2024, Family, Kids, Uncategorized

Solitaire

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My Boomgaarden relatives were inveterate card players. My Uncle Alvin played poker all his life, and my grandparents loved pinochle. My grandmother really liked to play Solitaire. My dad could take it or leave it. My cousins were all card players and gamblers.

I must confess that I am an obsessive Solitaire player on my phone. Grandson got a glimpse of me playing it, and so I had to teach him how to play, too. He has only miniscule screen time a week, so being on Oma’s phone, with his parent’s permission, is quite a treat for him. It sure seems a better option than most video games!

I plan to teach him Solitaire today using real cards to help him get a better feel for the game. I sure don’t want him to learn to play poker! My maternal grandmother’s family immigrated to the US because my great grandfather lost all his money playing poker! Solitaire seems pretty harmless.

What card games do you like to play? What were your family attitudes about gambling?

42 thoughts on “Solitaire”

  1. My parents played schmear. But no gambling at all, not me. NE MN in my childhood would teach you the destructive effects of gambling. I won’t buy $1 50-50 raffle tickets at the baseball games which support a good cause.
    Sandy and I used to play bridge.

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  2. I sometimes get roped into a card game but left to myself I could go years without. I don’t gamble, have never bought a lottery ticket, but that’s not the reason. Cards just don’t interest me.
    I don’t know how my parents felt about gambling. It never came up. My father played poker with his friends but penny-ante, so it would scarcely be considered gambling. I seem to recall they played bridge in the early days.

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  3. i have a monthly card game 1st thirsday of the month dating back more than 20 years. big winner or loser is usually about $20. 25 cent bets with max of 50 cents.
    i learned from a weekly card game 40 years ago that a small time game gets destroyed when big betting is introduced and allowed by the house. you loose all the commrodorie and get focused on winnings and losings. go to the casino for that. we caught a guy cheating and he was never thought of as the same guy. he explained that his dad taught him that trick . his dad was a schmuck too
    i enjoying in vegas but not in town here

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  4. I played a lot of solitaire (Mom was an avid player and taught us kids), poker , blackjack, Hearts with the guys, and the occasional game of War or Gin Rummy or 500.

    At the family gathering in Colorado Springs two weeks ago, my “gotta play a game with everyone!” BIL and SIL talked us into playing Pit, which I’d also played some as a kid. I remember why I stopped playing it at age 12. 😉

    Chris in O-town

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  5. Growing up I played a lot of Hearts and Old Maid. Our Grandma taught us how to play 500. I’m not much of a card player these days – mostly Solitaire on my iPad. When I visit one of my best friends at her lake cabin, we dig out the Canasta. I am not interested in any gambling or buying lottery cards.

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  6. My dad taught me how to play solitaire. I play it on my phone too but only if I don’t have a book, or something to do with my hands while I wait. I find it addicting to play on my phone, and I don’t like that feeling. It’s also really hard on my eyes and I can’t focus them if I play too long. So I avoid it. I should really delete the app.

    I have never gone into a casino. Some friends might be going in October. We’re going over to Red Wing for their art festival and we might stay overnight at Treasure Island. It will be a first for me.

    I have played the lottery in the past, but not recently. I won $500 once, long ago when it first started in MN.

    Busy day yesterday. I took a beading class at Fifty North, then Pippin had a vet appointment in the late afternoon. I learned that little 18-pound Pippin has a mass larger than a baseball in his lower abdomen.

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  7. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I love cribbage. While my family loved to play hearts, it was confusing and I had difficulty paying attention to it, so as a result I did not enter in to it with the same intensity as others. But cribbage! I found it interesting and challenging. Our neighbor, retired minister Harry Thompson taught us to play it when he would appear many afternoons as we got home from school. The late, great Uncle Jim played, as well. We had raucous games of this complete with its own sound effects:

    WooHoo: a score of 8
    WooWooWooWooWoo!: a score of 12 or above
    Woo. Pause WooWooWooWooWoo!: a double, double run scoring 16 or more points. Once somebody scored 24 points and the clamour was intense.

    So much fun, that was. As siblings we still make these noises in response to good news.

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      3. I have just been notified today that my sister, cozy mystery novelist, is booked at Once Upon a Crime, November 16 12-2pm. Her name is Jolene Stratton Philo. This book is See Jane Dig. The series of books is See Jane Run.

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    3. I have a four track cribbage board. While working in Williston, ND, it happened that the three other workmates loved cribbage. After a few weeks of regular two team play, I brought my four track. I’m sure playing independently was a relief for those who drew me as partner.

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  8. Sandy and I every night would have popcorn and play scrabble or cribbage. I grew to hate scrabble, but cribbage was all right. When we move down to here it stopped.
    I am fascinated by probability. For two years I played Klondike solitaire, one of the names for the kind of solitaire I think you all mean, to study probability and how to use it to win. I got good at it and quit. Every now and then I try playing it on my iPad but either I am still bored or don’t like using the tech.

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  9. My Uncle Alvin was a big time poker player in the early years of his marriage. Farm land was sometimes won or lost. He toned it down after Aunt Elaine got so mad at him leaving her at home to play poker at the Magnolia bar that she drove to town and threw a chair through the glass on the locked door where he was playing.

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  10. Very little, if any, gambling in our family.
    As for cards, I can say that I’ve played just about all there are except bridge. Pinochle, of many types, remains our favorite. We pre-teen kids learned the game during a three day blizzard.
    BTW
    August 29 is According To Hoyle National Day. And you can look it up.

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      1. There are local rules which are good to know before playing. Years ago, I was playing pinochle with friends in Cincinnati and began biding on hand. Up and up. ” Wes has a barn burner hand.”
        “Pass me hearts,” says I.
        “What? We don’t pass cards down here!”
        Set.

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  12. I have always enjoyed card games of various kinds. This despite the fact that we rarely played at our house, mostly because mom was such a poor loser, she’d inevitably cause a scene when she lost. Once she even tore up the cards!

    Husband doesn’t enjoy card games, so we never play. When I was single, between marriages, I belonged to a small group of women who’d meet monthly to play poker. Penny ante, small stuff. The group stopped playing after about a year and a half after a game where one woman lost $6.00 that she couldn’t afford to lose. This was in 1975; sheesh, that’s almost fifty years ago. What a shame, it was fun while it lasted.

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  13. I play a lot of Solitare on my phone. My current title is “King of Crowns” and I’m at level 876. 🙂

    My folks played a lot of 500 and would twist my arm to get me to fill in sometimes. They were in several card clubs. It really broke mom’s heart when she had to give that up.
    They played cribbage too, but I never learned that.

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  15. At Husband’s family gatherings, we played a version of solitaire where everyone had their own deck, and tried to play on each other’s “boards” and, of course, in the up top” piles. Variously called Oh Hell, O Sh**, Nuts, et al… I’ve seen several versions. Tried playing more recently and I couldn’t even begin to keep up.

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  16. If I’ve told this before, sorry. One summer during college, my dad spent the summer in northern WI, working. My greatgrandmother lived in Spooner. A couple of nights before he was scheduled to come home, he played poker with her and a couple of her cronies. They completely wiped him out and showed no mercy. He went home penniless. He learned his lesson well – no gambling at our house. When we did play poker, we only used matchsticks.

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  17. Spider solitaire online. Also watered down mahjong (if you’re just playing on your own, it’s pretty much just a glorified solitaire game).

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  18. I have had conversations with friends about gambling, and I tend to think I have a logical appoach to the subject, so I have a certain amount of trouble understanding what the appeal is.

    One friend has something of a history of going to casinos. She regards it as pretty harmless, as she has a limit on how much she will lose before she leaves. My argument has been, you know you’re going to lose that money, so what is fun about that? The casinos have the advantage over the patrons, so you know you’re not going to win. She says she knows she won’t win. I maintain that some part of her must believe she might win, or it wouldn’t appeal to her. I could stand on a bridge and throw money into the river and know that I would never get it back, but it would not be fun. So why, if you know you’re going to lose the money, would you give it to a casino?

    A different friend likes to buy lottery tickets. The logic is, someone somewhere wins the lottery, and if you never buy a ticket, you can’t win. But she buys five or ten tickets for a drawing. I maintain that, if your logic is that you can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket, then you should buy one ticket for the drawing. If you buy five tickets, you’ve spent five times as much money on that drawing, but you have not increased your chances of winning by any statistically significant amount. The odds for Powerball, for example, are about one in 292 million for a single set of numbers. I have never been able to convince her, though, that five chances in 292 million isn’t any better than one chance in 292 million. In her mind, that’s FIVE TIMES as many chances.

    I think I am too logical to ever develop a gambling addiction.

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  19. Parky, my late next door neighbor, used to go to a casino at least once a week. I can’t imagine how much money he has lost there, but the occasional small jackpot was enough for his to keep going back. He once won a red Jeep Cherokee, and after that, he was convinced it was only a matter of time before his ship came in. I’m convinced he paid for that Cherokee many times over.

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