Psellos
Life So Short, the Craft So Long to Learn

The Schnapsen Log

April 22, 2012

At Trick One (solution)

Martin Tompa

With the royal marriage and the top three trumps, you would very much like to prevent your opponent from winning a trick so that you can score 3 game points. To do this, you will have to trump the first trick with ♣T. Suppose you draw a useless card such as Q. Should you then close the stock? Let’s count up. The first trick brings you 13 trick points, plus 40 points for the marriage, plus 7 points for ♣K and ♣Q, plus what you collect from your opponent on those two tricks. If your opponent contributes only jacks, the total comes to just 64 points. Not enough. With bad luck, your opponent holds AQ and either two jacks or a jack and queen, and you may lose the deal.

This time there is no reason to close the stock. By playing your cards in exactly the same sequence with the stock open, you leave yourself two extra chances to draw some winner from the stock. Whenever you do draw a winner, you can then close the stock and hopefully cash it. There is an outside chance that you only draw the winner after you have played all your trumps, and that your opponent holds ♣J and happens to be void in your winner’s suit. That combination of events poses only a tiny risk that is well worth taking.

© 2012 Martin Tompa. All rights reserved.


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About the Author

Martin Tompa

Martin Tompa (tompa@psellos.com)

I am a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where I teach discrete mathematics, probability and statistics, design and analysis of algorithms, and other related courses. I have always loved playing games. Games are great tools for learning to think logically and are a wonderful component of happy family or social life.

Read about Winning Schnapsen, the very first and definitive book on the winning strategy for this fascinating game.

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