Welcome to our weekly blog. Today our topic is Solitaire.
Hey, I know how to play that!
EVERYONE knows how to play that, 9.
Which makes it a universal topic, Lily.
According to an AI-generated (and therefore, possibly hallucinated) overview:
“Solitaire card games originated in the late 18th century, likely in the Baltic region of Europe, potentially evolving from fortune-telling games. The game’s popularity grew in 19th-century Europe, with early collections of rules published in Russia, Germany, and France before English-language books appeared in the 1860s. The game’s popularity was further amplified globally with the inclusion of Microsoft’s Solitaire in the Windows 3.0 operating system in 1990.”
Wow, AI, it is news to me that English-language books did not, apparently, appear until the 1860s. . .
Moving right along, the Solitaire I’m talking about involves seven piles of cards and the object of playing off those cards into four piles running from Ace to King, sorted by suit. At the start of a hand, it looks like this:
Solitaire: A simple game and a useful pastime. . .
With a small amount of skill and an extreme amount of luck, you may declare the game a winner if it looks like this:
Solitaire: When you know you’ve won the game. . .
A chief virtue of Solitaire is the game being, well, solitary. One person can play the game all by themselves. Very handy if, as in my household, your cat eschews card playing.
Aside from entertaining oneself, there are many good reasons to play Solitaire. Adhering to the classic high school essay format, I will describe just three:
- Unlike many pastimes that require vision, I can (still) play Solitaire without wearing glasses.
- Solitaire as a method of prognostication. Are you familiar with the saying “Lucky at Love, Unlucky at Cards”? Don’t ask me the origin of this saying, as even AI seems reluctant to fake its way through an explanation. What I can contribute to the conversation is this:
About 15 years ago, when Bruce and I were touring musicians, the A/C in our bus gave out while we were parked for a week at a fairgrounds campground with temperatures stubbornly in the triple digits. Between shows we sheltered in the bus. Bruce napped. I, far more fidgety, decided I’d conduct an experiment in probabilities. I played 1,000 hands of Solitaire that week, recording wins and loses with hash marks in my journal. The result? 12.5% wins, 87.5% losses.
Statistically proven, but how does it compare to real-life luck in romantic situations? From my personal experience, the percent of wins appears overstated. . .
You are so weird!
And that’s only two examples. What’s the third?
You mean to tell me you haven’t guessed? Because I think it’s pretty obvious. The third good reason for playing Solitaire:
I really, really needed a topic for this week’s blog. . .
Solitaire: Time to re-shuffle and start again. Only 999 hands to go!
Hahaha! I play solitaire all the time! Reason 4: shuffling is meditative. Reason 5: It trips me out to observe the role of “random” in the Universe. My hands, my eyes and my mind love the ritual!
Solidarity in Solitaire, Sister!
So my question is how long does a game last typically? You must have data on that in your journal?
I provided a highly detailed answer based not on my journal (I did not collect time per game in that project) but on a sample of 5 hands played just now. Time includes seconds required to lay out the game but not to shuffle the deck in between. The short answer is:
Between 2m 11 s (throwing out high and low times) and 2 m 16 s (all 5 game times included in the average).