How to Play Hearts

Hearts in two sentences

Hearts is a four-player card game where you are trying to lose: every heart you take costs one penalty point, the queen of spades costs thirteen, and the lowest score wins. So the whole game is about ducking out of tricks instead of winning them.

Below: the deal, the pass, the two rules that catch new players out, five habits that cut your score, and the one move that inverts all of it — shooting the moon.

• Play Hearts free online against three computer players

The deal

• Four players, one standard 52-card deck, thirteen cards each. No partners: everyone is on their own.
• No trump suit — hearts are simply the suit that costs money.
• Cards rank high to low: A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2.
• Dealing is a formality. There is no bidding, and the dealer gets no advantage — the two of clubs decides who plays first, so the deal rotates each round only so that nobody always deals.
• The two of clubs decides who starts, not the dealer. Whoever is holding it once cards have been swapped must play it first. Play then moves clockwise.

Passing three cards

Before most rounds, every player picks three cards and passes them face down, then — and only then — picks up the three coming the other way. All four passes happen at once, so you commit before you see what you are getting.

The direction rotates on a four-round cycle: left, right, across, then a “hold” round with no passing, then it repeats. Passing left means you receive from your right, from the player who plays immediately before you every trick. That order is the American standard, and it is the one Microsoft shipped with Windows from 1992 through Windows 7. Some online versions rotate left, across, right instead, so check what the table tells you before you commit three cards.

Anything can go in the pass, including the two of clubs. Cards move before the opening lead is settled, which is why the player dealt the two is often not the player who leads with it.

How a trick works

• A trick is one tiny round: each player lays down one card and one takes all four. There are thirteen per round.
• One player leads — plays the first card — and the other three follow in clockwise order. Whoever wins the trick leads the next one.
• Everyone must follow the led suit if they hold it. Holding none of it is called being void, and a void player may throw any card at all. That is the best position in the game, because it is how you unload the queen of spades and your high hearts.
• The highest card of the led suit wins. A card of another suit cannot win however high: the ace of hearts thrown on a club trick takes nothing, and its point goes to whoever wins the trick. That is exactly why you throw it.
• Playing a card that deliberately cannot win is called ducking, and you will do it constantly — it is how you follow suit without collecting the trick.
• The winner takes the four cards and any penalty points in them. Those cards go face down and stay there; you cannot leaf back through played tricks, which is why the counting habits further down are worth building. Winning a trick is a punishment twice over: you take the points and you have to lead again.

The two rules that trip people up

• No points on the first trick. Nobody may play a heart or the queen of spades on it, not even a player void in clubs, who must discard something harmless instead. The one exception is a hand with no harmless card at all: nothing but hearts, or hearts plus the queen. We let that hand play a penalty card, because the alternative is a player with no legal move — several of the big free Hearts sites leave the exception out and strand the hand.
• You cannot lead a heart until hearts are broken. Hearts break the first time one hits the table, almost always when a void player discards one on somebody else’s trick. After that they may be led freely. A hand of nothing but hearts is again exempt. A hand of hearts plus the queen of spades is not: the queen is a legal lead, so our version makes you play her. Plenty of tables rule the other way and allow the heart instead.
• The queen of spades does not break hearts. That is our decision for Hearts on Solitarium: she is a penalty card, not a heart, so playing her leaves the leading restriction exactly where it was. It is the more common ruling, but not the only one — some tables let her break hearts, which is worth settling before you play anywhere else.

How Hearts is scored

• Each heart taken is 1 point. There are thirteen of them.
• The queen of spades is 13 points on her own — as much as every heart together.
• Exactly 26 points are on the table each round. Clubs and diamonds are worth nothing.
• Points go onto your running total at the end of each round. Low is good.
• When any player reaches 100 the match ends and the lowest score wins — not the player who crossed 100. A tie for lowest plays one more round, because nobody shares a win.
• Nothing is scored per trick. A round where you take eleven of the thirteen tricks and none of the point cards is a perfect round.

Passing strategy: choosing the three cards

The pass decides more rounds than the play does. You are choosing blind, so pick by role rather than by rank.

• Pass the queen of spades if you have her. Thirteen points is half the round, and keeping her means spending the whole hand protecting her. The one reason to keep her is four or more low spades alongside, enough cover to follow suit with rubbish while the ace and king get flushed out.
• Pass the ace and king of spades even without the queen. High spades and no queen is the worst holding in the game: eventually somebody void throws her and your ace catches her.
• Get short in a suit. Two or three cards you can shed early become a void, and a void is a licence to throw anything. Passing your only two diamonds often beats passing a heart.
• High hearts are the third priority. The ace of hearts costs one point if it lands badly — a rounding error next to the queen. Keep two or three small hearts behind it, though: they are what lets you duck when hearts finally get led.
• The two of clubs is genuinely arguable. Keep it and you lead a trick nobody can score on, then have to lead again into an unknown table. Pass it and you are free to throw a big spade away on the opening trick, which is the only free discard of the round. Keep it when your hand is full of low cards and you are happy leading; pass it when you are holding a spade you need gone.
• Keep low cards in the suits you keep — they let you follow suit without taking the trick. A hand with the two, three and four of a suit is safer than one with the jack, queen and king of it.

Which direction should you pass in Hearts?

• Passing left, you receive from your right — the player who acts immediately before you. Do not hand your left-hand opponent the high spades that let them dump the queen after you have committed.
• Passing right is the safest direction for offloading high cards, because that opponent plays immediately before you. If the queen you handed over comes back at you, you watch it land before you have to commit a card, and you can follow with a low spade.
• Passing across, you face the player you can read least — the best place to send the queen.
• On the hold round nothing moves — plan to lose small rather than win.

Five habits that cut your score

Once the pass is over, most of Hearts is bookkeeping. These are the habits that separate a 40-point round from a 4-point one.

• Count one suit, not four. Pick whichever suit you hold most of and keep a running count of how many have been played. Thirteen exist; when you have seen ten and hold three, every one of yours wins whether you want it to or not. The same count tells you when a card has quietly gone hot: once the ace, king and queen of a suit are gone, your jack is the highest one left and it stops being safe.
• Watch who goes void, and when. The moment a player fails to follow a suit, that suit becomes their dumping ground and you should stop leading it. This is also the only warning you get before the queen appears.
• Duck as high as you safely can. When you have to follow suit and cannot win, play the highest card that still loses to the card currently winning the trick — not your lowest. The lowest is what you will need at trick eleven, when a two is the difference between escaping and eating a hand full of hearts.
• Track the queen and the two spades above her. Until the ace and king of spades are gone, leading spades is how you force her out; once they are gone, whoever still holds her can drop her on anyone. If you hold her yourself, the trick you want is a spade lead you can follow low.
• Give away the lead late. In the last three or four tricks, winning a trick usually means leading into a table that has thrown away everything safe. Spend your high cards in the middle of the round, when there is still rubbish left to eat them.

• Try these on a live hand — Hearts, free in your browser

A worked example: watch one hand go wrong

Everything above, played out. You are South; going clockwise from you sit West, North and East. It is round one, so the pass goes left, to West.

Your hand: the ace, king and four of spades; the ace, nine and six of hearts; the ten, seven, five and two of diamonds; the eight, five and two of clubs.

The high spades are the problem. You do not hold the queen, but the ace and king are exactly the cards that capture her when somebody throws her at you. So you pass the ace and king of spades plus the ace of hearts, and keep the harmless two of clubs. Back from East come the jack of clubs, the three of diamonds and the four of hearts.

• Trick 1. You lead the two of clubs — the rules give you no choice. West plays the nine, North the king, East the three. North wins and takes nothing, because no penalty card is legal on the opening trick.
• Trick 2. North leads the ace of clubs; East follows with the six. The ace is already down, so your jack of clubs cannot win — throw it away now rather than carry a high club into the last few tricks. West has no clubs left and discards the five of hearts. Hearts are broken, and North collects 1 point on their own lead.
• Trick 3. North leads the three of spades, testing whether the ace and king are still out there — North holds the queen and wants those two gone before letting her go. East plays the jack, you play the four, and that was your last spade, so you are now void. West wins with the king, one of only two spades they hold. The cards you passed have become a trap: West cannot avoid a spade lead, and must lead next.
• Trick 4. West leads the ace of spades, their last one. North follows with the six, quietly keeping the queen back. East plays the five. You are void and playing last, so you throw the nine of hearts — your worst heart gone, and the point charged to somebody else. West takes the trick and that point.
• Trick 5. West leads the king of diamonds. North has no diamonds and throws the queen of spades. East plays the nine, you play the two, and West takes 13 points. North bet that nobody would beat the king with the ace, and won the bet.
• Where that leaves you. Five tricks in, you have zero, West has 14 and North has 1. Nothing clever happened: you passed away the cards that capture the queen, you ran out of spades, and you threw your worst heart the moment it was legal. Three of those five decisions were made before a single card was played.

• Deal a hand and try it — Hearts, free in your browser

What does it mean to shoot the moon in Hearts?

Take every penalty point in a round — all thirteen hearts and the queen of spades — and you shoot the moon: you score nothing and the other three take 26 each. It is the biggest swing in the game, and the reason you can never assume the player collecting hearts is losing.

Recognising the hand matters more than nerve. A real moon hand has three things: one long strong suit you can run unopposed, hearts controlled from the top down (ace and king, plus enough small ones that nobody steals a late trick), and either the queen of spades or the ace and king of spades, so she cannot be forced onto you. Five hearts headed by ace-king beats three headed by the ace. High cards scattered across four suits is not a moon hand; it leaks a point here and a point there all round, and loses.

The abort condition is simple: the moment any other player takes a single penalty card, the shot is dead. Stop and start ducking. Falling one heart short is the worst outcome in Hearts — 25 for you and 1 for the player who broke it, when you were one card from zero.

Defence is the other half. If one opponent has taken every point so far and nobody else has any, take one yourself at the first legal chance, even at the cost of a trick you would rather duck. One heart is the whole difference: they finish on 25 instead of 0, and you finish on 1 instead of 26. The cheapest insurance is a small heart kept back all round for exactly this.

Common variations

Hearts appeared at the end of the nineteenth century and spread far enough that almost every table now plays it slightly differently. You will meet it under other names too: Black Lady in the United States, Black Maria in Britain, Rickety Kate in Australia. All three are named for the queen of spades.

• Jack of diamonds. The jack is a bonus card worth minus 10 to whoever takes it, so there is suddenly a trick you want to win.
• Omnibus Hearts. The jack of diamonds bonus under its usual name, with a twist: the jack (sometimes the ten) is minus 10, and a moon shot has to include it, or those 10 points go to whoever took it.
• Black Maria. The British version, usually three players with the two of clubs removed so seventeen cards deal evenly. Passing is always the same direction, leading hearts is often unrestricted, and harsher scorings add the king of spades at 10 and the ace at 7.
• Cancellation Hearts. Six to ten players with two shuffled decks. Two identical cards in one trick cancel out and neither can win it, though their points still count.
• Spot Hearts. Hearts score their pip value instead of one apiece — the two costs 2, the jack 11, the ace 14 — and the queen of spades costs 25. That is 129 points a round rather than 26, so the match runs to 500 and holding a high heart stops being a rounding error.
• Three-player Hearts. Remove one card — commonly the two of diamonds — and deal seventeen each, sometimes with a kitty to the first trick winner. Passing alternates left, right, hold.
• Five-player Hearts. Ten cards each with a kitty, or two cards removed. Passing gets elaborate, often cycling left, right, two seats left, two seats right.
• Old moon and new moon scoring. Old moon is the standard, and the rule used here: the shooter scores nothing and the others take 26 each. Under new moon the shooter subtracts 26 from their own score and nobody else is penalised, which makes shooting much less worth attempting.
• Ending the match. A hundred points is the usual finish, but some tables play to 50 for a short game or 200 for a long one. The number changes how much risk a moon shot is worth and nothing else.

How many players do you need to play Hearts?

Four, and four is what the deck is built for: 52 cards divide into thirteen each with nothing left over, and the standard left-right-across-hold passing cycle only works with four seats. Our game deals four every time, seating you against three computer players.

Three and five are playable with an adjustment, because 52 has to come out even. Three players either remove the two of diamonds and take seventeen each, or take seventeen each and leave the odd card face down as a kitty that goes to whoever wins the first trick. Five players take ten each with a two-card kitty. Six and up needs a second deck, which is Cancellation Hearts. Two-player Hearts exists as well, but it needs a dummy hand to work at all, so it plays like a different game.

Can you discard a heart before hearts are broken?

Yes, and it is normally how they get broken. The restriction is on leading a heart, not on playing one. If someone else leads a suit you are void in, any card in your hand is legal — hearts included — from the second trick onwards. The first trick is the exception: no penalty card is allowed there at all.

So the sequence most rounds follow is: somebody runs out of clubs, discards a heart to be rid of it, hearts are broken, and from that point anyone may lead them. Waiting for a heart to be led before you discard one is the most common mistake new players make, and it costs you the round, because the hearts you are still holding at trick eleven are the ones you get stuck with.

Can you play a heart on the first trick?

No. On the opening trick of a round no penalty card may be played — not a heart and not the queen of spades — even by a player who is void in clubs and free to discard anything. A void player must find something harmless: a diamond, or a spade other than the queen. The only exception is a hand with no harmless card at all, meaning nothing but hearts or hearts plus the queen, which may play one because otherwise it could not play.

Who leads the first trick in Hearts?

The player holding the two of clubs leads the first trick of every round — not just the opening hand of the match — and must lead exactly that card, not another club and not a card of their choosing. Because three cards change hands in the pass, the two of clubs is often not held by the player dealt it, so the lead is settled only once the pass resolves. Holding it is harmless: no penalty card may be played on that trick.

Does the highest card always win the trick in Hearts?

Only the highest card of the suit that was led wins. There is no trump suit in Hearts, so a card of another suit cannot win however high it is. If clubs are led, the ace of hearts thrown on top takes nothing, and its penalty point goes to whoever wins with the highest club. That asymmetry drives the game: being unable to follow suit is your chance to hand your worst cards to somebody else.

What happens if your hand is nothing but hearts?

If your entire hand is hearts, you may lead one even though hearts have not been broken, because you have nothing else to lead. If your hand is hearts plus the queen of spades, that escape does not apply here: the queen is a legal lead, so you have to play her. Many tables rule the other way and allow the heart, so check before you start.

On the opening trick the rule is looser. Any hand holding nothing but penalty cards — thirteen hearts, or hearts and the queen — may play one, because otherwise it would have no legal card and the round could not continue.

Do you have to play the queen of spades when spades are led?

No, unless she is your only spade. You must follow suit, but you choose which spade, and if the queen is your only one you have to play her, where a higher spade takes her. If you hold other spades you may keep her back and follow with a low one, which is why small spades are worth so much as cover. No rule in Hearts forces a specific card when you have a legal choice inside the led suit.

Is it better to play early or late in a trick in Hearts?

Playing last is the strongest position, because you see all three cards before committing: if the trick is already lost to somebody else you can throw your most dangerous card, and if it is unexpectedly cheap you can take it deliberately. Leading is weakest, since you are guessing — and the trick winner is forced to lead again.

How many points does it take to end a game of Hearts?

A hundred. The moment any player’s running total reaches 100 or more at the end of a round, the match stops and the player with the lowest score wins — which is almost never the person who crossed the line. Because exactly 26 points are dealt out every round, a match usually runs somewhere between four rounds and a dozen depending on how evenly the points land.

If two or more players are tied for lowest when somebody crosses 100, the match does not end there: another round is dealt until one player is alone at the bottom. Some tables play to 50 for a quick game or 200 for a long one; the rule is otherwise identical.

What is the difference between Hearts and Spades?

They look alike and play as opposites. In Hearts you are alone, there is no trump suit, and you are trying not to take tricks — points are a punishment. In Spades you play in partnerships, spades are permanent trumps, and you bid in advance how many tricks you will take, then have to hit that number: points are a reward, and taking too many is as bad as taking too few.

The shared skill is counting a suit and knowing who is void. The habit that transfers worst is ducking — in Spades, throwing your lowest card away to avoid a trick will cost you a bid you already promised.

• Play Spades free online with three computer players

Is Hearts a game of luck or skill?

A single round is mostly luck: hold four high spades and no low ones and you will take points however well you play. A match is not, because a match runs four rounds to a dozen, and three rounds in four the pass hands you a decision made with complete information about your own hand, before a single card is played.

The clearest evidence is that the two biggest losses in Hearts are both self-inflicted — keeping the queen of spades with no cover, and abandoning a moon shot too late. Neither has anything to do with the deal.

Where these rules come from

Hearts has no single governing body, so we built our version by comparing how several rule references and established online games handle the contested points, then picked one ruling for each and stated it plainly above. Where a common variation disagrees with us, we have said so rather than pretend the question is settled.

• Pagat — Hearts rules and regional variations
• Wikipedia — Hearts (card game)

Start a hand

The fastest way to learn Hearts is to play a round badly, notice which card cost you thirteen points, and pass it away next time.

• Play Hearts online free — no download, no sign-up
• Try Spades, the partnership trick-taking game that plays like Hearts in reverse
• More card game guides and strategy on the Solitarium blog