Useful Strategies to Increase Your Chances of Winning in Spider Solitaire

Among all solitaire games, Spider Solitaire is a great fun game; but it requires a lot of careful planning and patience. It’s a challenging solitaire game with each session of it taking over half an hour of constant thought.

Your aim when you play Spider Solitaire should be to build ascending suit sequences within the foundation zone. But this is not as easy as it seems. Especially when you play 4 suit spider solitaire it may sometimes seem almost impossible to complete the game.

However, certain strategies can increase your chances of winning dramatically. They are easy to learn too. However, it’s required that you have a solitaire program that supports multi-level undo or you don’t consider it a way of ‘cheating’. Even if you do not, you can get something out of these tips, though not all.

Empty Columns

An empty column is something you should always aim for in Spider Solitaire. Empty columns are useful for storing cards temporarily, enabling you to move more cards around the play area. Once you get one, you should aim for getting another empty column. Upon having 2 empty columns, your chances of winning become much higher. If possible, try and create yet another vacant column.

If you manage to get 3 or 4 vacant columns, your chances of winning become very strong, unless you obtain a very unlucky set of cards.

Emptying that First Column

Whatever the highest rank card you can play should be your first move in Spider Solitaire. If you have a choice, try to play from right-hand side stacks, as the six right-hand stacks are shorter and so, easy to start with.

Next, you should typically play cards in the following order:

• If a stack has higher chances of being emptied than others, play that card if possible
• If this is not possible, play a highest rank card
• If there are two or more cards with same high rank and if you can play one of them in same suit sequence, play that card. Wherever possible,
• it’s recommended to make your sequences the same suit. Later, you can move to longer stacks and go deeper into the columns, if you have been keen in keeping same-suit sequences.

Once you empty a column, your focus should change to ‘cleanup’, ‘re-arrange’ and ‘expose’.

Cleanup

This means to re-arrange columns so as to make same-suit sequences.

Rearranging

After cleaning up any card sequences possible, the next thing you should aim for is to rearrange any column possible, i.e. just moving any sequence you can, to create longer sequences.

Expose

The last thing you should aim for is to expose new cards while trying to keep any empty columns.

Follow these tips and you will enjoy Spider Solitaire because of the increased chances of winning.