Hearts program cheats! I've specifically caught the game cheating. Passed Ace & King Spades to the right & they ended up across the table. I think this is BULL I would expect a program to play by the rules!

I have been playing this game for at least 10 years. I don't believe the game cheats - ever. The moral of the story is don't be fooled by randomness. As someone (not a math major) once said, "The problem is that a random variable is so damn unpredictable!" 

Here's how you can tell if the game is biased. Keep track of the cards dealt to each hand for about 30 games. At the end of that time look at the totals for each combo of face value and suit. That's 52 pigeon holes for the cards you are counting. If the game is biased there will be significant differences in some of the totals. If not, the differences will be minor. Compute the mean number of cards in each pigeon hole. Compare those means. They should all be within a card of each other.

If the deal is fair, then the most likely cause of weird results would be the program reading your hand, and coordinating play. Sometimes this seems to be the case, even in life. Life is not always fair, but the game is. Consider the probability of winning if everyone is of equal skill. It is 25%. As your skill improves over the other players, your chances of winning improve. Same is true in poker. But it depends on both skill and the hand you have been dealt. If you play the game with all cards visible, what is the probability of winning every game? Zero. what is the probability of losing every game? Zero. Your score is going to be somewhere in between.

Note that you are actually playing against an algorithm written by a human being. So the game it plays is only as good as the person who wrote the algorithm. I doubt that this simple program uses deep learning to evaluate the play of the human player. So to win more games you just have to be more clever than the guy who wrote the algorithm. You can reverse engineer the game by playing it a lot to see what it does in a given situation. For example, it always saves a high heart for the last hand. If you know that you can win the last hand most of the time if you are leading the hand by not playing a heart. Thus you can usually win the penultimate hand with a low heart.

Algorithms written by humans make mistakes (so do algorithms written through machine learning). Some of the weirdness you are seeing is just a bug in the code. MS is not going to pay anyone to fix it. They don't make any money on this game.  Can't even send ads to bug you while it is playing.

I normally win in the 60-70% range for a total of 50 games. Then I reset. I count cards in my head. That's a sure strategy for winning. My guess is that even if I could count every card my winning average would not be above 75% because of the hands that have been dealt. Try sitting down with three other friends and playing cards with the cards face up. You should all be experienced hearts players. After 50 hands your winning average should be...about 25%.

OK so there is no way to verify the fact that the game does cheat.  I cant post a video because it could be edited BUT the simple fact is the game passes back to you some or all of your pass cards.  I believe this is a glitch in the code - or intentional, I'm not sure.

The game also passes cards between the three AI seats.  This can be confirmed.  Start a game and pass three cards.

Now as you play (if you didn't already get the three cards back - which is cheating) watch for those same pass cards.  If the player you passed to doesn't not play any of them - the game is flawed.

I've plaid hundreds of games and in only a few has the player I passed the cards too maintained all of my pass cards.

I'm pretty sure this is by design.  It's a crafty social experiment by Microsoft - hats off to you.

To Microsoft:

Why did you even release Microsoft Hearts, considering all it does is show how little you care into making a game?  It's sad how blatantly it cheats.  AT LEAST once a hand, of any suit, one side will have the 4, one side will have the 3, and the last side will have the 2, and, of course, the player will have to take the hand.  Usually, THE VERY NEXT HAND, one side will have the 6 of the same suit, another side will have the 7, and the last side will have the 8, and, again, the player will have to take the hand.  Also, it seems awfully suspicious that the one side that just happens to have the queen of spades is also the side that just happens to be passing to the player that hand.  I once started or received the queen of spades EIGHT TIMES IN A ROW.  That's f**king pathetic... I really wish that the people who made this game have heard of SHUFFLING.  And in keeping with the spirit of the game, most of the time (at least 60% I'd guess) the player gets the queen of spades, the computer will make sure the player has to take it.  I seriously can't understand why you would even make this game, Microsoft.  There are easier ways to show people that you want them to f**k off than making a game for them to play that doesn't even try to be fair.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for giving jobs to the mentally challenged (and I understand that the Special Olympics doesn't pay the bills), but maybe you shouldn't have made them make an entire game without supervision.  That's the only way that makes sense to me on why the game is so bad.

I've been playing this moronic game for quite awhile, I got tired of the way it cheats and passes cards that make no sense. So I went looking for a way to cheat back and I found a program that will let you flip all the prayers cards up so you can see what the computer is up to. I don't take the game seriously anymore since I've watch the cards it keeps and the ones it passes to me (Real Dumb) is the only way I can explain it. Any way here is the URL that you can get this cheat from. http://www.askvg.com/enable-hidden-secret-debug-menu-in-microsoft-hearts-game-in-windows-7/ just read the instructions and have fun screwing with the program.

To Microsoft:

Why did you even release Microsoft Hearts, considering all it does is show how little you care into making a game?  It's sad how blatantly it cheats.  AT LEAST once a hand, of any suit, one side will have the 4, one side will have the 3, and the last side will have the 2, and, of course, the player will have to take the hand.  Usually, THE VERY NEXT HAND, one side will have the 6 of the same suit, another side will have the 7, and the last side will have the 8, and, again, the player will have to take the hand.  Also, it seems awfully suspicious that the one side that just happens to have the queen of spades is also the side that just happens to be passing to the player that hand.  I once started or received the queen of spades EIGHT TIMES IN A ROW.  That's f**king pathetic... I really wish that the people who made this game have heard of SHUFFLING.  And in keeping with the spirit of the game, most of the time (at least 60% I'd guess) the player gets the queen of spades, the computer will make sure the player has to take it.  I seriously can't understand why you would even make this game, Microsoft.  There are easier ways to show people that you want them to f**k off than making a game for them to play that doesn't even try to be fair.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for giving jobs to the mentally challenged (and I understand that the Special Olympics doesn't pay the bills), but maybe you shouldn't have made them make an entire game without supervision.  That's the only way that makes sense to me on why the game is so bad.