Board Game Arena

HEARTS: HOW TO WORK AS A TEAM TO FEED THE LEADER
The leader is the player that is obviously winning the game. If you can consistently feed the leader the Queen of Spades, everyone will have a better chance of winning. The team are the other 3 players who have an understanding of working together as a team to feed the leader the Queen of Spades (QS). To me this is the essence of where Hearts is taken to a new level of strategy over just playing for yourself. These are powerful tips and guidelines and can help get the leader a much larger percentage vs. not working together as a team.
Here are twelve basic tips on how to work together as a team to feed the leader:
1. Trust your partners that they will try to feed the leader the QS and resist feeding the QS on you. If you do this you begin a trust among the partners, the leader is fed the QS and the team have a chance of winning the game.
2. Watch the player who passes to the leader. If he leads a spade, it indicates that he passed the QS to the leader. Continue to lead spades. If he leads another suit, he may have passed 2 or 3 high cards of that suit. Continue to lead that suit which he will have to take high and hopefully the QS will be dumped on him.
3. If the leader leads spades, he normally does not have a short suit in spades with the QS, KS, or AS, because that would endanger himself. Therefore he has a long suit in spades. Do not lead spades. If he has 5 spades with the QS, you probably cannot run him out of spades.
4. If you think the leader has the QS, protect yourself.
5. Usually do not lead spades, unless you are fairly certain the leader has the QS. The reasoning is that if you do not have the QS then it is only 33% chance that the leader has the QS and you are hurting your partners in holding the QS to feed the leader. Also, this indicates that you do not trust your partners and now open you up for your partner to feed the QS to you.
6. If you have the QS and less than 3 other spades, Pass the QS plus one or two more spades to your partner, especially if he is directly behind the leader. This gives him confidence to hold the QS until he can feed the QS to the leader.
7. Duck under the leader, so if anyone behind you is void and might dump the QS on the leader.
8. Let the leader win the trick and lead another card. This can makes him more vulnerable since one of your partners might have the QS.
9. Think about running a suit until it is almost void, then play low to force the leader to play higher and one of your partners feeds him the QS.
10. See what he plays and figure out what suits he is afraid of and not afraid of.
11. When the partner who plays after the leader has the QS, he is in prime position to feed the leader.
12. When the partner who plays before the leader has the lead, he is in prime position to control which suit that will hurt him most.

Here are some reasons why coop play is not as easy as you make it sound:

1) It takes three players who are knowledgeable. I host Hearts games exclusively for Average level and above and still it is very rare to have a game with three opponents who know what they are doing.
2) It takes trust between the other three players. Coop play works much better between people who know each other (and their game), so you will find it more often between friends playing ftf than beween strangers playing on the internet.
3) The BGA ELO system does not support coop play. If the goal is to win and second place is a loser as much as fourth place coop play thrives. That's not the case on BGA (even though every player sees this his own way - yet ELO 'educates' most of us after some time).
4) You didn't give exact definitions of when coop play should start and (even more importantly) when it should end. This is crucial since players who think they are cooperating with others, while those others strictly play for their own advantage (again), are at a distinct disadvantage. A mixture of point difference and progression of the game makes the situation: Coop is most obvious when the game is late and one players is leading by a wide margin. Coop is not advisable when the game has just started and one player leads by not very much. Other situations without coop include one player dangling while the other three are very close or two players in front and two others far behind. All these factors change after (and sometimes during) every hand. Can you still rely on the other players to coop while all those factors constantly change?
5) Many of the points you make apply to strategy in general and not just to coop play. It is extremely important to watch what others pass you and how they lead during the first tricks to know where their strenghts and weaknesses lie. However in several instances you assume that the leader has the Q of spades when in reality he might as well have A and/or K of spades instead. There is all the difference in the world between these sometimes.

Schweiger,
It was a real pleasure playing Hearts with you today! You are a very good player and one that I could trust to help feed the leader (depending on the situation).

Thank you for your review and comments. I agree with all your comments. I am interested in educating players and hopefully encouraging an element of the game that makes it much more interesting than protecting your butt.

I played with some men who play all the time together. I ran the first two hands. I saw a gleam in their eyes as they proceeded to show me how teamwork can really work. They used many of the strategies that I outlined and others, fed me the qs almost every time! They were actually setting me up. Finding my weaknesses and capitalizing on it. It was truly well played and executed. I thank these men at the Catalina Public Beach which was some 20 years ago.

MagiCalvin