We set them and there they were, in a very familiar scenario, suddenly behind with 9 bags.  I let my pard know that he shouldn’t question my playing.

Next hand we nailed their bag and it looked like smooooth sailing to the win.

But it got worse. The next hand I had 3 diamonds, king high. The A of clubs and the A of hearts. 3 spades with J high.  So I bid 3.  Pard bid 1. They bid, being baggers, team 6.   My A of hearts flew. Then I played my A of clubs and it got cut. Opp then led the Ace of diamonds and lo and behold, his pard was out of diamonds. I was screwed.  I tried to fudge my tricks in there, hoping my partner had underbid. No such luck. We took 2 tricks (pard’s only trick was A of Spades.  His only spade.) they took 11 on a 6 bid.

We were now at 396 to their 425. 

They did a team 6 bid. Hmmmm. My hand could take 1 and my pard was bidding 4.  So I went for it. Nil. My pard then said the dumbest thing. “A nil won’t win it for us, you should have bid”  I replied “For 1, a nil IS a bid. Second, it WILL win it for us. 3rd even if it didn’t win it for us it would put us in the lead” .  The opps thought they were being clever when they ran him out of spades.  Too bad I only had 1 spade so I was able to dump that pesky Ace of clubs and a few other high cards and make my nil.  We won. Pard said “You are such a bad player it was only luck we won” then he left before waiting for a reply. sigh.  Yup. I’m so lucky that I have an 80% win rate with total strangers.

He was feeling bad for questioning everything I did and then seeing I was right.

One of the defining characteristics of these people is they take everything personally.  You know the type, they lose their cool and threaten and cry when they are low and you hit them with the queen. “THAT JUST BOUGHT YOU A SLOW GAME!”  That is one of their cries. Then they stall. One loser was doing it even tho he was low still.  *shaking head*

Tonight I played 4 games with my low man.  I was down in the 1900′s and every game was the same.  People sliding against high, dumping on high, etc etc. Not just me. But that makes it very hard to win especially when the dealer goes for you also.  Out of 17 hold hands I took the queen 12 times.  That has to be the worst I’ve ever seen even for the zone.  I would get like the widow, or the married, or A/Q. 

Oh well. I went up higher and won 4 games to make up for the lower ranks.

In the end the original staller gave up and left.  That is usually how it works out if you have the time to wait them out.  They can’t handle people who stall on them because they are no longer in control.  You are.  Of course by the time he left the other 2 had also left so it was me versus 3 bots.   I kicked butt of course.

That brings me to the real point here.  Want to really mess with somebody?  Quit while you are ahead of them.   This works in the MSN Zone.  Why?  Because a bot is ranked at 1600.   So if it beats them, which it will if you are winning and quit at the last second, they lose to a bot.   It is really damaging if you are lower than them too because the win over you gets them almost no points but that loss to the bot nails them big time.  Unless of course you are all less than 1600.

After much searching I settled on HostingAtoZ.com  Seemed good. Now my site is a shopping comparison site and as such has a lot of searching the web going on. This never bothered the GoDaddy site at all.  I try to keep the searches throttled back to prevent sucking up a lot of resources.  Plus I don’t store the results in memory, I create temp tables on the database server to hold the results.  This works very well.

Well right from the start, even before I had the site up, I kept losing my site. Couldn’t see it. ColdFusion is down. And so on and so forth.  Seemed like 2 to 3 times a week I was having to contact support because my site was down.  Then cfthread stopped working.  No reply on the request for help with it. So I pulled everything out of the threads and ran them that way. Next thing I know I have a “Security violation” error.  Huh?

Sure enough I get a notice from HostingAtoZ.com saying my account has been canceled.  They claimed that my site was causing all their problems and they had lost many customers because of me. Oh really? Then why was it happening when my site wasn’t even running?  Well, luckily GoDaddy has upgraded to CF8 (tho still tightly bound). So I’m moving it over there again.  Just for now.  When I get my tax refund I’m going to go for a VPS I think.  I have a license for ColdFusion 8 server.  Wonder if I can go for a CF9? Not sure I have that much cash.

Anyway, I noticed that in the MSSQL Server area of HostingAtoZ they had way too many databases.  My guess is they bought space on a VPS and are now trying to sell as many sites as they can to make a profit.  Problem is, this makes the server unstable and just 1 site can take everything down.  They need to thin out the herd and focus on solid, reliable service.

Beware of cheap hosts. You get what you pay for.

I am always amazed at how people will just give up on a game when there is still hope. Especially if the other team is stretching for the win.
I was recently in a game where it seemed hopeless especially since my pard was pretty clueless.  She had already missed a chance to set on one hand and had been set needlessly on 2 others. She was so afraid of taking bags she was dumping points before bags were even an issue in the game or in a hand.So there we were with the score 234 to 428 and she left the game so I got a bot. Actually it was for the best I think. The opponents went for the win and bid team 8. Big mistake. Of course I had lured them into it by bidding low. I was going for either the bags or the set and they took the bait. Remember. Bid your hand unless you are bluffing to get the opps to do something like this. They had to think about it.  Take a chance on bagging out or push their luck?

They opted to push their luck and it backfired.  We (Le Bot N Me) set them.  Funny thing was they had a solid 7 bid.  They should have bid their hands and not done any stretching. They were far enough ahead to not worry about the bags. They should have just resigned themselves to the possibility of being set on bags and still having a good lead but with no bags.

We had bid low, a 4 bid. So with the set we now had 6 bags.  276 – 348.  The opps were following a set pattern now. Panic had set in. They could smell victory and it was slipping away.  What do you do in that case? NIL! Not.  Actually the nil was risky but doable.   We bid team 6 and they went nil 4.  Lots of baggies in there for the nil to take.

Well. Actually they took the nil and all the bags.  So now the score was 336 – 390.  Still looking good for them.  Then the dealer smiled on me.  Bot n me got a 9 hand.  I thought about pushing it to 10 (I was bidding 2nd on our team) but resisted, luckily.  They bid a team 3.  We got our 9 exactly and they got 4.  Score now 426-421.  Oh my.  The sprint for the finish line was on.

Next hand was a nail biter.  Both bid team 6 and made it.  We took the bag.  487-481.   We were bidding first and did a team 6.  They either had to bid a team 7 (and make it) or go nil or go low and try to bag us.  What they didn’t know was that I had bid high betting they would go for the bags.  Sure enough they bid a team 4.   They were so excited when I took a trick with a 6 of hearts.  I was going “WHEW! Got mine” because that was the last trick I took. If they had not let me have it by sluffing, I was set.  We took 2 bags and the win.

So never just give up. Unless you are a crappy player which my pard was.  Should have known. She had over 4000 games and was only rated 1920. (MSN Zone).  I, on the other hand, now have a 6 game winning streak going (after having a pard bid 13 and leave) rated over 1900 (just tried to look but the zone seems to be down) with just 31 games under my belt.

Some of the top ways to lose at hearts:

1. Slide on high man when you are not low man – this is a total loser move. But it happens all the time. 2nd or 3rd will actually slide on high man. What does this gain them? Nothing except a loss.
2. Lead spades to low man – low man is to your right, and you keep leading spades. He gets rid of those pesky Ace and king or gets to dump the queen on somebody who has the A or K.
3. This should be #1.  Make it personal. Somebody plays stupid and you target them instead of low man.  You are never going to win if you don’t target low man.

Look, you are there to relax and have fun. Don’t get so tied in knots about the way others are playing. Are they stalling? Quit. Unless you have all the time in the world. Then you can wait them out. If you are playing for ranking, is the rank worth the aggravation? Nah. If you are any good you can make it up on another game.

Just remember, sometimes you are going to lose. The dealer has it out for you. Seriously. If you play in the Zone you know what I mean. Unless you are a crappy player who the Zone doesn’t have to target.