Ruling — Hearts

You asked

What must be prepared before the first player takes a turn?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Heartsbg-6887-en-1e

Before the first player takes a turn, the following must be prepared: 1. Players draw from an outspread pack for the choice of seats and cards, with the lowest cut having the first choice [1]. 2. The player cutting the lowest card takes the first deal [1]. 3. Any player has the right to shuffle the pack, with the dealer being the last to do so [1]. 4. The cards are presented to the pone to be cut, and the cut must leave at least four cards in each packet [1]. 5. The cards are dealt from left to right, one at a time to each player in rotation until the pack is exhausted (or, in Two-handed Hearts, until each player has received thirteen cards) [1].

[1] RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook · p.2 · HEARTS.

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 307 ms · ask 13402 ms · total 2126282 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 2112563 ms · generation 13719 ms
retrieval refs (raw): [{"page": 2, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "If there are more than seven candidates for play, two tables must be formed. Players draw from an outspread pack for the choice of seats and cards, the lowest cut having the first choice, and the others following in their order. The player cutting the lowest card takes the first deal, which afterwar", "headingPath": "HEARTS.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Should he succeed in either object, he has another chance for his money. It is usually bad policy to return the suit opened by the original leader. He has picked that out as his safest suit, and although he may be the only one safe in it, by continuing it you are reducing your chances to two players", "headingPath": "SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Had not A been entirely safe in diamonds the stratagem would have succeeded. In following suit it is important to keep count of the cards played, in order to avoid the unwitting lead of a suit of which the other players have none. The suits that need close watching are those in which you have nothin", "headingPath": "SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The cards are dealt 3-2-3 at a time. The eldest hand leads any card he pleases, and the others must follow suit if they can. If all follow suit, the highest card played wins the trick, which is turned face down, and the cards in it are dead. The winner leads for the next trick, and so on. But if any", "headingPath": "ENFLÉ, OR SCHWELLEN.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "A good player, after sorting his hand, carefully estimates its possibilities. The hand may be such that it is evidently impossible to avoid taking some hearts. The player must then decide whether he will play to give each of the others hearts, or will take them all himself. If he succeeds in either ", "headingPath": "SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Where you have a certain safe card, and others of another suit not absolutely safe, it is better to keep the safe card, in order to be sure of getting rid of the lead if you are put in on your dangerous suit. In following suit, the most annoying hand that one can hold is one containing at least thre", "headingPath": "SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 13, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "There is some finesse in determining whether or not to change the suit often in the leads. If you have a better memory than your adversary, it may be well to change often; but if not, it may assist you to keep at one suit until afraid to lead it again. In Two-Handed Hearts, keeping count of the card", "headingPath": "SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "But 2 to 1 in his favour is a much better chance than the certainty, almost, that he will be loaded if a particular player is allowed the opportunity to lead a certain suit again. See B's play in Illustrative Hand No 2, and Y's in No 4. A player may have no desire to prevent any particular adversary", "headingPath": "SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}]
citations (raw): [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "HEARTS.", "sharpsignalDocId": 222}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 222 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 222 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
debug row retained until: Nov 6, 2026 14:49

retrieval — what the search arm returned

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	HEARTS.	p.2	0.032787 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.10	0.032258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.10	0.031746 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	ENFLÉ, OR SCHWELLEN.	p.17	0.03125 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.8	0.030769 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.11	0.030303 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.13	0.029851 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#8	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD PLAY.	p.11	0.029412 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222)	HEARTS.	p.2	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 307 ms · first delta 12489 ms · total 2126282 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 2112563 ms · retrieval 307 ms · ask 13402 ms · gateway work 13719 ms · total 2126282 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4119
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 160
tok/sec: 136.4 tok/sec — 160 output tokens in 1.173 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 46s ago)
stream path: streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog: first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture: both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 148), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.