Pinochle

I love playing pinochle and when I cannot get together with my pinochle friends I play on my ipad. I am addicted. In general I like this game although it has a few glitches. First, the other bots make bidding a real challenge. They will bid ridiculously high with no meld to support such a bid. They always seem to have aces making getting by them to your partner almost impossible. And my ‘partner’ does stupid stuff. In trying to get the opponents trump out she will lead with a 10 that is then lost to an Ace when they could accomplish the same thing with a Jack or Queen (I know this because it is a simple matter to count trump when you have most of them!) Also, my ‘partner’ bids against me over and over and when I finally give up I find out that she has a tiny run while I had almost a double run that I gave up thinking she MUST have something amazing. No she did not! But all in all it is still a fun substitute for the real thing.

The opposing team always seem to get a ton of meld usually enough to only have to pull a few tricks or none. Even when they get stuck with the bid and have no meld they still manage to win the hand. I’ve been counting how many aces they get between them and more often than not they get 6 or more. Plus my partner leaves me stuck when they clearly could have taken the bid. Sometime I replay the hand and choose the suit they have the most of and then we win the hand. Despite the above I have manage to win a few games. And occasionally manage to get good hands but not nearly the same as the other team.

While there are some frustrating flaws (more on this), I enjoy using a couple of features to “cheat” in a way that allows me to develop a more complete view of bidding and play possibilities. I ‘turn on’ view of all hands. This let’s me think through how I would bid ‘without view’ and then bid the best possible play. This also allows me to see some of the most ‘glaring’ flaws (which are in partner bidding and play - though also in passing). I often pass to allow partner to win bid .. only to have partner relinquish too early. I have also passed a perfect ‘Shoot the Moon’ hand and been stunned as partner destroys it with the pass back. Playing errors tend to be more subtle, and fall into two categories, one being feeding points with too high of a card and the other demonstrating no knowledge of suit counts (this may also have contributed to the aforementioned ‘Shoot the Moon’ destruction). Passing time playing this game despite the flaws, gives me all I can really expect (especially considering that it is free).