Black Hole (card game)

Solitaire game

This article is about the solitaire game. For other uses, see Black hole (disambiguation).

A Deal of Black Hole in PySolFC

Black Hole is a patience or solitaire card game. It is of the open builder type; its play is similar to Golf and Tri Peaks, but with a tableau of fans like that of La Belle Lucie. Invented by David Parlett, this game's objective is to compile the entire deck into one foundation.[1][2]

## Rules

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The cards are dealt to the tableau in piles of three. The leftover card, dealt first or last, is placed as a single foundation called the Black Hole. This card is usually the Ace of Spades, but any card can do.

Only the top cards of each pile in the tableau are available for play, and in order for a card to be placed in the Black Hole, it must be a rank higher or lower than the top card on the Black Hole, ignoring suit. This is the only allowable move in the entire game. Aces and Kings are considered consecutive, thus allowing wrapping.

The game ends if there are no more top cards that can be moved to the Black Hole. The game is won if all of the cards end up in the Black Hole.

## Analysis

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Shlomi Fish wrote a program that attempted to solve one million deals, of which 869,413 could be solved and the 130,587 others were fully traversed without finding a possible solution, yielding a winning rate of over four fifths (87%).[3] A generalised version of the Black Hole patience is NP-complete.[4]

The game typically offers multiple paths, and to have the best chance of succeeding, players should try to look a few moves ahead and eliminate lines of play that lead to a dead end.[5]

## Variants

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All in a Row is somewhat similar to Black Hole. It is played with 13 columns of 4 cards each, and at the start of play, the first move can be made from any column.

## References

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1. ^ Parlett, David (2020). Black Hole: You'll never get out of this one, parlettgames.uk.
2. ^ Parlett, David. The Penguin Book of Patience
3. ^ Shlomi Fish, Solving Statistics for the First 1 Million PySolFC Black Hole Solitaire Deals, 11 September 2010. According to Schlomi, the search iterations counts of both the solved and unsolved deals had fairly large averages (roughly 292,400 and 553,884) and standard deviations which indicates that some deals result in many false ends, while the median number of iterations for the solved states was also relatively high (roughly 79,000).
4. ^ Gent, I.P., Jefferson, C., Kelsey, T., Lynce, I., Miguel, I., Nightingale, P., Smith, B.M. and Tarim, S.A. (2007) "Search in the Patience Game `Black Hole'", AI Communications - Constraint Programming for Planning and Scheduling archive Volume 20 Issue 3, Pages 211-226
5. ^ "Black Hold" (p.79-80) in Galt, David. 101 Great Card Games, Publications International, 1999. ISBN 0-7853-4044-0

## See also

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* List of solitaires
* Glossary of solitaire

* v
* t
* e

Patience or Solitaire by type - (list, glossary)

Closed games|

| Simple builders|

* Amazons
* Auld Lang Syne
* Birthday
* The Clock
* Clock
* Cotillion (Contradance)
* Leoni's Own
* Musical (Betsy Ross, Fairest, Four Kings, Plus Belle, Quadruple Alliance)
* Precedence
* Quadrille (La Française; Captive Queens)

|

Reserved builders|

* Carpet
* Eagle Wing
* Golf
* Duchess of Luynes (Grand Duchess)
* Queen's/King's Audience
* Matrimony
* Monte Carlo
* Moojub
* Odd and Even
* Patriarchs
* Pyramid
* Royal Cotillion
* Royal Rendezvous
* Sultan (Emperor of Germany)
* Tri Peaks
* Windmill

Simple packers|

* Batsford
* Big Ben
* British Constitution
* British Square
* Congress
* Corona
* Deauville
* Deuces
* Diplomat
* Emperor
* Following
* Fortune's Favor
* Four Seasons
* Gargantua
* Herring-Bone
* Klondike
* Napoleon at St Helena (Forty Thieves)
* Napoleon's Square
* Red and Black
* Westcliff

Reserved packers|

* Acme
* Alhambra
* American Toad
* Backbone
* Canfield
* Casket
* Crazy Quilt
* Duchess
* Gate
* The Plot
* Queen of Italy (Terrace)
* Seven Devils

Closed non-builders|

* Accordion
* Aces Up
* Baroness (Five Piles, Thirteens)
* Decade
* Eight Cards
* Elevens
* Frustration
* Good Thirteen
* Herz zu Herz
* Hit or Miss
* Hope Deferred
* Nidgi Novgorod
* Perpetual Motion (Narcotic)
* Royal Flush
* Royal Marriage
* Travellers (Four of a Kind, Hidden Cards, Hide & Seek, Spoilt, Wandering Card)

Half-open games|

| Builders|

* Interregnum
* Royal Parade
* Tournament
* Virginia Reel

|

Blockades|

* Babette
* British Blockade
* Labyrinth

Planners|

* Calculation
* Colorado
* Colours
* Cribbage Squares
* Frog
* Imaginary Thirteen
* Jubilee
* Poker Squares
* Puss in the Corner
* Rosamund's Bower
* Sir Tommy

Packers|

* Agnes
* Algerian
* Blockade
* Box Kite
* Bristol
* Four Corners
* Heads and Tails
* Intelligence
* Martha
* Miss Milligan
* Mount Olympus
* Pyramide
* Russian Solitaire
* St. Helena
* Stonewall
* Yukon
* Zodiac

Spiders|

* German Patience
* Rouge et Noir
* Scorpion
* Simple Simon
* Spider

Open games|

| Open builders|

* Archway
* Black Hole
* Crescent
* Intrigue
* Salic Law
* Stalactites

|

Open packers|

* Baker's Dozen
* Baker's Game
* Beleaguered Castle
* Bisley
* Capricieuse
* Eight Off
* Flower Garden (Bouquet)
* Fortress
* FreeCell
* Grandfather's Clock
* House in the Woods
* King Albert
* La Belle Lucie
* Mrs. Mop
* Päckchen
* Penguin
* Persian
* Russian Patience
* Seahaven Towers
* Shamrocks

Open non-builders|

* Fourteen Out
* Gaps (Montana)
* Gay Gordons (Exit)
* Maze
* Nestor

Competitive games|

* Australian Patience
* Double Klondike (Double Solitaire)
* Kings in the Corner
* Nerts (Pounce, Racing Demon)
* Russian Bank (Crapette)
* Speed
* Spite and Malice
* Spit

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