Please stop holding the queen of spades when someone is shooting the moon

[biwebof]

I know the thought process: "The queen of spades is worth points, so I better not give it to the shooter."

But is this wrong for two reasons. First of all, if someone stops the shoot, they will get a heart anyways, the queen of spades is redundant to stop the shoot.
But the second thing is if I have some cards that can stop the shoot, I know that if I do it, I'll get the queen of spades dumped on me, because "the shoot is stopped, its safe to let go of the queen now".

Because of this, I will not stop the shoot, because I know I'm going to lose more points than the actual shooter.

Thus, you're giving the shooter a free win. If you have the queen of spades, please dump it on the shooter. You'll find other players surprisingly eager to hold onto their high cards after the queen is gone!

[Strode]

But maybe shooter has no hearts, or no low hearts, and only the Q of spades will stop them. You never know. I doubt players are shooting with questionable hearts.

[kostini]

Like most strategy in card games, this might be often true but it is situational and there are situations where you absolutely want to hold the queen.

One example - if I'm in 3rd place, and the player in 4th is trying to shoot, I would rather force 1st or 2nd to stop the moon and take the queen, than feeding it to last AND still having the moon stopped, making it so I'm closer to losing.

[SleeperService]

It's true there's nothing more aggravating that stopping a moon with a high heart and having the queen dumped on you. Sure to earn a red thumb if the dumper wasn't in a bind. But I'll always take 13 points versus 26 points and will hold and eat the queen when required.

[Bread4Ducks]

Often the queen of spades being held back is the only thing preventing someone from shooting the moon. If I've got J through to A of hearts then (unless the hearts aren't distributed well), I'm going to gain all the hearts just from playing those 4 cards. If someone has dumped the queen on me then I've already shot the moon.

If however someone holds the queen back and I've got a spade below a Q then it's almost impossible to shoot the moon. Even if I don't have a spade, but I have a low club or diamond then I'll likely lose control at some point, at which point the person with the queen can dump it on someone else.

It is frustrating when you know you can stop the shooter (it's happened to everyone that isn't a selfish player) but ultimately the person with the queen doesn't know that, so it isn't bad play for them to assume that holding the queen back might be the only way to stop the shooter.