How to Play a Hand of Hearts

Series Summary

Playing cards date back to ancient China, where they are believed to have originated, when paper currency was both the vehicle for the card games, and the bet. One popular card game that incorporates playing cards is Hearts. Also known as Black Lady, Chase the Lady, and Black Maria, Hearts is a card games based on trick-taking and trumps, where hearts are always trump. The distinguishing factor of hearts is that points are negative, which means that the lowest score win the game with each game ending after a player reaches one hundred points or a predetermined number of hands have been dealt.

In this free video series, our expert Joe Andrews will teach you how to play hearts. Joe will teach you how to play a hand of hearts, how to manage your spades, and how to defend against another player shooting the moon. Joe will teach you the pass and pull technique, and teach you the art of passing the queen of spades. Mr. Andrews will also teach you several varying types of hearts games, how to become a hearts expert, and tell you all about how luck and psychology come into pay in hearts. Joe will even say a bit about live Vs. internet hearts play.

Video Transcript

"Here we go with the play of the hand overall approaching strategy. You're in a hearts game and the opponents are good. The game has just started, and after the pass is completed, you pick up this specimen. You've passed your low heart and you try to get rid of diamonds and sure enough, the nasty fellow on your right has passed you two pretty awful diamonds. What's the plan here? Well, you look at the spades suit, and that looks pretty safe. Furthermore, it has the deuce of spades on it, with it, so so it's very comfortable. You look at the diamond and club suits and those aren't very good are they? But, I can see the plan here and you should be able to see it too. The plan is very simple. You're going to strip the diamond and club suits when you can and you're going to hope that the spades break as evenly as possible. The other aspects of this plan are, that if nobody has five spades, you should be able to escape from this hand as clean as a whistle. Now here's how it's going to happen. Let us suppose that on the first lead of the hand the deuce of clubs comes along and the king comes out but the ace doesn't. Well what you do here is that you get rid of the eight. Not the jack or the queen. The idea is that you want to be able to use these to force the lead into the king, get that out, and then you'll be able to clear the club on the third trick."