Spider Solitaire (1 suit): what the first ten cards tell you
Spider opens with a wall of face-down cards. Ten columns, 54 cards on the table, and only the bottom card of each column showing — so 44 of those 54 cards are hidden. Reading a Spider deal is less about what you can see and more about how quickly you can make room.
We played 4,000 games of one-suit Spider under this site's rules with a computer player that sees only face-up cards and never undoes a move. It won 52.8% of them. The single most telling moment wasn't in the deal at all: in the rare games (1.3%) where it managed to empty a column before touching the stock, it won 51 out of 52. An early empty column is the best sign you can get in Spider.
One-suit Spider, by the numbers
| What we looked at | Result | Games | How we got it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cards face down after the deal | 44 of 54 | every deal | From the rules (6,6,6,6,5,5,5,5,5,5 dealt, top card up) |
| Games where a column was emptied before the first stock deal | 1.3% (95% range 1.0–1.7%) | 4,000 | Look-ahead player, no peeking, no Undo |
| Wins in those games | 51 of 52 (98.1%) | 52 | Same player |
| Wins overall | 52.8% (51.2–54.3%) | 4,000 | Same player |
| Suits completed per game, of 8 | 4.96 on average | 4,000 | Same player |
| Games with at least 4 suits completed | 56.9% | 4,000 | Same player |
| Moves in a winning game | about 118 | 2,111 wins | Same player (includes stock deals) |
The rules of one-suit Spider on klondike.nz
Ten columns, mostly hidden
Two packs, 104 cards, all spades. Ten columns: the first four get six cards, the other six get five, with only the last card face up. The remaining 50 cards are the stock.
Eight runs to finish
Build eight full runs from King down to Ace. Each finished run is lifted off the table automatically.
Moves
- Any card can go on a card one rank higher.
- A run can be moved as a block if it is all one suit and in sequence (in the one-suit game, every sequence qualifies).
- Any card or run can go into an empty column.
- Clicking the stock deals one card onto every column. There is no redeal. The game warns you if a column is empty when you try to deal.
Once you are comfortable, the next steps are two suits and four suits.
Reading the start of a Spider game
Start with the short columns
Six of the ten columns start with only five cards, four of them hidden. Those are your best candidates for an empty column. Look along the bottom row for cards that could move onto each other and free one of them.
Make every move before the first deal count
Once you deal from the stock, a card lands on every column, including the one you were about to clear. That is why the handful of games where our player cleared a column before dealing were so strong. Take your time with the first 10 cards.
Turn cards over, even at the cost of a neat run
With 44 hidden cards, information is precious. A move that uncovers a card is almost always worth more than one that tidies a column.
Use the empty column as a workbench
An empty column lets you reshuffle runs into better order. Don't park a single low card in it and forget about it.
Count your completed suits
Our player finished about 5 suits of 8 per game on average, and got at least four in 56.9% of games. If you are at four finished runs with cards to spare in the stock, you are in good shape.
How our results sit next to real players
On solitairex.io, one-suit Spider is listed among the "quick wins", with player win rates of 70–84% (the site doesn't publish its method). Our player won 52.8% without ever undoing a move or looking ahead at hidden cards. The gap is roughly what you'd expect Undo and human judgement to buy you. For the four-suit game, the best published research finds 98.5% of deals winnable when every card is visible (Blake & Gent, 2026), so the deal is rarely the problem.
A first-minute checklist for one-suit Spider
You see only ten cards when a Spider game begins, so the checklist is short and all about creating information and space.
- Read the bottom row for sequences. Any card one rank below another visible card can move onto it. List them before you move anything.
- Prefer moves from the short columns. Six columns hold only five cards. Moving their top card starts digging towards an empty column.
- Take moves that turn over a card. Each new face-up card may open another move; that chain reaction is how columns get cleared.
- Aim for an empty column before the first stock deal. It happened in only 1.3% of our player's games, but those games were almost all won.
- Before you deal, tidy up. Make every useful move first, because the next deal drops a card on every column.
- Track completed runs. Each finished King-to-Ace run frees space on the table. Our player's average was about five of the eight.
Most of this is common sense, but the data puts it in order: space first, information second, tidiness third. Once you can win one-suit games reliably, the same checklist carries over to two suits, with one extra item: keep runs in a single suit.
Play Spider on klondike.nz
Free, in any modern browser, on computer, tablet or phone. No download, no sign-up, no email. Large cards with zoom, Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play, drag-and-drop or tap to move, and a count of wins, time and moves for the current game. Mute the sound, go fullscreen or change the table colour — a good fit for a lunch break in Nelson or a long evening in Taupō.
Where these numbers come from
The klondike.nz team ran this study in September 2026.
- Rules from our code. Ten columns, one card per column from the stock, no redeal, same-suit runs move together, any card into an empty column. We assumed you can't deal while a column is empty, because the game warns about it; we didn't confirm that behaviour in a browser.
- A program version of the game. Rebuilt with spades only.
- Numbered deals. We tuned the player on deals 1–30, then measured it on a fresh set, deals 100,001 to 104,000.
- The player. It sees only face-up cards, treats a newly uncovered card as unknown, and never undoes.
- Running it. 4,000 games.
- Comparison. There is no published figure for one-suit Spider with a no-peek player, so our number stands alone; the published four-suit figure shows how winnable Spider deals are in principle.
- Error bars. 51.2–54.3% is the 95% range around 52.8%.
- Limits. This is a floor on what a careful person with Undo can do.
Under the bonnet
The simulation is Python 3.11 with only its standard library. Spider lives in spider.py, and a shared runner spreads the 4,000 games over 19 worker processes with multiprocessing; the run took about 21 minutes. On every turn the player runs a best-first look-ahead of 250 positions over the visible cards, scoring same-suit links, empty columns and uncovered cards, and penalising face-down cards. It then plays the line that scores best. Percentages carry Wilson score 95% intervals. We used Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic, to help write and review this code and to draft the page; no figure came from the AI — all of them come from running the code, and we checked them against published work.
Questions players ask
How many cards are hidden at the start?
44 of the 54 cards on the table.
Is it worth trying to clear a column before I deal?
Yes. It only happened in 1.3% of our games, but 51 of those 52 were won.
How long is a typical winning game?
About 118 moves for our player, counting each stock deal as a move.
Why is my win rate higher than 52.8%?
Probably because you use Undo and think ahead. Our player does neither.
What should I try after Spider?
Our Klondike page looks at what an opening deal tells you, and the about page explains who we are.
By Admin, klondike.nz. Study date: 18 September 2026.