The Three Hands Variation of Hearts

Video Transcript

Three handed Hearts is another form of the game. If you're looking to play Hearts, you only got three people, you can't find four, I guess if you're on the Internet you can play with a bot, and maybe you'll get a good game and maybe you won't, and bots don't really discriminate. In other words, they just blast the queen no matter who's going up. Bots basically are avoidance programs. They are programmed not to take the queen, oh god forbid, and they're programmed not to take hearts, oh god forbid, and they may even pass, they might even discard all the way to the moon, but in three handed Hearts it's really not a bad game. Firstly, in three handed Hearts we have to take into consideration the distribution of the suits. For example, if you take the heart suit, and we'll spread out this heart suit which won't take too much time, and I know that these aren't in any particular order. Let's look at the hearts, and firstly the deuce of clubs is removed, the deuce of clubs is removed from the game so the person with the three of clubs has the opening lead. Now some people playing three handed Hearts play that the deuce of clubs, person with the deuce of clubs, also plays another club on the first trick. Others will play with a kitty meaning that they'll deal out all the cards and the fifty-second card will go into the middle of the table. Personally I think that's awful because whoever takes the kitty might wind up taking the queen of spades or an extra heart. So you really don't know what the count on hearts is. Because there are only three people playing in the game, the most evenly divided the suit can be is five, four, and four. So unless you have the top five, it's almost impossible to shoot the moon unless you get some incredibly lucky lie of the cards where the jack comes down singleton or doubleton and the nine and the eight are together and what have you. So you really need six hearts to shoot and you also need a lot of power in the hearts so you need to hope that the suit breaks evenly so that you don't get stopped with somebody. So the probabilities of somebody else having a six or even seven card suit are greatly increased. Secondly, on the queen of spades, well, four guards are normally good enough in the regular game. In the queen of spades in three handed Hearts you really need five backers or four pretty high guard cards with it so the whole distribution of the game changes. Thirdly, on the pass, you're still passing three cards. So keep in mind you're going to get some really wild hands. In fact you might even get a lot of two suiters or close to two suiters. So take into consideration the distribution and so forth. Three handed Hearts is really intended to be played when your short a player and you're looking for a regular Hearts game. It's really not played competitively or on the Internet or in live tournaments.

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