Poker Patience Scoring

• Poker Patience Scoring Software
• Poker Patience Scoring System
• Poker Patience Scoring Chart
• Poker Patience Scoring Rules

Introduction

This is a discussion on Patience within the online poker forums, in the Learning Poker section; An advice I give. It is to have patience in their hands. Because many times make desperate choices. Poker Lines is a fun and challenging solitaire game which is a variation of classic poker and patience. It is played on four rows and five columns, with or without a free card. The goal is to arrange the cards in the columns to obtain the maximum score from the horizontal poker lines.

Poker patience is a card game for one player in which cards must be placed, one at a time, to form a five by five square. Once a card has been placed, it may not be moved. Each row and column is then treated as a poker hand (ignoring the order of the cards) and scores according to this table:

As you will have noticed, there are two scoring systems: English and American.

The English system is the more accurate, as it takes into account the difference in probabilities when compared to ordinary poker. However, poker players may find the American system more natural, as hands are ranked as in conventional poker.

The target score is 70 by the English system or 200 by the American.

Poker combinations

For anyone not familiar with poker, the possible scoring combinations are explained below:

One pair

any two cards of the same rank, eg. 2 2, J J or A A

Two pairs

two pairs of cards of the same rank, eg. 2 2 3 3 or 7 7 K K

Triplet

three cards of the same rank, eg. 9 9 9, Q Q Q

Straight

five cards of consecutive rank, regardless of suit. Aces can be high or low (but not both). eg. A 2 3 4 5, 3 4 5 6 7, 10 J Q K A, but not K A 2 3 4

Flush

five cards of the same suit, regardless of rank

Full house

a triplet and a pair, eg. 5 5 8 8 8, 4 4 4 J J

Four of a kind

four cards of the same rank eg. A A A A, 3 3 3 3

Straight flush

five cards of consecutive rank, all in the same suit

Royal flush

a straight flush consisting of 10 J Q K A

The order of the cards does not matter, and any odd cards are irrelevant.

Playing the computer version

Click the iconbar icon to open the main Poker Patience window. The first card to be played is shown in the top right hand corner. Click in the blank part of the window to position the card. Cards can be placed in any of the five rows and columns, and need not be next to any card already played. To undo the last move made, click the adjust (right hand) mouse button.

When a row or column is completed, the combination and its score appear, and the total is updated. At the end of the game, if your score is high enough, you may be asked to enter your name for the high score table. (There is a different table for each scoring system.)

The menu

The main menu can be accessed by clicking the menu (middle) button over the iconbar icon or the window. The options are as follows:

• Info - Leads to the usual program information
• New game - Leads to a submenu with two options: English scores and American scores. Clicking on one of these starts a new game with the chosen scoring system (Clicking on New game itself starts a new game with the same scores as the last one.)
• Scores - Displays a table with the scores for the combinations under the current system
• High scores - Displays the high score table
• Cloth colour - Leads to a choice of window background colours
• Quit - Exits the program and removes its icon from the iconbar

Note to users of older monitors

When the game is played in modes 12 or 15, the bottom of the window is chopped off. This does not affect the functioning of the game. Alternatively, switching to mode 35 allows the whole window to fit on the screen.

The card sprite files

These sprite files are © Jonathan Rawle 1997. They may be used in other non-commercial products, as long as I am credited in Info boxes, help files etc.

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Solitaire rules and how to play

Game setup: After a 52-card deck is shuffled you’ll begin to set up the tableau by distributing the cards into seven columns face down, with each new card being placed into the next column.

The tableau increases in size from left to right, with the left-most pile containing one card and the right-most containing seven. As an example, this means the first seven cards will create the seven columns of the Tableau. The eighth card distributed will go into the second column, since the first column already has its one and only card.

After the piles are complete, they should be cascaded downwards such that they form a “reverse staircase” form towards the right. Ultimately, you will have seven piles, with the first pilie containing one card, the second pile containing two cards, the third pile containing three cards etc. Only the last card in each of the Tableau columns is flipped over face up so you can see it’s suit, color and value. In our game, this is automatically done for you!

All leftover cards after the foundations are created become the “Stock,” where you can turn over the first card.

Goal: To win, you need to arrange all the cards into the four empty Foundations piles by suit color and in numerical order, starting from Ace all the way to King.

Tableau: This is the area where you have seven columns, with the first column containing one card and each sequential column containing one more additional card. The last card of every pile is turned over face up.

Stockpile: This is where you can draw the remaining cards, which can then be played in the game. If not used, the cards are put into a waste pile. Once all cards are turned over, the remaining cards that have not been moved to either the tableau or foundation can then be redrawn from the stockpile in the same order.

Playing the game:

1. Face up cards in the tableau or stockpile can be moved on top of another face up card in the tableau of an opposite color that is one rank higher, forming a sequence of cards.

2. Groups or stacks of sequenced cards in the tableau can also be moved together on top of a card of the opposite color and higher rank.

3. If a tableau column has only face-down cards remaining, the last card is flipped over and can be played.

4. To start a foundation pile, an Ace must be played. Once a foundation pile is started, only cards of that suit can be placed in that specific pile.

5. As cards are surfaced from the stockpile or tableau, and there are no other cards on top of them, they may be moved to a foundation pile if they can be placed in the right order.

6. If a tableau column is empty, you may move a King, and only a King, to that column.

7. Win by moving all the cards to the Foundation piles in the right order.

History of Solitaire

Poker Patience Scoring Software

One-player card games are called by some form of the word ‘solitaire’ in some countries (US, Spain, Italy, etc), ‘patience‘ in others (UK, France, etc) or ‘kabale’ in others (Scandinavia, eastern Europe), but both ‘solitaire’ and ‘patience’ are increasingly common worldwide.

The oldest of these, ‘kabale,’ implying something secret or occultic, suggests that the idea of laying out cards in a pattern or ‘tableau’ had its origins in fortune-telling (cartomancy), which became popular in the mid-1700s in Europe. Possibly its original purpose was light-heartedly to divine the success of an undertaking or a vow. If the game ‘succeeds’ or ‘comes out’, the answer is favorable, otherwise not. In France card solitaire is still called ‘réussite’, meaning ‘success’.

In a German games book of 1798 ‘patiencespiel’ appears as a contest between two players, while bystanders and presumably the players themselves wager on the outcome. Single and double-deck versions are described, and seem to be much like one later recorded in English books as Grandfather's Patience. Some references suggest either Sweden or Russia as the place of origin.

Books of solitaire games first appeared in the early 1800s in Russia and Sweden, and soon after in France and the UK. Most seem to have been written by women. A Livre des patiences par Mme de F**** (possibly the Marquise de Fortia), for example, was into its third edition by 1842 and was soon translated into English. Many of the games described have titles commemorating the Emperor Napoleon, such as Napoleon at St Helena, Napoleon’s Square, etc, probably based on the entirely mistaken assumption that Napoleon amused himself by playing solitaire in exile, for which there is no evidence. In fact he most often played games called Pique and Whist.

Poker Patience Scoring System

Dickens portrays a character playing patience in Great Expectations. This was published in 1861, the year in which Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, who was himself a keen player, died. The first American collection was Patience: A series of thirty games with cards, by Ednah Cheney (1870). Around that time, a British Noble women named Lady Adelaide Cadogan published Illustrated Games of Patience. The last decades of that century were the heyday of patience games, the largest collections being compiled by the prolific Mary Whitmore Jones.

From then on solitaire games settled down into a fairly nondescript existence. From popular literature, print media and movies it soon becomes clear that most people with any interest in card games knew only two or three of the most popular types, such as Klondike and Spider, and whichever one they played they called solitaire without being aware that any others existed. Such further collections that appeared in print were largely rehashes of classic titles, with little or no acknowledgement given to previous authors or inventors. Nothing of any value appeared until 1950 when Albert Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith published their Complete Book of Patience. These authors had clearly studied all the literature, tidied up conflicting rules, and for the first time ever decided to classify games and arrange them in some sort of logical progression. Thus, if you found that you liked a particular game you could then explore others of similar type, and ignore the ones that failed to appeal to you. Throughout most of its history solitaire has been regarded as a pastime for invalids rather than the physically active, and for women rather than men, though it must have been much played by prisoners-of-war who were fortunate enough to have some recreational time on their hands.

All that began to change in 1990 with the advent of Microsoft’s first digital solitaire collection, originally intended to teach people how to use a computer mouse. This same phenomenon caused FreeCell and Spider to both rise in popularity among the general population, as they appeared as free games in later editions of Windows. According to a news item released in May 2020 over half-a-billion players in the past decade alone have played the game. It is now a global phenomenon.

Note that many games from the late 1800s have you start by arranging the cards in a pretty but complicated pattern taking up a lot of space. These gradually went out of fashion over the last 160 years as tables got smaller and players wanted to spend more time playing than dealing. They could be easily reproduced on a desktop monitor but would not be suitable for play on the small screen of a cellphone. In any case, strictly symmetrical, straight up-and-down layouts are more in keeping with the digital zeitgeist.

Citations and further reading:

Poker Patience Scoring Chart

1. Das neue Königliche L’Hombre-Spiel, 1798.
2. A collection of the card layouts usually known as Grand-patiences, 1826.
3. Mary Whitmore Jones, Games of Patience for One or More Players, 1890 - 1910.
4. Albert Hodges Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith, The Complete Book of Patience, 1971.
5. David Parlet, Solitaire: Aces Up and 399 Other Card Games, 1978.

Poker Patience Scoring Rules

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