Hearts program cheats! I've specifically caught the game cheating. Passed Ace & King Spades to the right & they ended up across the table. I think this is BULL I would expect a program to play by the rules!

@ DavidB69 - Thank you for your comment.  I have an Android tablet and I will look for that Hearts program.  I would welcome playing against skillful opponents just as long as the deal was fair and by that I mean random and as long as my opponents play as singles and not as a team versus me.  I will reserve comment on that until I see it.  The first time I pass the A or K or Q of Spades and get the others passed to me in return, I am gone.

As for MS Hearts the evidence of cheating is beyond overwhelming.  I think most of the cheating is in the deals which aren't really deals at all but are a fixed apportioning of the cards designed to keep the human player from winning too often.  This is necessary because the AI in the game is so dreadfully stupid. 

As an experiment I reset my MSHearts stats and began to dump games so that I could see what happens when one gets a ridiculous winning percentage.  I made one mistake and my record is 89-1 at this point.  It's a travesty now.  Every hand revolves around I will manage the various combinations of A-K-Q of Spades that appear in my hand.  I've lost interest in it.

Here are some examples of what I consider cheating in the fixed deals:

1. in a game played with real cards you never see the Q Spades and five other Spades in one hand and the other seven Spades all in another.  Many people at Mrs B's have reported this;

2. in a game played with real cards, one player would never be dealt A-K-Q Spades in consecutive hands but recently I got that combo three times in less than a week with MS Hearts;

3. in a game with real cards no one player sees the Q Spades dealt or passed to them in 8 or more consecutive hands.

There are so many other examples: the cutsie when the 2,3,4 & 5 of Hearts are in different hands with the human taking the trick with the 5; the double-cutsie which is the same thing only the human takes 4 more points with the 9 of hearts; the human player takes the Q Spades with a 4 on the second go around of Clubs or Diamonds; etc etc.

A couple months ago I hauled my old computer out of the store room so I could play the XP version of MS Hearts with all cards face-up.  That was when my real education about this game began.  When you can see all the cards, you can see how the deals can't be called random.  With the cards exposed you can sometimes plot your way out of a jam but just as often you can look ahead 5-6 tricks and see how escape is impossible.

Some things I observed make me suspect that the game looks at the cards the human player passes before deciding what the bots will pass.  But I can't prove it.

I recall one game with the cards face up when I had 22 points and the other 3 all had more than 70.  Then after 3 hands in a row in which I took 20+ points in each the game was over and I lost.  I could watch it happening and there was nothing I could do.

Having said that, playing with the cards exposed shows that the game also cheats during the play.  On several occasions I caught the game when it reneged, cards coming out of the wrong hands. 

The AI may be stupid but sometimes it is smart enough to:

1. the 3 bots will gang up on and pound the points to the human even when he already has the high score;
2. one bot will intentionally gobble up points and bust themselves so another will win;
3. one bot will hit 99 and stick there for several hands until the human no longer has the low score
4. two bots will slough off their high cards so that the third will shoot-the-moon and all the human player has are low cards.

Regards.

I thought it just reneged on me.  I wish I could find a Hearts game that does not cheat.  Aside from it cheating when my win rate gets a bit high it also always cheats when I am downloading something and after I have to quit because I get a call or have to do something and close the game.  Another thing it does is always have the queen of spades on my left if I play the ace or king, not sometimes, not a third of the time as one would expect, but always.

I'm glad it isn't just me.

I know for sure MS Hearts cheats. I just had a great hand to 'shoot the moon'. East played 7 spades, North played 6 hearts, West played 6 spades, so I played king of spades. Guess what, East won the hand!

I totally agree! I've caught it cheating numerous times. I do not understand how these people who write these programs think. Is frustrating people something they get off on? Or can they not understand that making a game unwinnable is not a "challenge", but just plain ridiculous. KEEP THE GENERATOR RANDOM!!!!! Let "luck" itself decide the hands dealt. DO NOT integrate a win/loss ratio into the mix. This is just plain bad and immature programming. Microsoft should be old enough to know better and to not allow such glitched out programs into the market. As it stands, the game is sadly starved for the element of "fun".