Solitaire
The Shuffle Decides More Than You Do
Klondike, dealt the standard way: seven piles, one card face up on each, the rest in the stock, turned three at a time. Build the four foundations up by suit from ace to king, and build the tableau down in alternating colors to free what is trapped underneath.
How Much of It Is the Deal
Not every Klondike deal can be won. If you could see every face-down card before choosing a move, roughly four deals in five turn out to be solvable; playing blind, as you actually do, the fraction is considerably lower. Nobody has an exact figure for either number, because settling it means searching a space far too large to walk through. The published estimates come from playing very large numbers of random deals and measuring how many fall. That is the Monte Carlo method: when a quantity cannot be computed, sample it instead. Physics reaches for the same trick whenever a system has too many configurations to enumerate.
How to play
- Drag cards to move them; double-click sends one to its foundation, a right-click on the table sends up all that can go, and Ctrl+Z undoes a move.
- Turning over a face-down card - a click does it - usually beats filling a foundation early.
- An empty column takes only a king and is the most valuable thing on the board - choose that king slowly.
- Some deals are lost from the start, and no sequence of good moves will rescue them.
