Is it possible to get all 52 cards to the homecells at once?
Yes. While I was participating in Dave Ring’s project, I noted that some deals ended with 40 or more cards going to the homecells at the end of the game (called a flourish, cascade, or sweep — the latter term coming from peg solitaire). The best I managed was 47 cards. George W. Edman discovered a number of deals on which he could end with a 50-card flourish: 7329, 7851, 15824, 23600, 26963, 31126 (found by Carol Philo), and 31637. Edman’s solution to 7851, remarkably short at 35 moves, is found in the solution catalog. Since the standard version of FreeCell plays aces automatically to the homecells as soon as they are available, these deals depend on having two aces buried at the bottom of the same column, and arranging the remaining cards into sequence before uncovering the last two aces. But in March of 1998, Andy Gefen found the ultimate: a 52-card flourish. After noticing that deal number 18492 had four aces at the bottom of column six, he realized that if he could get all of the
