Solo Whist question

[John McSorley]

Are you Brits still in the woodwork here?

I've been reading about Solo Whist in David Parlett's books, as well
as Hubert Phillip's "The Pan Book of Card Games". It looks challenging
enough, but with enough similarities to Spades, Hearts, etc, that I
might be able to convince people to play it at lunch.

In the sections that have sample games, one of the first things that I
noticed was that the card distributions seemed a bit off. Then I read
in "Teach Yourself Card Games" (2006?) that shuffling is usually not
performed rigorously, if at all....maybe a simple stack & cut. The
gist is that to make the game interesting, the deck has to be stacked,
which seems, well, wrong to me. Has anybody tried using a pass,
perhaps in a manner similar to the one used in Hearts, to create these
tweaked distributions? Before the bidding would make more sense, I
suppose, but after the bidding
would be interesting, too!

[John McLeod]

On 24/05/2011 03:08, John McSorley wrote:
> Are you Brits still in the woodwork here?

Yes, though it's a while since I checked this group. I'm pleased to see
it is still being used.

> shuffling is usually not
> performed rigorously, if at all....maybe a simple stack & cut. The
> gist is that to make the game interesting, the deck has to be stacked,
> which seems, well, wrong to me.

But that is the tradition: a perfunctory shuffle, followed by a deal in
batches of 3 and 4. Without that the higher bids will rarely be possible.

> Has anybody tried using a pass,
> perhaps in a manner similar to the one used in Hearts

I have never heard of it being played this way. If you try it, let us
know how it goes.

> Before the bidding would make more sense, I
> suppose, but after the bidding
> would be interesting, too!

It would have to be before the bidding, I think, otherwise the pass
would favour the bidder's opponents too much.

Incidentally, if you want to try a game of this type, I think that both
Belgian Colour Whist (Kleurwiezen) and Dutch Rikken have more
possibilities and variety.
--
John McLeod For information on card games visit
jo...@pagat.com http://www.pagat.com/