What's New

The bots no longer schmear a queen or jack of trump onto a trick their side has already won.

When a bot was last to play and its teammate already had the trick, it threw whichever card carried the most points, so it would give up a queen of trump for three points and keep a worthless nine of diamonds. It now schmears a fail card or the ace or ten of diamonds, and when it has none it lets go of its weakest trump and keeps its queens and jacks for a trick of their own. Measured over 400,000 simulated hands, the new play wins more often in both games. The coach picks this up too, so it no longer suggests those queens.

In a leaster, a tie for fewest points is now shared: every player tied for fewest wins.

A tie used to go to whoever took fewer tricks, and then to the player nearest the dealer’s left, so one player collected from the whole table while the player level with them paid like everyone else. Now each player tied for fewest collects from every player who did not win, which is how get61 settles it and how the group who asked for it plays. Two tied at a five-handed table each collect 3, and the other three pay 2 apiece. You still have to take a trick to win, and the blind still goes with the last trick. Hands already played keep the result they were scored with.

Reported by a player

Watch it play now says when a player could have laid down the rest, and when the table played a card for somebody.

The written replay already named a lay-down nobody took, but the animated playback beside it did not, and that is where people look. It now shows "could have laid down the rest here" while that trick plays, and a card played for somebody whose clock ran out, or who had left the seat, is labeled as it lands. Stepping back and forward keeps the labels in step.

Reported by hkmcd

The score tracker can mark a leaster tie.

Leaster ties are now shared at the tables, and the paper score tracker had room for only one winner. It now has a box per player: tick everyone tied for fewest, and each of them collects from every player who did not win, the same as the site.

Watch it play also says when the table made a pick, bury or call for somebody.

A replay already named these under its grid, but the animated playback only labeled cards. Now a pick, bury, call, double or lay-down decided for a player whose clock ran out, or who had left the seat, is named in the playback when it happens, in the same words, and stays up until the next card lands.

The coach now speaks up when a defender lets a big trick go.

If you were last to play on defense, the other side was winning a trick with ten or more points on it, and you held a card that would have taken it, the note after the hand says so. Across thousands of hands, taking a trick that size is clearly right, and it was the biggest mistake the coach had been staying quiet about. It still says nothing about smaller tricks, where taking or not is a fair judgment.

If you turned the coach off, the lobby asks once whether you would like to try it again.

The coach has been fixed and extended since some players switched it off, and they had no way of hearing about it. A short line in the lobby offers the new version once. Say no and it does not ask again; the coach is never switched back on without you.

The coach no longer tells you to throw a queen, a jack or a low diamond onto a trick your side has already won.

After a hand where your side had the trick and you played last, the coach suggested whichever card carried the most points, including a queen or jack of trump. A queen is worth 3 points and far more as a trump that takes a later trick, so that advice was wrong, and it was the most common thing the coach said. It now suggests only plain cards there, or the ace or ten of diamonds, which players schmear on purpose. When naming a card to get out of a trick cheaply it picks a plain card over an equally cheap trump. Thanks to the player who reported it.

The coach no longer judges a play on information you could not have had.

At jack of diamonds, a picker who holds the jack plays alone, but nobody else can know that until the jack is played. The coach treated it as known from the first card, so it sometimes faulted a defender for how they treated a player who looked like a possible partner. It now waits until the picker has shown the jack, as a player at the table would.

A replay now shows which cards the table played for you.

When your clock ran out, or you left the seat mid-hand, a bot played your cards and the replay showed them as if you had chosen them. Those cards are now marked "ran out of time" or "played by a bot", and the coach never comments on them.

The coach now names the card the bots play, instead of working it out with its own rules.

The review after a hand used to decide for itself which card you should have schmeared or taken a trick with, and those rules got things wrong that the bots never do, such as telling a partner to throw the ace of diamonds onto a trick the picker was already winning. Now it puts the standard bot in your seat, with your cards and only what you could see, and speaks only when the bot plays a different card worth at least three points more on that trick. A one point difference is not a coaching moment.

Tournament bots take the called-suit trick when they can win it, and a picker no longer opens with the called suit.

From a hand-by-hand review of a bot at a club table. When the called suit is led, the partner has to play the called ace on it, so a defender with none of that suit who can win the trick with a trump now takes it instead of throwing a card away. And a bot that picks no longer leads the called suit on the first two tricks, when the ace is least likely to walk. Both were tested over thousands of hands under the club’s rules before going in; the other plays in the review were tested the same way and did not show a gain.

Reported by hkmcd

A player who blitzed as they picked is no longer offered a Blitz Recrack with the same cards.

Each player gets one blitz. That rule counted a blitz announced after the bury, but not one shown as the picker took the blind, so a picker who blitzed on the pick and was then cracked could show the same cards again for a Blitz Recrack and double the hand a second time. It now counts. A picker who picked without blitzing can still Blitz Recrack, as get61 and sheepshead.org allow.

Reported by hkmcd

A replayed hand now shows when a player could have laid down the rest and did not.

Lay ’em down is offered only to the player on lead who holds nothing but sure winners, and until now a replay showed what was played but never what was offered, so there was no way to check afterward. Recent hands now adds a line such as "ryerichter could have laid down the rest at trick 5."

Reported by hkmcd

Tournament bots take the called-suit trick with the ace or ten of trump instead of a queen or jack.

When the called suit is led and a defender has none of it, winning the trick with the ace or ten of diamonds banks those points and keeps the high trump for later. The strongest bots sometimes spent a queen or jack there when the ace or ten would have won just the same.

A club can choose whether the picker may blitz recrack.

Every table lets the picker or the partner answer a crack with a blitz recrack, as get61 and sheepshead.org allow. Some groups play that the picker blitzes on the pick or not at all. A club owner can now set Blitz recrack to Partner only on the club card, and new tables for that club play it that way.

Offline games now play the same rules as the tables online.

Rules added to online play over the summer never reached offline play, so an offline game was quietly using older rules. Among them: the picker keeps a card of the called suit, one crack per hand, a partner may recrack, recracks go in turn, one blitz per player, the card under is face down and can be led, and the defense is schneidered under 30. Offline and online now read the same list, and a test fails if they ever drift apart. A game already in progress finishes under the rules it started with.

A blitz recrack no longer names a hidden partner in the table chat.

Since August a recrack by a partner nobody had identified yet has been announced as "the picking side", so the chat line cannot give the partnership away. A blitz recrack skipped that rule and still named the player, which told the table who the partner was before a card was played. It now follows the same rule, and still lists the cards shown.

The end-of-hand score now lights up the side that won, and the table says when the picker is alone.

After each hand the Picking team score was always the highlighted one, whether the picker won or lost and whichever side you were on, which read as if the picking team had won every hand. The highlight now goes to the side that actually won, and your own side is marked "you". Separately, when the picker plays without a partner there was nothing on screen to say so. An ALONE badge now appears beside the called-ace badge: for everyone once it is public (in call an ace, when the picker declines to call; with the jack of diamonds, once the picker plays the jack), and only for the picker while the jack is still secretly in their own hand, because telling the rest of the table would give the hand away.

Reported by stilts

On a smaller window the hand log starts folded up, to give the side panel room.

The panel on the right of the table holds the score sheet, the last trick, the chat and the hand log, and on a shorter window that is more than fits. The hand log now starts folded on a window under about 760 pixels tall. Folded, its heading still shows the latest thing that happened, and one tap opens it. If you have opened or closed it yourself before, your choice is kept.

The table works better on a phone: more room for the game, no seats on top of each other.

On a phone the top of the table was a stack of five rows of buttons before the cards even started, and your own seat sat on top of the player to your left, hiding their name, the picker badge and their score. The extra controls (bots, speed, the trump reference, invite, watchers, leave now, report a bug) now sit behind a single Table button, which gives the game back most of that space. The side seats moved up so nothing overlaps, the sign-up reminder for guests now appears after the table instead of above it, and a lot of small labels got larger, on every screen size. The status line in the middle of the table, like "blitz / crack window", now sits on a dark background so it reads cleanly over the table logo.

Easier to tap on a phone, and table announcements no longer cover the buttons at the top.

On a touch screen, the links under the logo, the Easy, Hard and Tournament bot buttons, the quick chat messages and the tabs along the top were all small enough to miss with a thumb. They are now full finger size, and nothing changes when you use a mouse. At the table, announcements like "ran out of time" appeared on top of the leave and Table buttons on a phone; they now always appear just below the top of the table, however tall it is.

On a phone, the end-of-hand result no longer covers the score changes of the players beside you.

When a hand ended early because someone laid their cards down, the result box on a phone grew tall enough to cover the players on either side, hiding their score change and badges. On a phone it now shows just the result, the laid cards and the two team scores. What everyone was still holding when the hand was claimed now also appears under Last hand, below the table, on every screen, where it stays until the next hand ends.

On a phone, the coach note after a hand no longer covers the table or your cards.

The note that tells you what a hand cost you used to float over the bottom of the screen on a phone and stay there until you tapped Got it, sitting on top of the other players and then on your cards and buttons in the next hand. On a phone it now appears just below the table, above the Sheet, where it covers nothing. On a computer it still appears in the corner as before.

The buttons at the top of the table are easier to tap on a phone.

Rules, leave after hand, the Table button and everything in the Table menu are now full finger size on a touch screen. The top of the table is a little taller on a phone as a result. Nothing changes when you use a mouse.

Offline solo games no longer freeze in the crack window.

Playing offline against bots, a hand could stop for good at the blitz and crack window: if you had already passed on the blind, there was nothing for you to answer, but the game kept waiting for you anyway. It now passes for you, the same way online tables always have, and the hand carries on.

More buttons and links are easier to tap on a phone.

On a touch screen, Quick match, the leaderboard tabs, the links at the bottom of the page, the Hand log toggle at the table and the buttons on the coach note are now full finger size. Nothing changes when you use a mouse.

Reconnecting after your phone wakes up no longer restarts a connection that was already coming back.

When a phone woke up, two signals could arrive a moment apart, and the second one threw away the connection the first had just started and began again. A connection that is still opening is now left to finish.

If you are the only person at a table and your connection drops, your seat and Sheet wait five minutes for you.

Before, if your phone went to sleep for more than 45 seconds while you were the only person at a table, a bot took your seat and the table cleared its Sheet, so you came back to hand one. Now the seat is held for five minutes, and no new hands are dealt while you are away, so nothing is played in your name. When other people are at the table, the usual shorter hold still applies so nobody is kept waiting.

Sit down, Watch and the table rules buttons are easier to tap on a phone.

On a touch screen, the Sit down and Watch buttons in the lobby, the choices in the Table rules window, Call an Ace, Copy link, the supporter tiers and the small links for your password, ranked hands, prize rules and How to play are now full finger size. Nothing changes when you use a mouse.

Typing on a phone no longer zooms the page in, and the rules and help pages are easier to tap.

On an iPhone, tapping the name or password box, or the chat box at the table, zoomed the whole page in and left it that way. Those boxes now use a size that does not trigger the zoom. On a touch screen, the links along the top of the Rules, Handbook, Fairness and other help pages, their back links, and the filter buttons on this page are now full finger size, and the small New and Fix labels here are a little larger for everyone.

The deal check and Recent hands buttons are easier to tap on a phone, and typing no longer zooms the page.

On a touch screen, Verify deal and recent under Last hand, every Verify button in Recent hands, Close and How this works are now full finger size. The earlier change meant to stop an iPhone zooming in when you tap the name, password or chat box did not take effect; it does now.

The room around the table is a little lighter, and every seat now has a visible edge.

The area around the green table was close to black, and a seat sitting off the table, like the two at the top, had nothing visible around it until it was that player’s turn. The room is now a dim green rather than black, the table still stands out clearly against it, and each seat has a faint light outline so you can always see where a player sits.

You can turn the coach notes back on from the lobby.

If you turned off the short note that appears after a hand, the only way back was hidden in a panel that needed an account. Now, while the notes are off, the lobby shows a card to turn them back on.

Recent hands: step to the next or previous hand, see the hand number, and see a blitz on the pick.

When you open a hand from Recent hands, the bottom of it now has Newer hand and Older hand buttons and a button back to the list, so you can go through an evening without starting over each time. The top of the hand shows its number, and the line that explains the stakes now includes a blitz made as the picker took the blind, which it used to leave out.

A bot that could not bury two plain cards no longer buries a queen.

Under the rule that the picker must keep a card of the called suit, a picker sometimes cannot bury both of its plain cards. When that happened, a bot chose the rest of its bury by points alone, so a three-point queen went under ahead of a low diamond. It now buries its weakest trump and keeps its queens and jacks.

Reported by hkmcd

The last trick plays itself.

When everyone is down to one card there is nothing left to decide, so the table now plays each last card on its own, one at a time, two to three seconds apart, so everyone can see what each player put down. It works the same online and in offline play, and the hand is recorded exactly as if every card had been pressed.

Reported by hkmcd

Any table can now choose how passed-out hands are paid, not just clubs.

When nobody takes the blind the stake doubles for the next hand. There are two fair ways to settle a run of them: compound, where three pass-outs land on one hand at eight times, or one at a time, where they become three hands at double. The same total either way, landing very differently. One at a time was a club setting only, which meant the tables that needed it most could not have it, because the public tables belong to no club. Whoever opened the table now picks it, next to the all-pass and bots controls, and it only appears on tables where a doubler can actually happen. Switching mid-session is safe: anything already carried converts rather than being paid twice or dropped, and if a hand is being played it waits for that hand to finish first.

Reported by hkmcd

Lakefront now plays passed-out hands one at a time instead of compounding them.

Lakefront is the J-diamonds room, and the J-diamonds hand a bot needs before it will pick is a demanding one, so a quarter of deals there end with nobody taking the blind. Compounded, a run of those turns into one enormous hand: three in a row is a single hand at eight times the stake, and the player who happens to be dealt into it wins or loses an evening on one deal. It now plays them one at a time at double instead. Same total, spread across the hands it came from. The other three public rooms still compound, partly because call-an-ace almost never passes out and partly so we can see whether this is actually better before changing everything. Whoever opens a table can switch it either way in the table rules.

The lobby and the table header now tell you how a table pays its doublers.

Lakefront plays passed-out hands one at a time; the other public rooms compound them into one bigger hand. Both read as simply "doubler" in the lobby list and in the header at the table, so two rooms that pay very differently looked identical from the outside, and you could not tell which you were sitting down at until it happened. Both now say "one at a time" when that is the rule. Ordinary compounding tables are unchanged, since that is what a doubler normally means.

Tournament bots blitz when they should, and stop blitzing when they should not.

Two corrections to how the tournament bots double the stakes with their queens and jacks. Showing a blitz as you take the blind: they already showed the black queens every time, but held back on red queens and three jacks half the time, even though showing those wins points too. They now show all three. Blitzing on a crack, which multiplies the hand by four: they were doing it on hands without enough trump to back it up, and at a table of tournament bots more than half of those blitzes were exactly that kind of hand. They now need real trump before they do it. The second change also makes tournament tables a little calmer, because fewer hands balloon to eight times the stake or more.

Reported by hkmcd

On a phone browser, the game now reconnects when you come back to it.

If your phone went to sleep or you switched to another app for more than about half a minute, the site could quietly stop trying to reconnect, and the only way back was to reload. By then a bot might have taken your seat, and if you were the only person at the table your running score was gone too. Our app has always handled this; the website in a phone browser did not. Now, as soon as you come back to the page, it reconnects right away and takes your seat back, as long as the table is still holding it. On a computer nothing changes, because a browser there keeps the connection open while you are in another tab.

You can read a finished trick now, and pick how fast your table plays.

A finished trick used to sit on the table for about two thirds of a second before it was swept away, which on a phone is not long enough to see who played what. It now stays up about two seconds, and a finished hand stays up about four seconds before the next deal. Whoever runs the table can also choose Slow, Normal or Fast next to the bots setting. Slow gives the bots longer to play and leaves every trick and hand up longer still; Fast is how tables played before this change, for anyone who liked it quick.

Reported by Bryan

The chat and hand log no longer draw over each other on a smaller window, and the speed control is on the table.

On a shorter browser window, the chat box on the right could spill its quick-chat buttons and message field down over the hand log, so the words HAND LOG sat on top of what you were typing. The chat now always holds its own contents, the logs get shorter on small screens, and if everything still does not fit the panel scrolls instead of piling up. The buttons on that side were also in a different typeface from the text around them; every button now uses the same one. And the new table speed setting was only inside the rules panel, where nobody looks mid-hand, so it now sits next to the bots setting at the top of the table: tap it to go Slow, then Fast, then back to Normal.

Bots on the J-diamonds tables were passing out the deal far too often.

On a jack-of-diamonds table against our strongest bots, more than a third of deals were ending with nobody taking the blind. Every throw-in doubles the stake for the next hand, so the table would sit there compounding: twice, four times, eight times. One of our club-night players had thirty of his sixty-six hands passed out, and won sixty-four points on a single hand carried to sixteen times the stake, out of seventy for his whole night. That is not a game, it is a lottery for whoever is sitting down at the right moment. The cause was ours. We had tightened how good a hand a bot needs before it will pick, measured it carefully, and only ever measured what it was worth per hand. We never asked how often anybody picks at all, and a deal nobody takes is worth nothing to everybody, so the tightening looked free. Bots now pick a little lighter when everyone before them has already passed, which is what a good player does and which cuts the pass-outs by a third. It is better on the scoreboard too. We are not finished: the rate is still higher than we want, and the next question is whether the doubling should stop climbing sooner.

A run of passed-out hands now stops doubling at eight times, not sixteen.

When nobody takes the blind the stake doubles for the next hand. That used to keep climbing to sixteen times before starting over. Sixteen was set back when pass-outs were rare, and they stopped being rare: one of our club-night players had thirty of his sixty-six hands passed out, and won sixty-four points on the one hand where the doubling peaked, out of seventy for his whole night. Nobody should win or lose an evening on a single deal they happened to be sitting for. It stops at eight now and rolls back to double. Being straight about the size of this: it halves the worst case, and it does not stop one hand mattering more than the rest, because a crack, a blitz and a schneider on an ordinary hand can still add up to more than a carried one. The paper scorer had the old number too and now matches. If your club would rather spread the doubling out than shorten it, the doubler queue table option plays three pass-outs as three doubled hands instead of folding them into one.

Defending bots stop throwing away the low trump they need later.

When a defender has to follow a trump lead and holds nothing that can win the trick, it has to give one up. It was giving up the cheapest card, which sounds right and is backwards: the only trump worth no points are the low diamonds, and those are exactly the cards that still win a trick late in the hand once the queens and jacks are gone. A middling trump that is already beaten here is beaten later too. So it now spends the strongest card it cannot win with and keeps the little ones. Forcing both plays from the same spot across six thousand hands, the better card is worth about four tenths of a point every time it comes up, and it comes up often. Only the defense changed. The picker pulls trump on purpose and that is a different question we have not measured.

Tournament bots always show the black queens when they pick.

A player asked whether our bots ever blitz on three trump, and answering it turned up something we had never looked at. There are three ways a blitz happens and we had only ever measured the rarest of them, one that comes up about five times in twenty thousand hands. The common one is showing your queens as you take the blind, and whether a bot did that was decided by a coin weighted off how readily it cracks. That had it backwards: the most cautious bots showed least, so a bot holding the two black queens kept quiet more often than a reckless one did. Showing both black queens is worth about four points a hand every time it comes up, and the bots were doing it two times in five. Tournament bots now show every time. The mixed bots on Hard tables keep the old behavior on purpose, because a table where every seat plays its cards the same way stops feeling like different people.

Reported by hkmcd

Bots pass more four-trump hands at jack of diamonds.

The picking grid the WAC Pack gave us said four trump was worth taking at jack of diamonds with a modest amount of strength in them. We measured that when it arrived and it held up, but we measured it against one kind of bot. Rerun against the strongest bots we have, the ones that never misplay a card, a four-trump hand at that strength loses about three and a half points a hand, and the bots were picking it. The line has moved up: four trump now needs a queen and two jacks, or better, before a bot will take the blind in that game. It picks about a third less often there, and the hands it gives up were the losing ones. Worth two points about how we test rather than how we play: a grid can be right against the opponents you tested it on and wrong against better ones, and a table of what a whole class of hand is worth does not tell you where to put the line inside it. Called ace is unchanged, where the same test says our lines are already in the right place.

Hand events move out of the chat into their own Hand log.

The banner events belong somewhere you can read them back, which is why they were put in the chat room in the first place. The trouble is that a hand writes a separator and a "picks it up" whether or not anybody speaks, so across an evening the table wrote two lines a hand and the people wrote almost none, into a box that shows about five. At hand 42 one message from a player sat under eighty lines of bookkeeping. They now have their own log directly under the chat, with its own scroll, so neither can bury the other. It can be collapsed, and collapsed it still shows the most recent line beside its heading, which was the point of keeping them. Nothing is dropped and the chat is now only what people said.

The Hand log heading no longer prints through the message box.

The chat reserves a strip of space at the bottom so the mute and four-color buttons never sit on top of the input. That reserve was attached to the chat itself, and the chat is capped at a share of the rail, so once the Hand log arrived underneath it the reserve pushed the chat past its own cap and the log heading was drawn straight through the message box. The space now belongs to whichever panel is actually last.

Click somebody’s name at the top of the page to sit down with them.

The line above Play Now names who is on and where they are, and that was as far as it went: to actually join somebody you had to read the name, scroll past the fold to the table list, find their room and press its button. The name is now the way in. It only becomes a button when there is somewhere for you to go, which means a room you are allowed to see with either an open seat or a bot to replace, so a name never offers something it cannot deliver. Somebody standing in the lobby, or at a table that is genuinely full of people, is still just a name.

The lobby line no longer says people are somewhere they are not.

When more people were on than the line could name, it counted the rest as "and 2 more" and let them share the verb with everybody it had named. So with three players talking in the lobby and a fourth already at a table it read "and 1 more are in the lobby", which was simply untrue of that player. The shared wording is now only used when it is true of everyone it covers.

Players have a rating, shown beside the name.

A number that moves is something to play for when nobody you know is on, which is the one thing this site has never offered a lone player. It is built on points, not on wins: sheepshead settles zero-sum, so the average across everybody is exactly 1000 and the field centers itself. A hand counts toward it when it was a real test, meaning the five-handed game against opposition that was not the easy bots. It does not care whether the room was public or how many people were in it, because on this site most hands are somebody sitting alone and a rating that ignored those would have been blank for the players who play the most. Easy bots never count, so it cannot be farmed. New players are pulled toward the middle until they have a real record behind them, and a rating with a question mark after it is one we do not have enough hands to stand behind yet. No ranked hands at all means no rating, rather than a made-up average.

Tournament bots go back to playing their own cards.

At tournament difficulty the card play was handed to a search that thinks ahead by playing the hand out many times. It was meant to be the stronger option and it is not: watching a real table, it overruled the ordinary bot on 28 plays in ten minutes, and a player reported the result from the other side of the screen, a defending bot leading trump six times in ten hands. One of those hands is in our archive, so we could replay it. The defender held three fail cards including an ace and led the queen of trump, and the hand went 72-48 to the picker where the defense should have taken it 40-80. Handed the same position again with ten times the thinking, the search still likes the queen, so this is not it being unlucky, it is it being wrong. Tournament tables now play the same cards the hard bots do, which is the play those hands should have had. Reported by a player who tested ten hands and sent the replay.

Reported by hkmcd

Bots pick a little lighter on the end at call an ace.

Until now the bots decided whether to pick from their cards alone. Where they were sitting never entered into it, which is odd, because every book on the game says it should: pick lighter when the seats before you have already passed. So we measured it, by taking real hands and forcing the same seat to both pick and pass from the same spot, thirty thousand deals a game. Position is worth one to two points a hand at the margin, and the effect runs the same way in both games: the later you sit, the better the same hand plays. Three trump at call an ace is a clear pass in the first three seats and turns positive on the end, which is exactly what the old-timers tell you. So at call an ace the bots now need one point less to pick once three players have passed. At jack of diamonds we tried the same thing and it measured nothing, twice, so nothing changed there. Worth saying plainly: this is the same word that measured HARMFUL earlier this week when we asked whether position should affect cracking. It matters for one decision and not the other, which is why we test them separately instead of adopting a rule because it sounds right.

Tournament bots stop leading trump on defense early in a call an ace hand.

A player tested ten hands and reported a defending bot leading trump six times, with a replay of one of them: the bot held three fail cards including an ace, led the queen of trump on the second trick, and a hand the defense should have taken 40-80 went 72-48 the other way. He was right. The hand was in our archive, so we could put the same position back to the bot and watch it make the same choice, then force both leads from that spot across three thousand hands to see what the choice was actually worth. Leading trump there costs about a quarter of a point a hand, and only in call an ace, and only in the first four tricks. On the last trick it is usually the right play, so it is left alone. Tournament bots now hand that particular lead back to the ordinary bot, which knows to cash a fail ace instead. Measured before shipping: it is worth about a twentieth of a point a hand on top of everything else those bots do, not a trade against it.

Reported by hkmcd

The front page names who is on, instead of counting them.

The top of the page used to say something like "2 playing now". It has said who is here by name for a while, but only down in the Who’s on panel on the right, and the page is several screens long with Play Now at the top of it. Play Now deals you a hand against bots straight away, so a returning player was seated before the list of names was ever on screen. Yesterday two members were on the site inside the same two minutes and never saw each other: one had been sitting in the lobby for over two hours, the other signed in, played four hands alone and left. The line up top now says who they are and where, "hkmcd is looking for a game", and clicking it takes you to the list. It also stopped saying "playing" about people who are sitting in the lobby not playing.

The table tells you WHO is in the lobby, and lets you call them over.

Sitting alone with bots, there was already a line saying how many people were on. It counted everybody: signed-out visitors browsing the front page, and players already sitting at other tables. So "4 others are on right now" could be four people, not one of whom you could actually play with, and it named none of them. It now names the people who are genuinely standing in the lobby and says whether they have asked for a game, and it does not claim anybody is looking for one unless they pressed the button that says so. There is also a way to answer it. The only button used to be Invite, which copies a link and then needs somewhere to paste it; the new one posts a single line into the lobby room saying where you are sitting and that the other seats are bots. Once a minute, and only for a table the lobby can actually see, since a private room cannot be joined from there.

One list of who is on, at the top, instead of two.

The front page said who was on twice: once in the line above Play Now and again in a Who’s on panel a screen and a half further down. Reported as redundant, and it was. The panel is gone. The two things in it that were not a second copy of the same names have moved up beside the line: Quick match, and the button that tells the room you are looking to play. Starring somebody now happens on their name where you read it, and they still turn up under Your people. The one thing lost is the weekly form column, which read "no ranked hands" next to almost every name anyway, because ranked hands only happen during an event.

The host badge is readable again, and Invite says what it does.

The dealer button is nearly white and the seat plates are three-quarters transparent, so wherever the puck came to rest behind a plate it shone through the gold "host" badge and left it unreadable. That badge is solid now. The button beside "Ask them over" is also called "Copy link" rather than "Invite": one speaks to the people standing in the lobby, the other puts a link on your clipboard for somebody who is not here, and two buttons that both read as an invitation told you nothing about which was which.

Clicking a card twice on a slow connection no longer stacks refusals.

Nothing on the felt was optimistic: a card only moved once the server answered, so on a slow link the card you clicked looked untouched and the natural thing to do was click it again. Every extra click was a second play for a turn that had already moved on, and each came back as another error across the middle of the table. A clicked card now marks itself straight away, the same card is only sent once per turn, and a repeated message refreshes the one already on screen instead of stacking under it.

The Sheet was blanking the whole column of anyone who joined a long table.

Take a bot’s chair at a table that has already played twenty hands and the Sheet showed a dot for every hand, including the ones you had just played and scored. Blanking the hands from before you sat down is deliberate, so that a bot never inherits somebody’s night, but it worked out which hands those were by comparing two numbers counted from different places: one from the first hand the table ever played, the other from the twenty most recent hands you are actually shown. Under twenty hands they agreed. Past twenty, everyone seated since the start kept their numbers and everyone who joined later lost the lot. Reported by a player who had taken a seat around hand 41 and played a dozen hands.

No more waiting for the bots to finish before you can sit down.

On a table that keeps itself warm with bots, arriving used to mean watching the robots play out whatever hand they were in the middle of, with no idea how long that would take. Now you are dealt in straight away and the bot hand is dropped, which costs nothing: nobody was playing in it and it counted for nothing. This only happens when the table has no people at it. The moment a real person is sitting there, nobody gets lifted out of a hand they are in, and a second arrival waits their turn exactly as before.

The bots look at what their trump are, not just how many.

Four low diamonds and four trump with two black queens used to be the same hand to a bot: it counted four and picked. The WAC Pack sent back a grid that scores the trump instead, using the same queens-three, jacks-two, everything-else-one count we already use for schwanzers, and now four bare trump is a pass. We measured it both ways over 30,000 hands per variant before turning it on, and it is worth about nine hundredths of a point a hand at jack of diamonds and a quarter of that at call an ace. The two games get different lines on purpose: at call an ace the picker gets to choose a partner, so the same thin hand is a better bet there than at jack of diamonds, where the jack might be buried or in your own hand. The loose personalities are untouched. A bot called The Gambler that starts passing is not a gambler.

Bots take a trick worth four points now, not ten.

A tournament bot used to let a trick go unless there were ten points in it, and we told the WAC Pack that was measured. It was not measured well: the numbers behind it came from a couple of hundred hands with no margin of error. Howie pushed back, saying a player should take tricks when they can because having the lead is worth something. So we ran it again over forty thousand hands a game, and between four and nine points it is a dead heat, not a loss. Where the cards say nothing we now do what he does and take the trick. Below four it still measures slightly against, which matches the plain instinct that a trump is too much to spend on a trick worth nothing.

Bots show a blitz more readily at call an ace.

The WAC Pack called our blitz rule very conservative: the bots would only show with five or more trump. They were right, and only about their own game. At call an ace four trump is now enough, which measures out at about a quarter of a point per hundred hands, and going down to three adds nothing on top. At jack of diamonds nothing we tried beat five, so it stays there. It is the same split we found in picking, and for the same reason: a call an ace picker gets to choose a partner, so a shorter hand carries a doubled stake better than it does when the jack decides for you.

The coach speaks up more than twice as often, and is right when it does.

The coach was staying quiet on nearly every hand it watched, and it turned out to be a measurement mistake rather than good manners. It weighs your card against the best one by playing the hand out many times, and it was treating those two estimates as though they came from separate experiments. They do not: it plays the SAME imagined hands for every card you could have chosen, so most of the uncertainty is the luck of the deal and that luck is identical on both sides. Counting it twice set the bar so high that almost nothing cleared it. Comparing them properly, hand by hand, it now speaks on about one decision in twenty rather than one in forty. We checked the new advice against a search ten times deeper before shipping it: seven in eight of the new calls hold up, and we deliberately set the bar higher than the arithmetic requires, because a coach you argue with twice is a coach you switch off.

A quiet lobby now tells you what to do instead of showing you four zeros.

The four rooms that are always open are the point of having them, but on a quiet evening the list printed "0 players" four times down the page, which reads as abandoned rather than as open. Same seats, said the other way round: an empty room now says "5 seats open". And when nobody else is on, the line under the wordmark says so and points at Play Now, which deals you a hand against the bots straight away. It used to say nothing at all below two players, which is exactly backwards, because a busy site needs no help and somebody arriving at an empty one does.

Sit down at a public table and the bots take the other seats.

You used to sit down to "waiting for 4 more players" and a button, which on a quiet night is a dead end: most of the time there was nobody else online to wait for. Now the seats fill themselves about twenty-five seconds after you arrive and the hand deals. It waits that long on purpose, so that three of you turning up together find each other instead of a table of replacements, and if the table fills with people first the bots never appear at all. Anyone arriving later just takes over a bot seat, the same as always. Private tables and club tables are left alone, because those are groups waiting for their own people.

The table tells you why a card is grayed out.

JC Conway was the picker, had called the ace of hearts, and on trick 2 wanted to lead his nine of hearts. The game would not take it and said nothing, so he moved on. The rule was right: when you call an ace you keep one card of that suit back until the suit is led or the last trick, which is a rule the WAC Pack asked for themselves. What was missing was the sentence. Tap a grayed card now, or hover it, and the table says exactly which rule is holding it and when the rule lifts. It covers all of them, not just that one: following suit, surrendering the called ace, holding the called ace, the card under.

The table tells you when somebody else is on.

If you are the only person at your table and another human is online, you now get a quiet line saying so, with a button to send them the link. Before this, the "playing now" count only existed back in the Clubhouse, so once you sat down you stopped being told. We looked before building it: over 60 days, of the hands played by one person against bots, the overwhelming majority had genuinely nobody else online, and only a small slice had somebody playing at another table at the same time. That slice is what this is for. It only appears when you are the only human at the table, and never otherwise.

The picker can lead the called suit whenever they like.

JC Conway was the picker, had called the ace of hearts, and could not lead his last heart. We said that was the rule. Howie then told us the rule itself was wrong: "that must have been a mistake in what we gave you, the picker can lead the called suit fail any time." He is right, and the game already knew it one rule over, where the partner cannot throw the called ace away but can certainly lead it. Leading the suit drags the ace out, which answers the call rather than dodging it. So leading is free now. What stays is that the picker cannot THROW their last card of that suit onto somebody else trick, because that is the move that breaks the call.

The supporter badges are called FRIEND, PATRON and CHARTER now.

They used to be VIP, GOD and DIVINE, which read like a game server rather than a card club, and sat oddly next to the line beside them promising the badges are cosmetic and never pay-to-win. The new names say the same thing in the language of a club: somebody who comes by, somebody who chips in, and somebody who was here early and keeps it free for the rest of us. Nothing else changes. The tiers cost the same, they still buy nothing but a badge, and everyone who already had one keeps it at the same level. Regular was the first choice for the bottom tier and had to be dropped: it is already the badge for a player who has put a hundred hands through, and one word cannot mean two things on the same seat.

The front page says what this is before it says what it refuses.

It used to open with "no chips, no ads, no nonsense", which is true and is the wrong thing to lead with: it tells you what we will not do before it tells you why you might want to be here. Three lines now, in the order a stranger needs them. What this is, the online home table for sheepshead. Then what it promises, which is your group, your rules, your table. Then how it is paid for, which is not at all. Free forever, and no signup is spelled out because Club can read as members-only or as something you have to apply to, and it is neither. A guest can sit down and play without an account, exactly as before.

The mark is the queen of clubs now, not just a club.

The highest card in the game, and it took three tries to get it onto the emblem. A gold Q was drawn on top of the club once before and pulled, because it bulged past the lobe and made the mark read as a club with something stuck to it. This one is cut OUT of the gold instead, so the outline is exactly the club it always was and nothing can stick out of it. It also only appears where there is room for it: the big crest on the front page and the app icon on your phone. The little club in the table header and the one in your browser tab stay plain, because a letter that small is a smudge.

The Wednesday event is called Club Night, and there is a Handbook now.

It was Wednesday Night Schmear, which still carried the old name of the site into the one thing we say out loud every week. The day is on every listing anyway, so the weekday was not earning its place in the title. Trophies already won keep the old name on them, because that is what the night was called when they were won. The Handbook is new: every page we have written, all twenty-one of them, gathered on one contents page instead of being reachable only by stumbling across a link mid-sentence. It is in the top row next to Rules. The lobby is the Clubhouse now, which is what it always was.

You can actually read the logo on the felt now.

It was set at five percent white, which on a green table is not a faint mark so much as an absent one. It is three times that now, and more importantly it is lit from two sides instead of one: a dark edge above the letters and a pale one below, so the wordmark reads as pressed into the cloth instead of smeared onto it. Still quiet enough to sit under the cards, which is the whole job.

The queen is on the mark everywhere now, and you can read her on the felt.

The Q was only on the big version of the logo. The small ones, the browser tab and the little club up in the table header, were a plain club, on the reasoning that a letter that size is a smudge. True about the letter, wrong about the logo: a mark that changes depending on where it turns up is two marks. Same club, same Q, same proportions, everywhere. On the felt the whole watermark has been turned up again, and this time enough that the queen actually reads instead of hinting. The felt mark also keeps its gold now rather than being washed halfway to gray, which was flattening her tail into her ring and making her read as an O. Also: a couple of bot descriptions were long enough to wrap onto a second line and make one seat look taller than the rest, so they have been trimmed.

Bots no longer pick on two trump.

Howie caught The Judge picking on the ace of clubs, ten of spades, ace of hearts, seven of diamonds, queen of diamonds and eight of clubs. At call an ace that is two trump and a pile of points with no way to win a trick, and the picking side took 22 and paid double. It was not a glitch: the bots were allowed to gamble on a hand two trump short of their threshold about one time in twenty. We forced both choices from that exact spot across thousands of deals and picking two short loses every time, even holding two queens. So it is gone. Picking ONE short with two queens measures out positive and stays, because that one is real sheepshead.

The lobby stops calling long-standing players new.

Beside each name in the lobby list there is a little number: how you are doing over the last seven days. When there was no number to show, the space said "new this week", and it was never a check on when anybody joined. It is what appears when you have played no ranked hands in the last seven days, which is a strange thing to tell a player who has been here since the spring. It now says what it means. Worth knowing what counts: a ranked hand needs a public table, an account, and the bots set to Hard or Tournament, so a week of practice hands or club nights leaves that space empty and always did.

Reported by hkmcd

A mistyped address says so, instead of quietly loading the game.

Any address that was not a real page used to hand back the game itself, and report success while doing it. For somebody following a stale link to a table that has closed, that is confusing rather than helpful, and search engines count it against the site. There is a real page now that says the room is gone and points at the rules, the glossary and the score sheet. Nothing that worked before stopped working: the game is addressed after the # in the bar, which never reaches the server. A few corners of the site were also still calling themselves by the old name, including the browser tab while it was your turn.

A page for each way the game is dealt, plus how to teach it and how to run a tournament.

The variants page was a map, which is the right length for a map and the wrong length to be the page you land on when you search for how call an ace works. There are now pages for the five handed game, three handed and cutthroat, the jack of diamonds partner, call an ace including the awkward corners of calling a ten and the card under, and what happens when nobody picks. Two more for the people beside the table: a plan for teaching somebody their first night, and the decisions you have to make to run a tournament. The variants page keeps everything it had and now links down to them. While writing them we noticed the schwanzer, which the tables have dealt for weeks, was missing from the rules page and from the list of what we support. Both fixed.

The coach can tell a ten from a king.

Asked to choose between a four point king and a ten point ten with its own side holding the trick, the coach rated them identical. Not close: identical, and it stayed identical when we let it think twenty times harder. The reason was what it was measuring. It judged a play only by who ends up winning the hand, and winning is a threshold at 61 points, so six points that do not carry you across that line never showed up in the answer at all. It now counts the card points your side finishes with, weighted small enough that it can only ever break a tie: it can choose between two plays the score cannot separate, and can never talk you out of the play that actually wins. Bots also stop shedding a trump when a worthless fail card would do, which was never a decision anybody made, just an accident of how the cards happened to sort.

Reported by hkmcd

The picking side no longer throws aces and tens into tricks the defense can still steal.

Before committing points to a trick your own side is winning, a bot checked whether an opponent still had to play. It asked that question correctly from a defender's chair and did not ask it at all from the picker's or the partner's, where the players who can steal are the defenders. So the picking side gave points away. Over four thousand deals it happened 611 times, and the defense took the trick in 43% of them, against zero from the defender's chair. There are two decision trees in this game and we had written one. Both are there now, and when the bot cannot tell whose side a seat is on, because the partner has not shown yet, it treats them as an opponent and keeps its points.

Reported by hkmcd

One of the two bot mistakes we said we had fixed was not a mistake.

A player sent us a shared hand with two plays he thought were wrong, and we wrote back saying both were bad and both were fixed. Measuring them properly says otherwise. On the second one, a defender kept a ten back instead of throwing it onto a trick her own side had already won. That is a bad habit in general and we would still tell you not to do it, but in THAT hand she was holding her last two cards and both remaining tricks were going to her own side, so the two orders of playing them settle to exactly the same score. It cost nothing. The first play is a genuinely open question rather than a settled bug: trumping in wins that trick every single time, and still comes out slightly worse in the long run, because a teammate takes it anyway in a good share of hands and winning it forces you to lead the next one from a weak hand. We had convinced ourselves otherwise by playing the hand out with all five hands face up, which is hindsight the player at the table did not have. Chasing his report did find two real bugs, both below, and neither was the one he pointed at.

Reported by hkmcd

Your own played card is no longer hidden behind your player box.

On a shorter window the played cards rang out far enough to land on top of your own area, and your area won, so the card you had just played was covered up. There was none of this at 1920 by 950, twenty pixels of it at 1536 by 760, and fifty-seven pixels of an eighty-four pixel card at 1280 by 640. It bit hardest exactly when it mattered most: badges for picker, partner and dealer make your box taller, so the player whose card was worth looking at was the one most likely to have it hidden, which is also why a "card under" label sitting on that card could not be read. On a short window the ring of cards now sits tighter and the cards come down a size. Reported by a player who worked around it by zooming out, which enlarges the window and is the same fix by hand.

Reported by hkmcd

The table is told when a card goes under, as it happens.

Calling an ace into a void announced itself, but the card actually going under happens at the bury, and the bury said nothing: no banner, no line in the log. On a called ten, where the ace is forced under and there is no "with a card under" call to hear, the table was told nothing at all and found out when it was played. It now announces at the moment it happens, and never says which card, because knowing one is there and not what it is IS the mechanic.

Reported by hkmcd

Bots read a card-under trick correctly, and a loose bot no longer hands you points.

Two players reported the same hand: a defending bot held the ace of diamonds with no hearts, twenty-five points were sitting in a trick the picker’s partner had taken, and it threw the ten of spades into it instead of trumping. Two things were wrong. Bots worked out who was winning a trick from the suit printed on a card under, rather than the suit it is committed to, so at a card-under table they were reading the wrong trick entirely; the rules were fine, the bot’s picture of them was not. And the "loose" temperament was a uniform random legal card, which is not looseness, it is randomness: it could throw a ten into an opponent’s trick. A loose bot still misplays, still fails to trump, still picks the wrong low card. It no longer makes you a present. Measured over 20,000 hands, defenders gain about a twentieth of a point a hand.

Reported by hkmcd

The card that led a trick is marked on its square, not on its edge.

Third report on this one. It was a soft green rule under the card, then a dark one, and it still was not landing. The reason was not the shade: the rule was drawn along the bottom EDGE of the card, which is exactly where a card already has a border and a shadow, so the eye read it as part of the chip rather than as a mark on it. The lead now sits on a pale square with a bar down its left side. Different place, different shape and different color from the gold ring that means "took the trick", because a card can be both. It also turns out one of the two grids still had the original faint green rule, so which view you were looking at changed how visible it was. Both match now.

Reported by hkmcd

A hand can no longer stop dead waiting for somebody who has nothing to answer with.

On a practice table dealt with the card under, a player was left waiting to crack or not, forever. The cause was narrow and complete: those tables run without a clock so that nothing plays itself while you think, and the doubling round could put the turn on a seat that had no legal answer to give. A human saw no buttons, a bot had nothing to send, and the hand simply stopped. Nobody may now be asked a question with no answers, and a test walks real card-under hands to make sure the question always has one. It only ever bit the practice tables, because a normal table has a clock that moves the hand along.

Reported by hkmcd

The event now warns you before it starts, and the felt counts down.

Every warning an event had pointed at the END of the window: nothing told you one was about to begin except the "it is LIVE" line at the moment it did. Last night that line went out to an empty room. Somebody had been playing for over an hour and left three minutes before seven, with no clock anywhere on their screen, and the one player who came for the event arrived two minutes after the announcement had been made. There are now 15 and 5 minute calls before a window opens, and they reach you at a table rather than only in the lobby. In the last half hour a chip on the felt counts down beside your cards. If we boot or miss a tick past one of those marks it stays quiet rather than telling you 15 minutes when you have 3.

Reported by a player

The picker can lead the called suit again once it has been answered.

The picker has to keep a card of the suit they called until that suit is led, so the two of them actually meet on it. The rule was checking whether the suit was being led on THIS trick, so it never ended: the suit came out, the picker answered it, and he was still barred from leading it for the rest of the hand. Reported on a called-ten hand, where the ace had already gone under and been surrendered, and the picker was then refused his last club when he wanted to lead it and pull trump. Two things changed: the rule now stops once the call has been answered, and it holds back only your LAST card of that suit rather than every copy, so holding two you may spend one.

Reported by Doctor DNA

A card played from under is marked as one on the table.

A card under is committed to the CALLED suit, not the suit printed on it, so an eight of spades laid under a called-hearts hand is a heart for the whole trick. On the felt it just looked like a spade, which made the trick read as a spade lead while everybody followed hearts. It now carries a dashed gold edge and the words "card under" while it sits on the table, and it is marked the same way in the trick grid when you read the hand back afterwards. Reported by a picker who deliberately led his own under card to see whether it would say so.

Reported by hkmcd

A club can work pass-outs off one at a time instead of folding them together.

Until now three hands passed out in a row folded into ONE hand worth eight times, which lands a whole run of bad luck on whoever happens to pick next. A club can now choose to queue them instead: three pass-outs make three hands at double, one after another, which is the same doubling spread across the hands it came from. It is on the club card under Tonight we play, owner only, and it is off everywhere else, because every table that did not ask for it should keep playing the rule it always has. The queue stops at four so a freak run of passes cannot leave a tail of doubled hands long enough to bend a whole night. Asked for by a club that plays it this way at the kitchen table.

Reported by hkmcd

The "card under" label rides on the card instead of under it.

It sat below the card, like the name of whoever took the trick. That name is deliberately hidden for the bottom-center seat because it would print over your own player box, and the new label had no such guard, so the picker (the one player certain to be looking for it) was the one player likely to have it covered. It is now printed across the bottom of the card itself, where it cannot collide with anything.

Reported by hkmcd

A club can keep a played card under secret from everyone but whoever takes the trick.

Three ways to handle this were put to us and a club voted for the middle one: the card goes into the trick face DOWN, and only the player who gathers that trick ever turns it over. Nobody knows while the trick is still being played, because nobody has taken it yet, and it stays that way after the hand ends, since the taker was the only one who ever saw it. The picker knows throughout, having laid it. Owner-only on the club card; everywhere else a played card under is face up like any other card. Worth knowing before you switch it on: its POINTS still count toward the trick, so somebody keeping the count can often work out what it was anyway.

Reported by hkmcd

Club owners can decide whether a recrack names who gave it.

It is on the club card, under Tonight we play. Off means the table hears "the picking side", which keeps the partner secret in a called-ace hand. On names them, which is what a group that plays face to face and can see who spoke asked for. It was previously something you had to write in and ask us to set, and it was tangled up with the crack window, so a club could not have the live window and keep the partner hidden. Those are two different questions and they now have two different switches. It applies to the next table you open, not one already running.

Reported by a player

You can show one of your hands to your club.

Recent Hands has a Share button on each of your own hands. Your club is told in the lobby room, with a link, and there is a Copy link button so you can send it in a text message instead. Anything shared also sits under "Shared with your clubs" in Recent Hands. The link is not a key: it opens the hand for people in the club and nobody else, so forwarding it outside gets the same refusal as a stranger guessing. It stays inside the club: there is no public link, and the hand still disappears on the same seven-day clock as the rest of your archive, so sharing does not keep it alive any longer. Only YOU are named on a hand you share. The other four people at that table did not press anything, so they read as seat numbers, and the replay is watched from your chair rather than pretending to be theirs. You can take it back down at any time, and so can the club owner.

Reported by a player

We now count how often the coach is switched off, and we say so.

A player told us the coach was "true but not useful". That is worth acting on, and we could not, because switching it off was saved in your own browser and nowhere else, so we had no idea whether two people had done it or two hundred. We now keep a plain daily count: how often the coach spoke, and how often somebody turned it off. A count is a day, a name and a number. It carries no account, no hand and no session, so it cannot say who did anything. The fairness page has been updated to say this, because a new thing we keep belongs there.

Reported by a player

The line under the card that led is dark enough to see.

It was a soft green rule on a cream card, which measured about 3 to 1 against the background. It is drawn in the same ink as the card now, and thicker, which measures about 15 to 1. Reported twice by the same player before we measured it properly, which is on us.

Reported by a player

A leaster now shows what everyone took, not just the winner.

In a leaster the whole table is racing the same number, so one score never told you how close it was. Both the recap after the hand and Recent Hands now list every player. Hands you already played are included: the counts are worked out again from the hand itself rather than looked up, so nothing was lost by us adding this late.

Reported by a player

Badges say what happened: CRACKED, RECRACKED, BLITZ CRACKED.

They appear after the event, so the old present tense read as a question you might still be answering. The buttons you press are still "Crack!", because those are things you are choosing to do.

Reported by a player

Answering a crack no longer tells the table who the partner is.

When somebody cracked, the chat named whoever answered. If that was the picker it told you nothing you did not know. If it was the PARTNER, it gave away the one thing a called-ace hand is built to hide, before a card was played. It now says "the picking side" until the partner comes out anyway. Found by a club playing with five people at the table, and it had been true on every table for months.

Reported by a player

The called suit is a badge now, not a word in the header.

It was gold text sitting among a dozen other things in the bar, which is findable rather than obvious, and the called suit is what everyone at the table keeps asking about. It has a ring in the matching suit color and the card itself is set half again as large.

Reported by a player

A club can play cracking as a live window instead of a round of questions.

With this on, nobody is asked anything. A window opens the moment the picker calls an ace and closes the instant the first card is led, and any eligible opponent can crack whenever they like inside it. Crack late and the picking side may never get its answer in; lead fast and you can squeeze the window shut. Both are the point. It is off by default and switched on per club, for a group that plays this way at the kitchen table.

Reported by a player

The hand grid rings the card that took each trick.

Last hand has always put a gold ring round the winning card. The bigger grid in Recent Hands made you read the row underneath to work out who took what, so it now marks the card the same way. The lead is underlined, the take is ringed.

Reported by a player

The hand recap shows how the stakes got there, and the cards read like cards.

How this hand went now names every double in the hand and multiplies them out, so a hand that paid eight times the stake says why instead of leaving you to work it backwards. The trick grid uses the same white card chips as Last Hand, with the lead underlined rather than just slightly larger. And big print has a bigger suit under the rank.

Reported by a player

Two called-ace holding rules now hold.

Calling an ace is a promise that you and your partner will meet on that suit. Two ways out of it were open: the picker could throw their card of the called suit away early and be void when it was finally led, and a partner could lead that suit small while sitting on the ace. Neither is allowed now. Both are on by default and can be turned off per table, and hands already in the books still replay exactly as they were played.

Reported by a player

The doubling round no longer asks questions out loud.

The CRACK? tag appeared over whoever was on the clock, including players who had passed on the blind and could not crack at all, which read as an option they did not have. Nobody gets a tag in that round now. What actually happens is still announced: a crack, a blitz and a recrack each show up the moment they are made.

Reported by a player

The coach no longer suggests cards you were not allowed to play.

On a called-ace hand the coach could tell the partner they should have thrown the called ace, which is the one card the rules make you hold back, and bill them points for it. It was working out what you could play from follow-suit alone. Sorry to whoever got told off for playing one of their only two legal cards.

Reported by a player

Being asked to answer a crack no longer tells the table who the partner is.

Only the picking side is asked to answer a crack, so the table could see who was being asked and work out the partner before a card was played. That round is now quiet: nobody is named and no badge appears, including over the picker, since hiding it for one side only would give the same thing away. Actually recracking still shows, because that is a real event. The badge also said "crack" when it meant "recrack".

Reported by a player

Play a Hand steps backwards as well as forwards.

A Back button beside Step, so you can go over the moment you are arguing about instead of restarting the hand and watching it all again. It goes back one move at a time, all the way to the deal.

Reported by a player

Bug reports take a PDF, and tell you when a file will not attach.

If you screenshot to a PDF, you can now attach it to a bug report. And if you pick a file we cannot take, it says so instead of doing nothing at all, which is what it used to do. Sorry to whoever hit that: your screenshot never reached us and we could not tell.

Reported by a player

Recent Hands can rebuild every hand again.

Replay refused to rebuild hands where somebody blitzed on the pick, and three-handed hands, saying the hand could not be rebuilt. The hands were always fine and are all still there: the replay was reconstructing them without those two rules. Nothing was lost, and they replay correctly now.

Reported by a player

A sheepshead call you did not make is a loss, even if you lay down.

Call sheepshead and you must take every trick. If you lost one and then laid down the rest, you were being paid as the winner. Fixed. Two other rules were in the same state, applying only when a hand ended one way and not the other: the no-trick partner exemption, and whether the defense is safe at 30 or 31. All three now apply however the hand ends.

Reported by a player

Big print: one large rank on every card.

If the cards are hard to read, press BIG in the bottom right. It follows you everywhere cards appear: the felt, the tutorial, and the hand replay. The rank becomes the biggest thing on the card, with a small suit under it, and everything else on the face gets out of the way. It does not change the colors, so you can take it without switching to the four-color deck. Your choice is remembered on this device.

Reported by a player

The picker or the partner may crack back, including at four times.

Answering a crack belongs to the picking side, either of them. We had the four-times version fenced off from the picker, which was a house preference sitting where the rule belongs. get61: "the picker or partner can crack back to double the current stakes of the hand." sheepshead.org says the same for the blitz version. Tables that prefer the restriction can still set it.

Reported by a player

The printed cheat sheet had the schneider line wrong by a point.

It said "hold the losing side under 31", which is right for the picking side and a point out for the defense: they are schneidered under 30. The code was fixed a week ago and the paper you put on your table was not. The rules page also implied the two thresholds were the same, and the badge guide still described one crack per hand as "each crack doubles again" and the recrack as the picker’s alone. All corrected in a sweep of every page against what the game actually deals.

The way out of a replay says where it goes.

Watching a hand play back put one button on screen, labeled "Back to the lobby". It has taken you back to your own table for a while now, but nobody sitting in a live hand is going to press a button that says it will drop them in the lobby. It now says Back to your table when that is where it goes.

Reported by a player

Your club has one table, not one per person who opens it.

"Open our table" always made a new one, so two members arriving together each opened their own, sat alone in it, and both thought they were at the club table. Neither was wrong; there were two. It now walks you into the one that is already standing, and the button says Join our table when there is one. A second only opens when the first is full.

Reported by a player

A club link takes you to the club’s table, not just its membership.

A room link dies with the room, so a saved invite stops working the moment the table is reopened. A club is the one thing here meant to outlive its table, so the club link is the one worth keeping: follow it and you land at the club’s table, joining the one that is standing or opening it under the club’s own rules and bots.

Reported by a player

A long name can no longer cover the card that seat just played.

A seat plate had a minimum width and no maximum, so a long handle carrying a few badges grew to more than twice its usual size and reached out over the felt. The plate is capped now, the handle is the part that shortens (hover for the full one), and the badges wrap underneath instead of shoving.

Reported by a player

A chair that changes hands starts a new column on the Sheet.

The Sheet was kept per seat, which is right for a seat and wrong for a person: somebody left a live table, a bot took their chair, and the bot inherited their losing night. Now the column starts fresh when the chair changes hands, either way round, and the hands above it are left blank rather than credited to somebody who was not there. A player who only drops for a moment keeps their column: the seat is being held for them and so is their score.

Reported by a player

The lobby no longer names a private table, or where an admin is watching from.

Who’s on took the table name straight off each player, without checking whether you were allowed to see that table. A club’s private room was named to everyone, along with who was in it. Now a table you cannot see reads as "at a table", and an invisible admin observer reads as being in the lobby, which is what invisible has to mean.

The nights ahead show their full names.

The list had been shortening them to "Wed..." and "Brac...", which tells you nothing about the night you are being invited to. Each row now gives the name its own line.

Reported by a player

The suit is back on the Call buttons.

Calling a black ace gave you a button reading "Call A" with nothing after it. The suit was being drawn in gold on a gold button, so it was there and invisible. Red suits happened to survive because they carry their own color. Reported as a truncated button, which is exactly what it looked like.

Reported by a player

Three-handed is picker alone. There is no partner to choose.

A three-handed table was building a partner out of whichever partner rule you picked, which made it two against one with a payment split that could leave the winning partner on nothing. There is no such game: sheepshead.org lists one Three Player Option, "Picker Alone, 2 Against 1", and pagat says "in three-handed games, the picker plays alone against the other two". So at three the picker takes on both defenders and settles with each of them, and the partner setting is gone from the form because it decided nothing.

A three-handed table no longer advertises a partner it will never deal.

The lobby row, the room name, the rules chip, the rules panel, the waiting room, the saved presets and even the little suit badge all still said "J♦ partner" or "call an ace" at three players. They say picker alone now, and the badge is a spade rather than a diamond, because a diamond at three is promising the jack of diamonds.

A club plays on its own felt, with the club name on the table.

Sit down at your club’s table and the name embossed in the middle of the felt is your club’s, not ours. A small thing, but a club table is meant to be somewhere you come back to rather than another room that looks like all the others.

Reported by a player

Longer club names fit on the felt.

A two-word club sat on the felt fine, and anything longer ran across it. The two lines are now balanced rather than split before the last word, and the type is sized to whichever line is longer, so a club name takes up about as much of the table as ours does however long it is.

Reported by a player

Badges stay on your name plate instead of hanging off it.

If you have collected a few badges, they were laid out on one line and whatever did not fit hung out over the felt. They now wrap inside the plate, and past three the rest roll into a small "+2" you can hover to read. Nothing is lost, and your full set is still on your profile.

Reported by a player

Badges take turns instead of crowding your name plate.

If you have collected a few, your rarest badge stays put and the rest take turns in the slot beside it, a few seconds each. Nothing is hidden and the plate stays one tidy size. Badges that matter to the hand being played, picker, partner, dealer, cracks and blitzes, never move and are never tucked away. If your device is set to reduce motion, nothing rotates.

Reported by a player

The badge no longer blinks, and the tutorial has a way back to the lobby.

The rotating badge was re-animating every time the table redrew, which made it flicker rather than rotate; it now changes quietly. At the end of a lesson the buttons were sitting on top of each other, and there was no obvious way back to the lobby. Both fixed.

Reported by a player

Every hand in your list now says what happened in it.

Who picked, what they called, who they had, both sides’ points, the blitzes and cracks, and what everyone scored. Enough to settle an argument days later without opening anything.

Look back at a hand the way you would read it, not the way you played it.

Recent hands now lays a hand out as a grid: everyone down the side, the six tricks across, the card that led each trick bigger and bolder, and who took it for how many. The blind is shown beside the bury, which it never was, and the people are named rather than being "Seat 3". Every hand you have sat at is there for seven days, on any device you sign in from.

Reported by a player

A blitz could double the same queens twice. It cannot now.

Showing a blitz to take the blind, then being asked again after the bury, doubled the hand for one pair of queens and then doubled it again for the same two cards. It lived for one night. Once you have picked, your blitzing is done. Calling all four queens is untouched: that is a promise to take every trick, not a second showing.

The nights ahead, with who is coming, and a button to say you will be.

The lobby listed the next few dates and nothing else, which tells you a date exists and nothing about whether anyone will be there. Every night now shows how many have said they are coming and takes your answer, not just the next one, because groups plan further out than a week. The count matters on our own rules too: the prize does not pay below the field floor, so seeing who is short a week out is what gets a third player to answer.

Replaying an old hand is a door on the front page now, not a small link.

Every way into your hand history was worded as a way to prove the deal was honest, so people who wanted to look back at how a hand was PLAYED concluded we did not offer it. It has been one click away all along. The page now leads with Replay and keeps the fairness check as the second sentence.

Reported by a player

Somebody leaving the lobby disappears from it straight away.

A player who closed their tab while sitting in the lobby stayed listed until something unrelated refreshed the page. It never mattered while the lobby showed only a headcount; it started mattering the day it showed names and said who was looking for a game.

Keep a list of the players you actually play with.

Star anyone in Who’s on and they show up under Your people whenever they are around: in the lobby, looking for a game, or at a table with a Join button beside them. Offline friends stay on the list, because "my crowd is not on tonight" is a real answer and a shorter wait than staring at a lobby hoping.

Pass and play: the whole table on one device.

A group around a kitchen table with one laptop between them is how this game is usually played, and until now we offered them a score pad. Now they can deal. Everyone plays their own hand, the screen is covered between turns and names the person who should pick it up, and any spare seats are filled by the same bots a Hard table uses. Nothing is ranked or recorded, because five people sharing a screen are not five players. Open it from the lobby or go straight to /#/hotseat.

The site now tells you what a hand cost you.

After a hand, a small note in the corner: "trick 4, you were last and your side had it, the ace instead of the seven was worth 11 more." It only speaks about the two mistakes that can be priced exactly, and only when you were the LAST to play, because anywhere else the trick could still have been taken off you and calling that a mistake is hindsight. It also stays quiet until the partnership is public, since failing to feed a partner nobody had revealed is not an error. Turn the note off and it keeps logging: Your leaks, on your sheet, shows what the week has cost you and where. It does not second-guess your pick or your bury.

Cards spelled out in text follow the four-color deck too.

Turning four-color on changed the cards on the felt and nothing else, so the ace of clubs and the ace of spades still looked identical in the replay grid, the hand summary, the called-ace badge and the Call buttons. They all follow the setting now.

Reported by a player

The picking side takes no tricks: the partner shares the loss.

A called-ace partner used to pay nothing when their side took nothing, which meant the picker carried a hand two people lost. Both sides of the partnership now pay, which is how sheepshead.org has it.

Reported by a player

One blitz per hand, one crack per hand, and the recrack goes around the table.

The same cards can no longer double a hand twice. A blitz recrack belongs to the partner, not the picker. Three jacks blitz-crack at four times. And the offer to recrack travels around the table from whoever cracked, rather than going back to the picker first.

Reported by a player

The defense is safe at 30. We had been schneidering them a point early.

The two thresholds are not symmetric and we had treated them as if they were. The picking side needs 31 to be safe; the defense only needs 30, because they are chasing 60 rather than 61. Every schneider scored against a defense here was a point early until now. Hands already in the books still show what they actually paid rather than being quietly rewritten.

Reported by a player

Blitz when you take the blind, not in a round afterwards.

Dealt a blitz and it is a third button beside Pick it up and Pass: show the queens and take the blind in the same breath, at double stakes. No separate round, and nobody who is not holding one is asked anything. There is a hand you can deal yourself from the rules page to try it.

See who is on, say you want a game, or press Quick match and stop deciding.

The lobby knew who was around and only ever told you how many. Now it names them, shows how their week has gone, and lets you raise a hand: everyone else in the lobby is told once, and it stands down by itself after 45 minutes so it is never a lie. Quick match sits you at the fullest table with a free seat, or opens one and puts your hand up.

A chat room in the lobby, so a game can be arranged rather than waited for.

Everyone in the lobby sees it, it keeps a day of conversation for whoever arrives next, and it survives us restarting the site. Read it as a guest; sign in to talk, so a message always has a name behind it.

What just happened is written into the table chat.

Cracks, blitzes, the doubler carrying, somebody reconnecting: a banner is gone in seconds and the thing you want to check is usually what just went past. Hands are separated by a rule in the chat so you can see where one ended.

Reported by a player

One account, one seat, on every table.

Rejoining a private or club table reserved a second seat instead of giving you back the one you were already in, so a refresh could lock you out of your own game. Refreshing now restores every table you had open.

Reported by a player

Coming back from a replay puts you back in your seat.

Reported by a player

A table that no longer exists folds its tab instead of erroring forever.

Reported by a player

Call a ten, and the picker’s own ace is held back.

When the picker holds all three fail aces there is no ace left to name, so a ten stands in. Their ace of that suit must be played on the first lead of the suit and cannot take that trick, so the call actually finds a partner instead of finding nothing.

The card under can be led, like any other card of the called suit.

It counts as a card of the suit that was called, so the picker may lead it and pull the called ace out on their own terms. It still cannot take a trick.

Reported by a player

Your own seat shows your name, so you can see which account you are playing as.

Every other seat at the table showed a name and yours just said "you". Now it shows your name with a small "you" beside it, which matters if you have ever signed in twice and wondered which account you were on.

Reported by a player

One of the Hard bots misplayed more often than an Easy one.

The "sloppy" character dropped about a quarter of its cards, which is worse than one of the easy bots and not what Hard is supposed to mean. It now fumbles about one card in ten, so the whole hard cast plays inside a sensible band.

Tournament bots: the same opponent the coach would be.

A third bot setting, beside Easy and Hard. Tournament seats only the two temperaments that never fumble a card, and they choose their cards the way the coach does, by playing the hand out against the hands you could be holding. Head to head against the old bots they win about three quarters of a point a hand. Set it from the table rules, or once on your club card so your table opens on it every time.

Play Now is on the front page for everyone, not just people who have signed in.

The one thing the front page never offered a first-time visitor was a game: it showed the coach and nothing else unless you had already signed in. Play Now and the coach now sit side by side, the same size, and either one works without an account.

Tables top out at six seats, the tournament table.

Six seats with the dealer sitting out and five playing is where sheepshead stops. The form offered up to nine, where four people would sit out every hand, and nobody had ever played one.

Two links that deal a hand forcing a rare rule, for anyone who wants to try one.

Call a ten and card under almost never come up, because they need the picker holding all three fail aces or the ace of every suit they have cards in. sheepsheadclub.com/#/try/call-a-ten and /#/try/card-under open a private table already dealt the hand that forces the case. These tables are practice: chosen deals never count toward the board.

A card you were not allowed to bury looked exactly like one you were.

Call a ten of a suit you hold one card in and that card has to be kept, but it still looked and behaved like any other, so choosing it left you picking a second card forever while Bury stayed dead and nothing said why. Cards you cannot bury are now dimmed and do not respond.

Look back at how a hand was played, not just whether the deal was fair.

Recent hands has a Replay button beside Verify. It shows who took the blind, what was called, who turned out to be the partner, then every trick: each card, who played it, who took it and for how many points. The hand is rebuilt from the record kept when it was played, so it is what happened rather than a summary written afterwards.

Watch a past hand play itself at the table, from your old seat.

Open a hand from Recent hands and press Watch it play. The table comes back and the hand deals itself out at whatever speed you like, with pause, step and restart, showing what you saw at the time: your own cards, and everyone else’s only as they hit the table. Nothing is clickable, because it already happened.

Removing a player from your own room could stop the hand dead.

If you removed somebody while the hand was waiting on them, a bot took their seat but never played, so the table sat there with nothing to press and no clock running. It affected private and club rooms, where the host can remove anyone at any time. The bot now picks up the hand where they left it.

Picking two cards to bury and finding nothing happened.

The Bury button waits for the whole decision, and with a card under that means a third card face down as well. It sat there grayed, still looking like a button, with the reason in small print beside it. It now says what it is waiting for: "Pick 1 more card", then "Now pick your face-down card", then Bury.

A card laid under no longer follows the suit it came from.

Lay the eight of clubs face down and it is no longer a club: it is waiting for the suit you called. You are void in clubs and free to play anything when clubs is led, and the card comes up when the called suit does. Before this, being led clubs forced it out early. Hands played under the old behavior still replay exactly as they were played.

The rules are in the waiting room, before anybody sits down.

What you are playing tonight is now settled where a group actually settles it: the game, what happens when everyone passes, and the bots, all on the screen you are looking at while you wait for people to arrive. A club table opens on that club’s own rules. The waiting room can also be scrolled, which it could not before, so a rules panel taller than the screen is no longer cut off with no way to reach it.

Bug reports arrived without saying which table or which rules.

Every report came in reading "table ? (?)", because the report was asking for two things the table never sent. It now names the room, the game, the all-pass rule and whether the bots were easy or hard, which is the difference between a report we can act on and one we can only guess at.

The Leasters button on the front page did nothing when you pressed it.

It pointed at Leaster Lane, a room retired at the end of June when all-pass became something you set at your own table. With no room to send you to, the button did not fail, it simply did nothing: no table, no message. Pressing it now deals a leaster hand. The other two buttons would have gone the same way the day every table filled up, so all of them now open a table rather than giving up.

The site no longer scrolls sideways on a phone.

Every rules and reference page ran off the side of a phone screen, because the row of links across the top could not wrap at all. The Sheet also scrolled sideways at the table and cut off the last player’s name.

Your seven days of hands are reachable from the lobby.

They existed but could only be opened from inside a table, which is no use when you want to look up a hand from yesterday. There is now a Recent hands link on Your sheet.

Defenders stopped taking tricks off each other when the picker plays alone.

The bots could not tell "the partner is hidden" from "there is no partner", so on a hand where the picker went alone every defender treated every other defender as a possible partner and played to win against their own side. On a test hand the defense now holds a solo picker to 69 points instead of 96.

Deal verification now marks which hand was yours.

It proved the deck was honest but not that it was YOUR deck: five seats were listed with no way to tell which one you had been sitting in. Your own cards are the one part of that screen you can check from memory, so your seat is now marked.

A bug report with a screenshot and no typing did nothing at all.

Send required text, so attaching a picture and pressing it silently did nothing: no error, no hint, no report. A screenshot is a perfectly good report on its own and now sends by itself. The form also used to close the instant you pressed Send and assume it worked, so a refusal looked exactly like success; it now waits for confirmation and tells you if it did not go through, keeping what you wrote.

Private rooms have a host, and the host can remove people.

Whoever opened the room runs it, and if they leave it passes to whoever has been sat there longest. The host can add bots, remove a player, and change the table rules. On public tables nothing changed: removing someone is still only possible when they are on turn and have gone quiet.

Turn the clock off, switch the game, and fill an empty seat mid-session.

Your own rooms can run with no turn clock, for groups who would rather talk than be hurried; public tables keep theirs so one person wandering off cannot stop the game for four others. J-diamonds and call-an-ace can now be switched at the table like every other rule. And when somebody leaves between hands the table used to simply stop dealing with nothing on screen to explain it: it now says what it is waiting for and offers to fill the seat.

Set your club’s rules, and change them later.

Starting a club quietly captured whatever the table form happened to be set to, so a club could end up playing a different game from the one its members expected, with no way to correct it. The panel now says what it is about to capture, every club card shows what that club plays, and the owner can change it.

Join a club by typing its code, and see who is in it.

Joining used to need the invite link and nothing else, so losing the link meant there was no way in. The code is now printed on the club card to read out, there is a box to type one into, and View members shows who is actually in there.

A club’s table is private to the club, and sits at the top of your list.

Members see their club’s table in the lobby without anyone pasting a room link, and nobody outside the club sees it at all. Any member can open it, not just the founder.

Learn the game by playing a hand with a coach beside you.

A real hand, one step at a time: what trump is, why this hand is worth picking, what to bury and why, and who your partner secretly is. It refuses the moves that would teach you the wrong lesson and tells you why. No account, about three minutes, and the table is the same one you graduate onto.

Schwanzer: nobody picks, and the biggest mauerer pays.

The hand is not played at all. As soon as the dealer passes, every hand is counted for trump, queens 3, jacks 2, any other trump 1, and whoever was sitting on the most of it pays everyone a point. Ties go to the highest trump. Every player’s count is shown, because nobody sees a card in a schwanzer and the count is the only thing you can check the result against. Set it on a custom table under "all pass".

Four standing rooms instead of eight.

Two of the eight had not hosted a single hand in two months while every room sat empty, which makes a site look dead and splits the few people here across doors they have to guess between. Everything those rooms offered is still here through Custom table, which does more than they did.

The called ace says why it will not play.

It is held back for the called suit, and a card that refuses to move with no explanation reads as a broken game. The table now tells you.

Attach a screenshot to a bug report.

Paste it straight into the report. It is emailed to us with the report and stored nowhere.

Your hands follow you for seven days.

Signed in, you can look up a hand you played from any device for a week and check the deal against the commitment published before the cards came out. After seven days the link between you and that hand is dropped and the hand goes back to being an anonymous record. As a guest, nothing is ever linked to you.

See the trick just taken, and every trick before it.

The felt drops the previous trick the moment the next card lands. It now stays in the panel beside the table, with the earlier tricks one click away, and each card numbered with the order it was played.

A moment of lost connection between hands could empty your table.

Your seat was held if you dropped mid-hand, but not in the gap after one finished, which is exactly when people switch tabs. A two-second blip was enough to take the Sheet, the totals and the bots with it while you were still sitting there. Your seat is now held either way.

A site update could interrupt a hand and leave a board that would not respond.

An update went out while a hand was in progress. The player saw their cards and their turn, but the server no longer had that table, so nothing they clicked did anything and no error said why. Updates now wait for every table to finish and refuse to go out while anyone is mid-hand. The check that was supposed to prevent this could only see the public tables in the lobby, and this hand was in a private room, so it reported the site empty.

One link that carries your rules.

Set a table up the way your group plays, copy the rules link, and whoever opens it gets those rules already filled in.

Clubs: your group's rules, its own standings, and a badge you earn.

Start a club, send one link, and your table is somewhere you come back to rather than something you rebuild every week. Standings run alongside the site board rather than replacing it. Once a club can field a full table of five, its badge appears beside its members' names.

Build the table your group plays: three to nine players, either partner rule.

Custom table replaces picking a room off a list. Three-handed and four-handed call an ace now deal properly, and what happens when everyone passes is a setting you change between hands instead of a separate room you had to go and find.

A partner can answer a crack, but still cannot make one.

Cracking is the defense betting against the picking side, so it was never the partner's to make. Answering one is: if the picker declines the recrack, a partner who never had the chance to pick now gets the call.

Card under: call an ace in a suit you hold nothing of.

When you hold the ace of every fail suit you have cards in, there was no legal partner to call and you had to go alone. Now you can call that ace anyway and lay one card face down. That card is the one you must play when the suit is led, which is what lets the rest of the table trust a call made into a void. A table option, off unless you turn it on.

The site moved to sheepsheadclub.com, and you will need to sign in again.

Said out loud, the old name sent people to a different card game: Smear is its own game with its own site, so anyone who heard "play schmear" and typed the obvious thing arrived somewhere else entirely. The new name contains the game. Every old link still works and lands on the same page it always did. Signing in again is unavoidable rather than a fault: your login is stored by your browser against the site's address, so a new address starts empty. If you were signed in, the hands you played came with you.

You cannot lay down on your last card.

Claiming the rest of the tricks when you hold one card is not a claim, it is just the end of the hand.

The game fits a phone properly.

Compact table rows, only the badges that matter to the hand on the felt, no sideways scrolling on narrow screens, and a nav that matches the rest of the site.

A trump cheat sheet at the table, and a printable one for the kitchen.

Trump order and card points without leaving your hand, plus a print kit with a score pad for playing in person.

Players in the United States were being counted as Australian.

Only players whose connection used the newer style of internet address. The lookup we used answered confidently and wrongly for every one of them, so the "where people are playing" figures were quietly wrong rather than missing. Those addresses are now left unplaced instead of guessed.

An old browser now says so instead of showing a blank page.

The site needs a browser from the last few years. Before this, an older one loaded nothing at all and gave no reason, which looks exactly like the site being down.

Event prizes need a minimum field, and the panel says so before you enter.

An event with three qualified players is not a tournament, and paying out as though it were is not honest. The rule is stated up front rather than discovered afterwards, and an unmet prize is not rolled forward into the next event.

The all-pass doubler stops at 16 times and then starts over.

Passed-out hands used to keep doubling the stake with nothing to stop them. A long run of pass-outs could reach numbers nobody wants to settle. It now caps at 16 and rolls back to double rather than sitting at the cap.

The totals row on The Sheet no longer has text showing through it.

Your own column is tinted, and the tint was see-through. With the sheet scrolled, the row passing underneath showed through the total, so two numbers sat on top of each other in exactly the cell you look at most.

The event lock could switch the bots to Hard in the middle of a hand.

Found on the first night of the July 4 festival. When a rush window opened, standing tables locked to Hard bots immediately, including tables with a hand already in progress: the seats you sat down against changed while you were playing them. The switch now waits for the hand to end.

Discord and Facebook links in the footer.

A three-night July 4 festival with a cumulative champion.

Nightly prizes across three nights, plus a separate race decided on total score across all of them, so one bad night does not end your week.

Ranked means the standard game: five seats, or six with the dealer sitting out.

Three and four-handed are real sheepshead and stay playable, but they are different games with different odds, and pooling them into one leaderboard compared scores that were never comparable.

The partner may lead the called ace.

Standard rule, and we had it wrong. Holding the called ace does not stop you leading it.

The bottom player's name collided with their own seat chip.

Text printed over text at the seat nearest you.

One table is always warm, so the lobby is never empty.

Arriving to a room with nobody in it is how a card site dies. There is now always somewhere to sit down immediately.

You can always call sheepshead, and the defense gets a celebration too.

Play now was seating people at three-handed tables.

The quick-play button is meant to put you in the standard five-handed game. It was sending some arrivals to a three-handed table instead, which is a noticeably different game to be dropped into unannounced.

Three and four-handed tables, including three-handed cutthroat.

Six-handed tables, with the dealer sitting the hand out.

Your recent hands are kept so you can go back and check them.

Verify any deal yourself, in your own browser.

Every deal publishes a fingerprint before the cards come out, and the seed afterwards. Verify deal checks one against the other on your machine, without asking us. If the deck had been stacked or reshuffled, the check would fail.

Called ten: when the picker holds all three fail aces, they call a ten instead.

The three-aces rule. Without it a picker holding every ace has nobody to call and the hand has no partner in it.

Event ties break the same way every time, and the rules are printed.

A prize decided by a rule nobody published is not a prize anyone should trust. The tiebreaker is fixed in advance and the conduct terms are written down.

Deploys wait for hands to finish instead of interrupting them.

Updates used to be able to land in the middle of your hand. They now hold until the tables are between hands.

A full year of events, published in advance.

Weekly nights plus holidays, so you can see what is coming rather than finding out on the night.

Hands today counted a day that ended in the wrong place.

The daily figures rolled over on a clock nobody at the table is on. They now use the Central calendar day, which is the day the events run on.

A proper logo, and a clean green lobby behind it.

The wood-plank pub backdrop went; the lobby is felt under a lamp.

Players who stop acting are removed after three timeouts.

One person walking away should not end the game for the other four.

Running out the doubling clock means "No thanks", never an automatic crack.

A timeout should never commit you to doubling the stake.

Bug reports were being silently thrown away.

The form accepted your report, thanked you, and sent nothing. Anything submitted before this date never reached us, which we would rather say plainly than quietly fix. Reports now also reach the operator by email.

A refresh puts you back in your seat, in your game.

Reloading the page used to mean losing the table.

Easy and Hard bots, with Easy the default for a new player.

One bot strength suits nobody. Easy is a table you can learn at; Hard is a table that punishes a loose pick.

A seat could be claimed by whoever reconnected next.

A resuming connection was handed a seat it had no claim to, so you could return to find yourself in somebody else's chair.

The supporter tiers linked to the wrong checkouts.

VIP and DIVINE were swapped, so picking one paid for the other.

Defending bots play as a team instead of five separate hands.

Bots were playing as though they knew who the partner was.

They could see the secret partner before it was revealed in play, which is not a difficulty setting, it is a different game. They now learn the partner exactly when you do: when the J-diamond or the called ace appears.

The four-color deck, on by default.

Green clubs and blue diamonds. In sheepshead the diamonds are trump, and telling them from hearts at a glance matters more here than in most games. The toggle at the bottom right turns it off.

Rules, Learn, Strategy, Glossary and Variants pages.

Ranked counts public tables only.

A leaderboard you can farm at a private table against bots is not a leaderboard. Those hands still count, on a separate practice board.

Bots with distinct personalities rather than one house style.

Reserve a seat at a full table and sit down when the hand ends.

Double on the bump, as a table option.

Sit-out tables: five to nine at one table, with seats rotating out each hand.

Nine people at one table beats splitting into two half-empty rooms.

Real card faces, felt with depth, and cards that move when they are dealt and taken.

A turn clock, and a grace period to get back to your seat after a drop.

Play several tables at once in one window.

Named rooms and a link you can send to friends.

Accounts, leaderboards, badges and supporter tiers.

Supporter badges are cosmetic. Nothing you can buy changes a card.

Blitz, crack and recrack, with the doubler as the default pass-out rule.

Sheepshead Club opened: five-handed tables against bots, free, no chips and no ads.

Every deal was provably fair from the first hand: the deck is committed to before the cards come out, and you can check it afterwards.