Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002 01:42:56 -0400
From: Richard Tinkelenberg <deleted>
Subject: House rules
Hello Alan,
When I lived in a fraternity in college we had special House Rules for Hearts. The game was played the way you describe it with the Queen of Spades counting as 13 and each Heart counting as 1. The special rule was "Dealer calls the pass". Sometimes the dealer would look at his own hand before calling the pass, and sometimes not. This made for some very interesting variations during late nite "cramming" sessions. One common pass was to pass 3 cards to the right, pick up your 3, then pass 2 cards to the right, pick up your 2, and then pass 1 to the right and pick up your 1. Called a 3-2-1 Right. There was also a 3-2-1 Left, and a 3-2-1 Across. Sometimes it became 4-3-2-1, or 1-2-3. The worst was when someone was about to go over 100, and another player had a pitifully low score, sometimes a pass was called to deal all the cards to everybody else, leaving the leftover cards to that one player, and then everybody would pass cards to the low score player to make up his hand. With 4 players we'd deal 17 cards to 3 players and one to the low guy, and then the other 3 would pass him 4 cards each. It usually helped him raise his score considerably! Alliances and betrayal of such were all part of the game as well.
House Rules is the way I learned the game, and did make for a lot of fun as well as interesting strategy.
I enjoyed viewing your site.
Richard
