Play Spades

Spades is a partnership game for four players. You sit South; your partner sits North, directly across the table. The two players either side of you are the opposition. Partners never change during a game, and you can never see each other’s cards.

Everyone is dealt thirteen cards, and before a card is played each player says how many tricks they expect to win. Add your bid to your partner’s and that is your contract — what your side has promised to deliver. Then you play thirteen tricks and find out whether you were right.

The tension is that a promise cuts both ways. Winning tricks you did not bid for is almost as costly as missing the ones you did.

Every Spade beats every card of every other suit. The two of Spades beats the Ace of Hearts. That is the single most important thing to hold on to if the game is new to you — a suit that is usually just another suit is, here, the whole balance of power.

Which is why you cannot simply lead a Spade whenever you feel like it. Until Spades are broken — the moment the first Spade is played, by anybody, in any circumstance — nobody may open a trick with one. The exception is a player holding nothing else, who has no choice.

Bidding goes around the table one player at a time, starting to the dealer’s left, and every bid is public as it is made. If you bid last you know exactly what the other three have promised; if you bid first, they will all know about yours.

Count the tricks you can genuinely expect to win: the Ace of Spades, high Spades with length behind them, Aces in the side suits, Kings with a small card to protect them, and a short suit you can trump once the Spades come out. Then bid a little under what you counted, because being set costs exactly what making it pays.

A bid cannot be taken back. The moment it is public, the other three are bidding against it.

Every trick you take beyond your contract is called a bag. Bags are worth one point each, which sounds like a small bonus and is really a slow debt: your side keeps a running count of them across the whole game.

When that count reaches ten, your side loses a hundred points and ten bags come off the counter. Anything past ten carries over — collect twelve and you pay the hundred and start the next hand holding two.

So a side that bids four and takes eight has not had a good hand. It has scored forty-four points and moved four steps closer to losing a hundred. Bidding accurately is not caution in Spades; it is the game.

Instead of a number you may bid Nil: a claim that you will take no tricks at all. Manage it and your side scores a hundred points. Take even one trick and it costs you a hundred.

A Nil bid contributes nothing to your side’s contract, so your partner is carrying that number alone — and they now have two jobs, because they also have to keep tricks away from you. The usual way is to take control: win the trick yourself so the Nil bidder can throw whatever is threatening them into it.

One detail that is easy to miss and matters a great deal here: a broken Nil bidder’s tricks still count toward the side’s total at this table. If your Nil fails, those tricks help your partner make their contract — and if the pair of you go past it, they become bags like any others.

Good Nil hands are the ones that look worthless: no Aces, no high Spades, few Spades at all, and plenty of twos and threes to duck with. A void is a gift, because it lets you throw a dangerous card away.

Hands continue until one side reaches 500 points. Bag penalties are applied first, so it is entirely possible to cross the line on contract points and be pulled back under by the hundred you owed in bags.

If both sides are past 500 with the same score, nobody has won yet and another hand is played.