RuleSage cited table rulings
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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) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"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) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"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

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.

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 rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet 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

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.

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.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
[1] RULEBOOK Hearts — Rulebook (corpus doc 222) HEARTS. p.2 no quote on the wire
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 5s 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.
outcome
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
decision
NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
pattern that matched
BEFORE_FIRST_PLAY — "before the first turn" / "before we begin"
matched words (in the normalized question)
before the first player

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.