World of Card Games

Today, we have a guest blog from DevilDoc about the nil bid in Spades. I have added some links to definitions of "jargon" terms to help beginners. There's also an intro to nil bidding at the World of Card Games website. - Marya

The nil bid in Spades is the strongest of all the bids one can make. Worth 100 points, it represents 20% of the total game score if your partnership makes it. It also costs your partnership 100 points if you get set plus the penalty for your partner’s bid.

How to bid a nil: The ideal hand should be rich in distribution; i.e., singletons, doubletons, and voids. Ideally, you don’t want any honor [face] cards but if you have any, they should be protected by at least two low cards. The maximum number of spades should not exceed three, with no higher card than the Jack (25% probability of being set). While some will use the Queen of Spades, your probability of being set rises to 50%.

How to defend a nil: The bidding player needs to focus on his loser cards. You want to discard your highest cards as soon as safely possible. If your partner is running a long suit or you have a good distribution, that is the easiest way to get rid of your riskiest cards. The bidder’s partner needs to lead out with the highest card of his longest suit and keep running that suit, from high to low cards if possible. If the bidder’s partner’s hand is weak, he should focus on what the opponents are leading to see if they can cover your cards.

- DevilDoc

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!]

There's now a "tick" audio alert to accompany the hourglass that indicates you are timing out.

This was added to help people who may have been away from their computer when the "gong" sound indicated that the game was starting. If someone doesn't have the browser open to World of Card Games on their desktop when the game starts, they may be timing out while they are doing something else. For example, their browser might be minimized, or they have another browser tab open for reading the news, etc. This new little audio reminder will help to solve that problem.

Thanks to the player who suggested adding this!

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.

About a week ago, someone reported to me that they tried to download a hand history in Internet Explorer, but a problem occurred - the file was not correctly downloaded.

It turns out that there was a problem with this download in both Internet Explorer and Edge (two common Windows browsers).

As of this morning, the problems have been fixed. So you should now be able to download hand histories for Euchre, Hearts, Spades, and Pinochle.

Click here to download previous hand history

floppy disk icon

Some people like to download hand histories so they can review what happened in the previous hand. They are also useful when reporting bad card-playing strategy by the bots. If you want to report such a problem with the bots, it's helpful to me if you email me a copy of the hand history when you saw the problem - that way, I can most easily figure out what went wrong. Without it, it's like searching for a needle in a haystack.

A few days ago, I got a report that the audio alerts no longer functioned in the latest version of Firefox. That means you would not get the "gong" sound when your game started - an important feature!

As of this morning, audio alerts are now restored in Firefox. Thanks very much to the player who reported this issue!

There was a brief outage last night around 7 PM Central US time. It lasted about 10 minutes, and was caused by a network issue at my hosting service. I'm sorry, but there's nothing to be done when this kind of thing happens. I've been pretty happy with this service, but even the best have trouble on rare occasions! I appreciate your patience when such problems occur.