A heartless game

What happens when you put four intense Hearts players together at a table with a deck of cards, a round of rootbeer floats, and a previously viewed movie playing in the background? Hard feelings, quick tempers, assassinations, fencing, fighting, torture, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...

...and a really good game of Hearts.

Doesn't sound too bad. I'll try to stay awake.

Oh, well, thank you very much, very nice of you. Your vote of confidence is overwhelming.

Annaka came over Saturday night, armed with the aformentioned floats, and since it was just the four top SHH seeds together, and the four of us had never met at the final table, we decided to play a 200-point game of Hearts. As is customary, I threw on a movie, the classic Hudson Hawk, but I was the only one who had seen it (can you believe it, Drew?), and two hands into this thing, it was clear that no one was going to be paying any attention to the movie, so we switched to The Bourne Supremacy, a movie we could all easily ignore (then what's the point, you ask? ambient noise, I suppose, or tradition).

It was pretty clear we all wanted to win badly. Fishing the queen, passing her bare, not taking one for the team...nothing was off limits. The leader was regularly assassinated to bring balance back to the game. Every hand was followed up with in-depth analysis. There was constant second-guessing (and cursing) whenever someone made a bad play. At the 150-point mark, halfway through the second movie (The Thomas Crowne Affair), we were all separated by an amazingly miniscule eight points. It was probably the most competitive game in which I've ever played.

On the last hand, Annaka misplayed a trick that allowed me to avoid three hearts and the queen (which Hubert was waiting to dump on me), and I ended up beating her by 14 points. It was that kind of game. But in the end, the outcome was secondary to the sub-plots that developed during the game:

• During one stretch, Andrew went five hands in a row without scoring a point, but he was still in last place, about 15 points behind the rest of us. I made a dig that it's easy to go unnoticed when the rest of us are busy assassinating each other, and he rebutted that he actually had good hands and wasn't going to take points anyway. So on the next hand, Hubert passed me the queen, and I passed up opportunities to dump her on him and Annaka, and when Andrew finally showed weakness, I gave him his prize. It was a pretty ruthless move considering both Hubert and Annaka were closer to me in score (Hubert was leading at the time), but I wasn't going to let Andrew go six straight scoreless. He's not Roger Clemens.
  
  
• On one memorable hand, Andrew passed Annaka a bare queen, then went on to fish her out. Still steaming from the cutthroat move, Annaka returned the favor a few hands later, emphatically slapping down her spade to fish out Andrew's queen. It was the angriest I'd ever seen her! Her comment: "What can I say, I hold a grudge." Don't we all, at least when we play Hearts.
  
  
• Hubert took a break at the 100-point mark, so we decided to mess with him by rigging the deck. It didn't hurt that he was holding a healthy lead at the time, so he deserved it. But since we always rig the deck whenever anyone leaves for a long enough period of time, we decided to be a little more tricky (it's too obvious when someone comes back and you immediately start dealing). We took two identical decks, then rigged one of them and hid it in my lap, where it would get switched with the deck that I just shuffled in front of him. But we figured he might even see that coming, so we rigged a third identical deck, so that after he called us on the first rigging, we'd have a second one ready to go. Not ones for subtlety, we had made the rigged hands too obvious, and my sleight of hand was pretty poor, too, so our master plan didn't get very far.
  
  But when we actually played the next hand, we were able to assassinate Hubert when he unknowingly led a trick with the last heart (a rare mistake). Andrew didn't know it was the last one, either, but he knew it was the lowest one, so when he dumped the queen, he apologized to me, since I was the only other person to play a heart on the previous heart trick. Luckily I was void, and Hubert ate it.

We're all friends again, but man, during those four hours (yes, four hours), it was war, and we didn't like each other much.

Can't wait to do it again!