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Partnership Hearts

There are two ways that four players can play hearts in fixed partnerships, partners sitting opposite each other.

1. Partners keep their tricks together. On each hand your team scores the total number of penalty points you have taken in your tricks. A slam occurs if one team takes all 14 penalty cards in a hand, they can choose give the opponents 26 penalty points or to subtract 26 penalty points from their own score.
2. Each player keeps an individual score, and in order to "shoot the moon", an individual player has to win all the penalty cards. The game continues until an individual player's score reaches 100 or more; then the scores of the partners are totalled and the partnership with fewer points wins. Thus it is possible for your team to win even if it is you who go over 100. For example you have 105, your partner has 34, and your opponents have 78 and 69, then your team wins by 139 points to 147.

Other Numbers of Players

The game may be played with either three or five players. There are various ways of coping with the fact that the cards cannot all be dealt out equally to the players:

1. Deal the cards out as far as they will go evenly. There will be one or two cards left over. These cards are called the kitty; they are placed in the middle of the table face down. The player who takes the first trick (or alternatively, the first penalty point) takes these cards and places them with their captured cards (they may look at them first). If it happens that the 2 is in the kitty, the holder of the lowest club not in the kitty must lead it (if no one has the 2, ask if anyone has the 3, then the 4, and so on).
2. As in method 1 above, but the person who takes the first point or trick adds these extra cards to their hand and discards an equal number of cards face down into their tricks.
3. With three players, remove the 2 from the deck, leaving 51 cards. With five players also remove the 2, and the holder of the 3 leads it to the first trick.

In the 3 player game, the passing may follow any one of these patterns:

• Left, right, hold, repeat.
• Left, right, repeat.
• If you pass 4 cards instead of 3 you can also scatter by passing 2 cards to each other player. You could then include scattering in either of the above rotations.

In the 5 player game, the passing could follow any of these patterns:

• Left, right, hold, repeat.
• Left, right, repeat.
• Left, right, 2nd person to the left, 2nd person to the right, hold, repeat.
• Left, right, 2nd to the left, hold, left, right, 2nd to the right, hold, repeat.