When to Shoot the Moon in Hearts

Video Transcript

"You have times that you can shoot the moon and there's times that you shouldn't. Particularly if you're playing against good players. We showed a hand earlier that you had rip city in hearts. Ace, king, queen, jack, ten, nine, queen of spades in your hand. You take the queen of spades and you blow the hand out. There's others where you had good side suits. Let's look at this particular illustrative hand here. The pass is complete and you're on lead and you have ideas, maybe, maybe, maybe. You got some killer diamonds. You've got two middle spades and singleton or skip heart and you get ideas of shooting. Especially if it goes deuce of clubs, king of clubs and you say, wow, that just about sets that suit up and you throw that off. Maybe they lead spades a couple of times. Right, and they both go through, and now you say, hmmm, what shall I do? Well, if you honestly think you're going to get this moon past good players, don't even think about it. Even if you had completely safe diamonds. You know you can give your deuce and a five instead of a nine. Even if you had completely safe diamonds. There's no way to hope for the moon here, because, if you lead a club and a heart comes down, right. Do you think you're going to get that through. Probably not, because they'll go ahead and stop it and then they could throw you in with a club and you could eat the queen that way. If you try to take the diamonds down from the top. Three leads will pick up that whole suit and you'll be stuck with this and the same problem. You'll put a heart on the table, somebody will stop it and by that time, you've eaten the queen and you've taken in about eighteen points. So, don't go for the moon if you have a losing heart. It just will not work, otherwise if you have it off the top, go for it."