Spider Solitaire (1 suit): a stock you get to see only once

On the home page of solitaire-turn-3.com you can cycle through the Klondike stock as often as you like; the catch is that it comes three cards at a time. Spider turns that bargain around. Its 50-card stock is never turned into a waste pile at all. Each click drops one card on every one of the ten columns, you get five such deals, and then the stock is gone for good. There is no second pass and no choice of which card comes next.

So the question this site asks of every game, "how much does the draw rule shape your chances?", has a blunt answer here: the stock decides when new cards arrive, never which ones you may use. In the one-suit game, our look-ahead bot, which sees only the face-up cards and never undoes a move, won 52.8% of 4,000 deals (95% range 51.2%–54.3%). Compare Klondike on our home page: a simpler rule-list bot won 42.3% at Turn 1 (41.3%–43.3%) but only 10.6% at Turn 3 (10.0%–11.2%), each over 10,000 deals.

At a glance: Spider with one suit

All of these come from a bot, so they are a floor, not a measure of how often the game can be won or how often people win. We ran no solver for Spider. Blake and Gent (2026) report 98.5% (±1.5%) for four-suit Spider with a solver that sees every card; nobody we cite has a one-suit figure of that kind.

Why the draw rule matters less here than in Turn 3

In Solitaire Draw 3, two of every three stock cards are locked under the one you can play, and our bot needed 3.81 passes through the stock per win (3.73–3.90) against 2.34 at Turn 1 (2.32–2.36). Spider has nothing like that: every dealt card lands face up on top of a column and is immediately playable. What the stock does do is bury things. Each deal covers ten column tops, including runs you were halfway through building. That is why the rare deals where the bot opened an empty column before its first deal were won 98.1% of the time – though only 52 deals, so the range is wide.

We did not simulate Spider with a different stock rule (more deals, dealing onto empty columns, or a waste pile), so we cannot say how much the five-deal rule costs you. We only report what we measured.

Spider rules on this site

• Cards: 104, all spades in the one-suit game.
• Table: ten columns of 6, 6, 6, 6, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, top card face up.
• Stock: 50 cards, dealt one to each column per click, five deals, no redeal.
• Empty columns: any card may go there, but you cannot deal while a column is empty.
• Building: any card on one rank higher; only same-suit runs move together.
• Win: build eight full King-to-Ace runs; each is removed automatically.

Timing the five deals

Deal late, not early

Unlike Klondike, a Spider stock click cannot be undone by cycling round again. Exhaust the table first: every useful move you make before a deal is one the deal cannot cover up.

Aim for an empty column before deal one

Our bot managed it in just 1.3% of games, but when it did, it almost always won. Short columns of 5 are the natural targets.

Refill before you deal

You cannot deal onto an empty column, so park a card or a run there first; a high card that will not block much is best.

Keep runs tidy

Each deal lays a random card on every run. A long, clean run is easy to lift back off; a jumbled column is not.

Three ways a stock can treat you

It helps to line up the stock rules on this site side by side. In Klondike Turn 1 the stock is a queue you can walk through as often as you like, one card at a time, and every card becomes reachable. In Klondike Turn 3 it is the same queue, but you see it in groups of three and only the top card of each group is live, so reaching a particular card can take several laps. In Spider the stock is not a queue at all: it is five timed drops of ten cards, and you choose only the moment, never the card.

For a one-suit player this is mostly good news. Nothing is ever hidden inside the stock the way a Turn 3 card can hide in the middle of a group, and every one of the 50 stock cards will reach the table. The cost is that you cannot wait for a card: if the 9 you need is in the last deal, it arrives only after four other deals have landed on your runs. Our Spider bot's wins took about 117.5 moves, deals included. The Klondike bot's wins took 111.2 moves at Turn 3 and 126.2 at Turn 1, draws included, so a won game is of a similar length in all three, even though the stocks work so differently.

Playing on solitaire-turn-3.com

Spider is free in any current browser on computer, tablet or phone, with no account and nothing to install. You get Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play, plus zoom and fullscreen for ten columns, drag or tap moves, a counter for wins, time and moves, and sound and table-color settings.

How the figures were made

The solitaire-turn-3.com team ran these tests in September 2026 on the Spider rules read from this site's game code.

1. Rebuilt in Python 3.11, standard library only.
2. Numbered deals: seeds 100001 to 104000, kept apart from seeds 1–30 used to choose the bot's scoring weights.
3. One player: a bot with a 250-position look-ahead over visible cards only, treating any newly turned card as unknown.
4. 95% ranges: Wilson score intervals for percentages, normal intervals for averages.
5. No stock variants were simulated for Spider.

Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic, helped write and review the code and draft this page. It produced no figures; every number comes from running the code or from the linked study, and the team checked them.

Spider questions

Is one-suit Spider easier than Klondike Turn 3?

For our simple bots, yes: 52.8% of 4,000 deals against 10.6% of 10,000. Both are floors, and a patient player with Undo does better at each.

Can I go through the stock again?

No. Five deals, then it is empty. For a stock you can recycle, try Klondike Turn 3.

What about more suits?

See Spider 2 suits and Spider 4 suits. Everything else is on the games page and the blog.

By Admin, solitaire-turn-3.com (Forty Media). Research run September 2026.