Spider Solitaire
Spider Solitaire that comes with Windows is flawed. I make this statement after about a thousand games over more than a year. There are clearly recognizable patterns over time where there should be none. My guess is the random number generator is of poor quality.
I ask you, how many times have you been burned by being dealt all the aces within two deals? And no twos?
I’ve tried to explain the card clumping away with nonscientific reasoning. I reasoned after some thought that it was that the mind recognizes more vividly when all the aces are dealt close together. So when the aces kill you again, as often as random percentages would allow, it’s more noticeable than if you had all the threes on the table and no fours to play them on.
So I decided to test that theory. The vivid recall theory, as I like to call it, is true, actually. But once you are aware of it and take the effects into consideration on your future calculation, what happens is that you notice the card clumping happens with pretty much the other cards too. Most noticeably the Kings. You’ll have a Queen to Ace lined up on a full stack of cards and the King comes up in spades killing almost every stack on the table.
I also noticed that in addition to the card-clumping, there is always one card missing. One card that you really need. And many times that missing card is the card needed to play the clumped card on.
Obviously, if I really gave a rat’s ass I would just keep track of the losing hands, of which there are plenty (it’s not like Freecell where if you are careful you can play at a 98% win rate over thousands of games. Every game is winnable–if you play your cards right) and then tally up the actual percentages of times pile-killing card clumping occurs. A scientific experiment, Brainiac style.
But I don’t care that much. Maybe I’ll write in to Brainiac and get them to do the test. All I need to know is that my win rate on Spider Solitaire is 41%, my high score is 1185, and no matter what my average is about 1150. I have been trying different strategies and techniques–methods of guessing I suppose you’d call it–for over a year and those numbers wont budge.
Therefore, or ergo, from a nonempirical standpoint, I conclude that Spider is pretty much non-random. Either that or I really suck at the game.