Hearts Scoring, Explained

Hearts is the rare game where you're trying to score AS FEW points as possible, and the one huge exception to that — shooting the moon — inverts the entire hand's scoring so completely that it's worth walking through both a normal hand and a shot moon side by side.

The 26 points in every deck, and where they live

Every heart is worth 1 point (13 hearts, 13 points total). The queen of spades is worth 13 points on her own. That's 26 points distributed across the deck every single hand — no more, no less — split up among however many players actually won tricks containing point cards.

Worked example 1: an ordinary, evenly-split hand

Four players take tricks containing the following point cards: Player A ends up with 4 hearts (4 points). Player B takes 3 hearts plus the queen of spades (3 + 13 = 16 points). Player C takes 5 hearts (5 points). Player D takes 1 heart (1 point). Check the total: 4 + 16 + 5 + 1 = 26, matching every point card in the deck exactly. Player D had the best hand this round; Player B had by far the worst, almost entirely because of the queen of spades.

Worked example 2: a hand where the queen decides everything

Player A takes 6 hearts (6 points) but manages to avoid the queen of spades entirely. Player B takes only 2 hearts but also takes the queen of spades: 2 + 13 = 15 points. Player C takes 5 hearts (5 points). Player D takes 0 points at all. Even though Player A took more individual hearts than Player B, Player B still finishes the hand worse off, purely because of the queen's 13-point weight — a single card worth as much as thirteen ordinary hearts combined.

Worked example 3: shooting the moon, and how the scoring flips

Player A manages to take every single heart AND the queen of spades in one hand — all 26 points. Under standard scoring, this doesn't score 26 against Player A at all. Instead, the result flips entirely: Player A scores 0 for the hand, and every OTHER player is charged the full 26 points each. Players B, C, and D each add 26 to their running totals, while Player A adds nothing — a single hand that would ordinarily be catastrophic for whoever "won" all the points instead becomes the single best possible outcome for that player.

Worked example 4: the alternative moon-scoring convention some tables use

Same shot moon by Player A. Under the alternative convention some tables adopt, rather than charging every other player 26 points, Player A simply subtracts 26 points from their OWN running total instead. If Player A had 60 points before the hand, this brings them down to 34 — a very different outcome from the standard version, where the other three players' totals would climb instead of Player A's dropping. Over a multi-hand match with a fixed target to lose at (commonly 100), these two conventions can produce a different overall winner from the exact same shot moon.

Worked example 5: tracking a full match to its finish

A four-player match ends when any player's running total reaches 100 — at that point, the player with the LOWEST total wins, not the player who hit 100. After several hands: Player A sits at 88, Player B at 71, Player C at 104 (having just crossed 100 on the final hand), and Player D at 95. Because Player C crossed the ending threshold, the match ends immediately after this hand is fully scored — and because Player B has the lowest total among all four, Player B wins the match, despite never being the player whose score actually ended it.

Worked example 6: a jack of diamonds bonus, a real but non-universal variant

Some tables add the jack of diamonds as a bonus card worth -10 points to whoever takes it (often paired with the moon-shooting rule under the name "shooting the sun," where taking the jack of diamonds along with every heart and the queen of spades scores an even larger bonus). Under this variant, a player who takes the jack of diamonds along with an otherwise ordinary 8-point hand would score 8 - 10 = -2 for that hand — actually improving their running total rather than adding to it. This bonus card doesn't appear in the base game at all and should be confirmed before assuming it applies.

Why the passing phase matters just as much as the play itself

A hand's final point split is often decided before a single trick is even led, during the mandatory three-card pass. A player who passes away a dangerous queen of spades to a neighbor, only to receive three hearts back in return, has effectively traded a 13-point liability for 3 points of new risk — a clearly favorable swap on paper, though it depends entirely on how the cards actually play out afterward. Reconstructing why a hand's points landed the way they did almost always starts with what was passed, not just what was played.

The fastest way to total a hand

1. Count hearts taken by each player (1 point each) and add 13 if that player also took the queen of spades.
2. Check the total across all four players equals 26 exactly — a mismatch means a card was miscounted.
3. If one player took all 26 points, apply the moon rule: either 0 for them and 26 for everyone else, or -26 to their own total, depending on the table's chosen convention.
4. Check the running match total after adding this hand's result — the match ends once any player crosses the target, and the LOWEST total, not the highest, wins.

For the deal, passing rotation and the first-trick restrictions this scoring depends on, see the full Hearts rules and the dispute page for exactly when hearts can be led and how the moon-shooting rule gets argued.