Spider Solitaire Tips: Column Order, Empty Piles, and When to Deal

Updated August 2026

Spider Solitaire punishes the obvious move. Almost every losing game contains a moment where a tidy-looking build buried a card that was never coming back. The skill is not in finding moves — the game shows you plenty — it is in refusing the ones that cost you flexibility. Here is how strong players decide.

In-suit beats long

You can stack a descending run of mixed suits, but you can only move it as a block if the whole run shares a suit. So a five-card mixed run is not an asset; it is a wall. Given the choice between placing a card on a matching suit or on an equally valid off-suit pile, take the suit every time, even when the off-suit move looks like it develops more. A short in-suit sequence is worth more than a long rainbow one because it can still travel.

The corollary: think twice before dropping an off-suit card onto a clean in-suit run. You have just frozen everything beneath it. If there is any other legal home for that card, use it.

Dig where the payoff is

Not all face-down cards are equal. A column with one hidden card under a short pile is a cheap unwrap; a column with five hidden cards under a tangle is a project. Early on, spend your moves on the shallow columns — each flip gives you a new card and, more importantly, a new option. Boards are won by keeping the number of available moves high, and every face-up card adds to that number.

Keep an eye on which column will empty first and steer toward it. That is your real objective for the first third of the game.

An empty column is the whole game

An empty column is not a place to dump a King. It is a workspace: it lets you unload a card temporarily, move a mixed run one card at a time, and rebuild it in a better order. Treat it as a tool with a cost, and only spend it when you can see what you get back. If you fill an empty column with a King and nothing follows, you have converted your best asset into another wall.

Two empty columns is a different game — with two, you can relocate substantial mixed runs by shuttling cards, and boards that looked dead come apart. If you can trade a little immediate progress for a second empty column, take the trade.

The pre-deal checklist

A deal drops one card onto every column, and it will not skip a gap — so it seals empty columns and can bury a card you needed. Before every deal, run three checks:

1. Have I made every move that flips a face-down card?
2. Have I consolidated in-suit runs so the incoming row lands on useful cards?
3. Is there anything I can do with my empty columns first, because I am about to lose them?

Dealing early is the most common way to throw away a winnable game. The deck is not going anywhere; the flexibility on the board is.

Order matters more than you think

When several moves are available and they interact, sequence them so that each one preserves the option to make the others. A useful habit: before moving a card, ask what it is currently supporting and what will be exposed. If moving it leaves a card stranded with no legal destination, look for another order that unloads the stranded card first. Many positions that look dead are just moves played in the wrong sequence.

When to accept a messy board

At higher suit counts you cannot keep everything clean, and trying to will stall you. Accept that one or two columns will become junk piles, choose them deliberately — ideally columns whose face-down cards you have already exhausted — and protect the rest. A game with two designated dumps and six workable columns beats a game where all eight are moderately tangled.

Play with those priorities in order — flip cards, keep suits together, build toward an empty column, and never deal on autopilot — and your win rate moves before your card reading does.