Canfield

The game the casino sold you

Canfield is named after Richard Canfield, who ran a famous gambling house in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the 1890s. The papers of the day called him the Prince of Gamblers, and he turned this patience into a table game. You bought a shuffled deck for fifty dollars, played through it once, and the house paid you five dollars for every card you got onto the foundations. Ten cards just to break even. The average player managed about five or six, which tells you exactly how steep the odds are, and why the game made Canfield rich. Legend says a full clear paid five hundred dollars, and that almost nobody ever collected it. In Britain the same layout is called Demon, which is at least honest about its temper.

That history is worth keeping in mind while you play. Losing most deals is not you playing badly. It is the game working as designed, and it is what makes a win feel like getting one over on the house.

How the wrapping works

The first foundation card sets the base rank, and this is the wrinkle that trips up newcomers. Say the base is a seven. All four foundations start at seven and climb eight, nine, ten, Jack, Queen, King, then wrap around to Ace, two, and on up to six. The tableau does the same thing in reverse: it builds downward in alternating colours and also wraps, so an Ace will happily accept a King of the opposite colour. Run that base-seven deal through a tableau column and you get a ladder like nine, eight, seven, six, then on down through two, Ace, King. Once the wrap clicks, moves that looked illegal suddenly appear all over the board.

Beside the columns sits a thirteen-card reserve, face-up. Whenever a tableau column empties, the top reserve card slides in automatically. You do not choose when to spend it; the board decides for you. It still pays to glance at what the top reserve card is, because a column you empty on purpose drops that card exactly where you can see and use it, and that is one of the few flows you can control.

Playing the odds

Canfield gives you fewer choices than Klondike: four short columns, an automatic reserve, and a stock you can cycle forever. With so few levers, the ones you do have matter more. When two moves are both legal, prefer the one that lets the reserve shed a card; when neither does, prefer the one that keeps your longest tableau ladder growing.

• Clear the reserve as your top priority. Those thirteen cards are the ones most likely to strand you, so feed them out at every chance.
• The stock turns three at a time with unlimited redeals, so run through it again and again. A card you cannot use now may fit after the next foundation card goes up.
• Do not pin your hopes on an Ace early. Here it is just another rung on the ladder, not the bottom of it.
• Before you send a tableau card home, glance at what it is holding. Sometimes a card does more work catching builds on the tableau than it would sitting on its foundation.

The three-card rhythm

Because the stock deals three at a time, you only ever see every third card, and the same faces keep coming around on each redeal. Here is the trick: the stock's order never changes on its own, so playing a single card from the waste shifts which cards land on top next time through. If a full cycle gives you nothing, hunt for any legal move at all from the waste, even a small one, purely to change the rhythm. One played card can surface a run of cards you have never seen. This is the closest thing Canfield has to a secret, and it is often the difference between a stuck game and a slow win.

Double-tap a card to send it straight home, and remember the win is total: all 52 cards on the foundations. Expect to fail often, take the five-card games on the chin, and treat anything past twenty cards as a genuinely good day. Richard Canfield built a fortune on exactly that arithmetic.