better. Personally I would be loath to expose another Ace. I would prefer to move “jg”, maintaining the status quo and hoping to make progress after the next round.

This situation (one-hole-no-card) does happen more than we would like to admit. Usually what happens is an empty column gives us at least many different options to choose from and each option will be worth “some fraction of a turnover”. For sake of argument, suppose that we have a free and open source Spider Solitaire engine called StockSpider, and that StockSpider evaluates every turnover is worth an equity of +1.0. Building in-suit is worth +0.2 (on average), exposing an Ace is worth -0.2, having an atomic column is worth +0.1 and so on. Given so many options, sheer numbers dictates that we should be able to get some value from our empty column despite no turnover. Maybe some minor achievements here and there will add up to +0.5 or +0.6. Basically, one-hole-no-card isn’t necessarily the end of the world as we know it.

The observant reader will have noticed Steve failed to build in-suit with ed before wasting the empty column. Presumably Steve wants to get as much junk off column 4, since that is clearly where our most likely source of turnovers is coming from. However, it was actually possible to play “e3=d1” before burning the hole (an exercise for the reader). This allows us to have our anti-smoking song and sing it too: we build in-suit without adding more junk to column 4.

The other point is that at this late stage of the game we should (ideally) be thinking about removing a complete suit rather than our next turnover. Unfortunately, we’re in a bit of a fix and I don’t see anything spectacular here. One bright spot is that with so few cards unseen, there is a decent chance of drawing the cards we need. For instance, we might draw X5X5XX53X3, where X represents any card, take our empty columns and win the game. A little bit of wishful thinking never hurt anybody!