What is the name of this solitaire card game?

Question

You start flipping cards over one at a time and holding them in one hand. When you have two cards of the same suit that are separated by two other cards (e.g. 4♣ 2♦ 7♥ 10♣), you discard the middle two. When two cards of the same value are separated by two other cards (e.g. 4♣ 2♦ 7♥ 4♥), you discard all four.

This game is neither Accordion nor Royal Marriage, but bears similarities to both. Somebody else asked this same question on Yahoo Answers five years ago and the response was unsatisfactory.

If someone can identify this game, I would also like to know what happens when you finish with two cards left: do you win, as in Royal Marriage, or not?

Answer 1

It sounds like a variant of Push-Pin.

You can eliminate a card or a pair of adjacent cards between two cards of the same suit or rank. Select a card or a pair of cards you want to discard by clicking on them. The overall effect of successive plays is that length of the layout gets shorter and shorter. If the length is reduced to two cards the game is won.

The differences I see are:

• In Push-Pin, you can remove two or one cards between cards of the same rank or suit.
• In Push-Pin, if you don't remove all four cards when matching cards between cards of the same rank.
• In your game, the cards are flipped in your hand as you go, not all at once, so there's no strategy required.

Since you can remove all four cards, it is possible to eliminate all cards in your described game. As there's no strategy required to "win" (the outcome is predetermined by the order of the cards) I don't think it matters which rule to win you use. ;-)

Answer 2

I play this sometimes and the person who taught me called it "One-handed Solitaire". I don't know if that's the real name, but that's what I've always called it and people seem to know what I'm talking about if I ever do mention it.