World of Card Games

I updated Gin Rummy with a new library which should fix any problems rearranging your cards. I personally have not experienced any problems with rearranging the cards in Gin Rummy, but a few people told me that they had.

If you still have problems, please let me know. It would help if you can tell me what type of device you are using (laptop, iPad, desktop?), which browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari?), and whether you are using a mouse or touchscreen or something else. Thanks!

Gin Rummy rearranging your cards

In case you want a quick demo, I have a YouTube video which demonstrates how "drag-and-drop" works for rearranging your cards in Gin Rummy.

[Edit: this afternoon, I got reports from one person that they were having problems with Gin Rummy, so I reverted these changes for now... hopefully I can fix this, and reapply the change soon.]

The site was updated this morning to fix a few bugs.

In Gin Rummy, there was a bug which caused your deadwood to be optimized incorrectly when your opponent declared "Gin". This had been reported to me a few times, but I was never able to reproduce the issue. Thanks to Alagon for reporting it and also sending in the hand history! With the hand history, I was able to reproduce the issue, and then I could fix it pretty quickly. (If you want to download a "replayer" for the previous hand, click the little floppy disk image that appears near your avatar after the hand finishes.)

Marie-Michele has reported a few bugs with the Euchre bots, including hand histories. Those hand histories make it possible for me to fix the problems. Most recently, the bot was seen to delay in playing the right bower to take a trick. This has been fixed. The Euchre bots are now a little bit smarter, and will be better teammates (or opponents!). Thank you, Marie-Michele!

This morning, the site was updated with a few bug fixes and modifications.

First, the Elo rating has been slightly modified in team games (Spades, Twenty-Nine, Euchre, and Double Deck Pinochle). You won't see much of a change when players with similar ranks are playing against each other. However, if a player with a higher Elo is teamed up with one who has a much lower rating, then the higher rated player will get a little more credit than they did previously. The details are explained on the page which describes Spades rankings. This should help to mitigate the risk of teaming up with a lower-rated partner in ranked team games. Thanks to the player who suggested this to me!

The hand history is now available for Gin Rummy (there's a blog post that describes how the hand history works for Hearts). I've had a couple of bug reports in this game, but have not been able to reproduce the issues. So if you notice a problem, please download the hand history and send it to me. It may help me figure out what is going wrong here

Someone mentioned to me that the Pinochle bots have not been giving an "aces around" bid. If a player has "aces around", it means they have at least one ace in all suits, and indicates a pretty strong hand. If no one has bid yet, a bid of 51 (rather than the minimum bid of 50) is usually taken to signal that the person has "aces around". The bots have been programmed to do this, now.

I'm first to bid, so I'll bid 51, because I have aces around. Now the bots will too!

This update also includes some bug fixes for problems that were reported to me in Twenty-Nine. If you notice any more problems in this game, please report them so that I can make the site better.

The server was updated this morning to apply some changes.

In Gin Rummy, you can now click the "sort" button to sort your cards from left to right or vice versa, by rank.

The sort button toggles between ">" and "<"

Also in Gin Rummy, when you pick a card, it will get added to the right of your hand. This suggestion was made by someone who uses the site on a tablet. It's easier to move a card when you can grab the entire thing and not just an edge. I hope this change won't disturb others too much. I usually dislike making changes to the user interface, but I think the pluses outweigh the minuses, in this case.

[Edit: I see only negative comments below... is there anyone who uses a tablet and likes the new placement that puts your picked card to the right? Feedback from all is welcome!]

With this morning's server update, your cards are now fanned wider by default in Gin Rummy. They look like this, now:

Gin Rummy cards fanned wider

You can go back to the old fanning by unchecking "Fan Cards Wider" in your Settings:

user Settings are opened by clicking your user name

The "Fan Cards Wider" user setting is checked by default.

This is what happens when you uncheck the "Fan Cards Wider" setting:

Gin Rummy with "Fan Cards Wider" unchecked

The server was also updated with some bug fixes. The ability to move your cards around in Gin Rummy had broken in some touchscreen devices. This is now fixed. Also, if you reloaded the web page while sitting at a Gin Rummy table, your cards got resorted. This no longer happens.

Another general bug fix was made so that the F5 key now works to reload the page in your browser when you are sitting at a table.

Finally, the messaging system was broken during last week's update, but it is now functioning again.

A few people have reported to me that when they upgraded their PC to Windows 10, they could no longer drag the cards around, to rearrange them, in Gin Rummy.

The bug that caused this should be fixed, as of today! Please let me know if the change doesn't solve your problem.

The server was updated this morning. Sorry for the outage while this was done!

The update applied several improvements:

1. Twenty-Nine now has the Double / Redouble Option
2. Double Deck Pinochle players can download hand histories
3. Gin Rummy players can see the size of the stock pile

In addition, the site uses a new audio library that works on more devices. I have an Android tablet where alerts are now audible, so this is an improvement for Android users, at least. [Edit Mar 12 2016: I want to mention that this library breaks the site for versions of the web browser Opera that are earlier than 11.60. Sorry! But that is a pretty old version of Opera, from Dec 2011. Please upgrade if you are using this browser. Thank you to Doriano for bringing this to my attention!]

Players at ranked Hearts tables now have a 2-minute grace period to return to their table if they get disconnected, causing them to leave the table (note that this does not apply if you click the "leave table" link - if you do this, you will be warned of the penalty, and it does apply). If you've ever been frustrated because you were kicked from a ranked Hearts table due to an internet disruption, I hope this helps. Note that the remaining players at the table are free to call on a bot to replace you during the 2-minute grace period. However, as soon as you return to the site, you will replace that bot, provided it is within 2 minutes of your leaving.

At all games, it has sometimes been a problem that a player would hit the backspace button, intending to erase a character in their chat, but it got interpreted as telling the browser to "go back" to the previous page. It would get you kicked from your table unless you returned to the site very quickly! With today's update, the backspace button is ignored unless it's used within a text input field. I hope this problem is solved, now.

In Gin Rummy at World of Card Games, you can now view the size of the stock pile (the stock pile is the pile of cards on the left that are face down).

When you start your game, you will see a small disk containing a question mark next to the stock pile. Click this to reveal the number of cards in the stock pile:

number of cards in the Gin Rummy stock pile is 31

Possibly the most frequent complaint that I get at World of Card Games is about people quitting games. I've been collecting some statistics to see how the site is affected by habitual quitters. Here are the results!

The charts below are histograms that show the number of players divided up according to their quitting patterns. Players who rarely quit - between 0 and 10% of their games - are "bucketed" in the first column. Players who quit a lot - 90%-100% of their games - are bucketed in the last column. The rest are divided into buckets between those percentiles.

Private tables are ignored in these statistics, as are tables with only a single human player. Quitting from such tables is not a major problem. On the other hand, if you enter a game and then quickly leave, you are getting counted as a quitter for the purpose of these statistics. So the charts may make things look a little (or a lot?) worse than they are.



Euchre is a fairly quick game - you are usually done in 10 minutes. Quitters are not as big a problem, here.
One noticeable thing is that the games that take longer tend to be affected more by quitting. I do wonder how big a factor this is in quitting.

The server was out briefly for an update this morning. Sorry for the interruption in games!

The update included a couple of changes. There was a bug in Gin Rummy which caused bots to time out, occasionally. Thanks to everyone who reported this! I found a problem which caused that, and fixed it. Please let me know if you see any other problems.

The drag-and-drop functionality in Gin Rummy has also been altered slightly, so you can now see the card that you've picked up to sort. I hope this makes sorting a little easier. Also, sorting now works on tablets - at least on the devices that I have available for testing. Let me know if this does not work for you.

Finally, the Hearts robots have been tuned up a bit, so they will no longer be so cooperative towards someone attempting to shoot.

Gin Rummy - click to play!

 Gin Rummy is now available at World of Card Games! This is a 2-player game that tests your pattern-matching abilities and your memory. The rules are described at the Pagat website.


As usual, there's a tutorial to get you started (click on the "Tutorial" button to the lower right of the Gin Rummy panel on the main page). And you can play with robots if you want to get comfortable before playing with real live humans.

One thing that will help when playing is the ability to sort your cards via "drag-and-drop" functionality.

Give it a try and let me know what you think! Please let me know if you notice any bugs.

[Edit: I just noticed a bug near the end of the Tutorial - a warning message shows up which says "You are not currently playing a game!". I'll fix this eventually, but in the meantime, you can continue the tutorial just by clicking the "x" in the upper right corner of the message - Sep 28 '14 12 PM EDT]