Spider Solitaire Strategy

Greetings:
[updated 15 Oct 2017]
[updated 16 Oct 2017]

A friend of mine complained a while back that I never publish anything technical any more.  OK - this is kind of technical.  Kind of.  Sort of.

After playing Spider Solitaire from Branium for many years now, I have finally come up with a (somewhat) fairly successful strategy for a two-suit game.  (Single-suit game is for children and I have NEVER beaten the four-suit game. Just never took the time and brain power to attack it.)  The following rules are not absolute but if followed them they might give you a somewhat better than average increased advantage.  Just for fun, look at your statistics now, reset them and then check them again about 500 or 1K games later.  (Yeah, well, I play it a lot when waiting for a taxi or bus or for meetings to start.)

Before I started this strategy, my percentage of winning was around 4.2% but then it climbed to 19.4% after about 450 games.  I have now gotten up to 17.3% after 1100 games.  (Well, I did have a couple of 100+ losing-game runs.)  This has been over about six months of playing so it takes a while to get any meaningful results.  Anyway, this is just a set of general rules and not meant to be a hard-and-fast guide to winning.  You still have to plot your way around the board and use some brain power.

1. The first objective is to turn over the hidden cards.  Give that a priority of 100.
2. The next priority is to get long runs of the same suit - give that a priority of 90.
3. The next priority is to make King->Ace runs a quickly as possible.  Try to make at least two runs before you have the last two stacks left to play.  If you have not done that, probably you will not win the game.  Probably.  I have won a couple of times but not normally. Priority of 80.
4. Given a choice, always play a card from the smallest stack.  That means that you should start from one of the six cards on the right before playing one of the four cards on the left when first starting the game.  After that, if you have choice of two or three cards to play, pick the one on the smallest stack of cards.  Priority of 70.
5. NEVER EVER make a cross-play (defined elsewhere) on a same-suit run of four cards or more UNLESS you can immediately uncover that mistake and correct it by playing that card elsewhere.  OK - I have done it sometimes just to get a card uncovered near the end of the game when all else seemed lost but it never has worked out well for me.
6. If the cards to pick to play are all the same, pick the play with the largest card.  i.e., pick a Queen over a Jack or an 8 over a 5.  Why?  Just because...
7. If at all possible, try to get an empty slot so that you have a choice of which card or stack of cards to put there so that you can have an option of playing a better suit of cards.
8. If you have a choice of playing a card on a different suit (a cross-play, 5-of-heards on the 6-of-spades) or a same-suit play (5-of-hearts on the 6-of-hearts), ALWAYS play the same-suit play unless you can make the same-suit play in the next play or so.
9. Set the  options so that the game can pick the play for you.  Meaning that you can just click on the card and the game will make the move for you.  You can always pick "go back" to reverse the move it the game makes the wrong move but (usually) it makes a better move than you would have made.

Strategies

1. Try to keep long runs of the same suit if possible 
2. As the game progresses, during a play, keep one leg open as long as possible for "transportation."  This will become increasingly important in the later stages of the game.  You will have put "something" in there before proceeding to the next stage so try to put something that has little importance to your overall goals.

Anyway, these are just some general guide-lines that seem to work for me.  No real logic to them.  They just seem to work.  I may add some later as I think of them.  Check back from time-to-time and add some comments if you like.  I usually publish comments with credits to the person(s).  TTFN

jco