How to Play Spades
Spades is a classic card game that requires some skill. It involves bidding, trump, and knowing the best cards to throw. It’s similar to Euchre, Bridge, 500 bid, or Pinochle but much simpler. These games involve bidding, leading, playing trump, and score keeping.
In Spades, spades is always trump. Which makes it easy to remember. Bidding and score keeping are also straightforward. Learning Spades definitely makes learning the more complicated trump games easier. Still, Spades is fun enough on it’s own.
What Exactly is Spades?
Spades is a card game requiring four people. It’s a basic version of other trump type card games such as Euchre, 500 Bid, or Bridge. The bidding is simple and so is the score keeping compared to other card games.
How to Play
Start with a regular deck of 52 cards and 4 players. Decide who is to deal first then deal out all the cards. Once everyone looks at their cards and is ready the bidding begins. The person to the left of the dealer bids first. They asses how many tricks they can take. Each lead of cards is a trick. High card or trump wins the trick.
Players can bid between 0 and 13, however bidding between 2 and 5 is very common.
Bidding 0 or nil is a strategic move where the player attempts to take zero tricks. This is generally only successful when you have 2 or less trump, have a lot of one suit, or very few high cards. A successful nil bid wins 100 points. Not getting a nil bid loses 100 points.
If you’re not sure what to bid, a general rule of thumb is to count how many spades you have and bit that. A better way is to count aces, kings, and any more than 3 trump. Other factors to consider are being short suited, or heavy suited. For example, say you have 6 diamonds in your hand with ace, king, queen. The ace of diamonds is probably good for one trick, but the king is likely to get trumped.
Once everyone has bid the scorekeeper writes it down. It’s up to you and your partner to take the exact number of bids your team made. If you take less than you bid you lose however many points you bid. Taking extra tricks results in “bags”. Once your team accumulates 10 bags you lose 100 points. It’s best to take exactly the number of tricks you bid.
Once the scoring is recorded, the round begins. The player to the left of the dealer leads. Whatever suit is lead has to be followed. Each player throws one card in the trick. The high card of the suit lead wins or any spade thrown. The player that takes the trick gets to lead the next hand.
Spades can’t be lead until they’re broken or that’s all you have in your hand. Spades are broken when a player runs out of the suit lead and decides to use a spade.
The round ends when once everyone has played all their cards. Then each team counts how many tricks they took (max 13). If you got your bid then you get your bid x10 points. For example, if you bid 6 and took 6 tricks you get 60 points. If you bid 5 and took 7 tricks, then you get 52 points. Each bag only counts as 1 point.
If your team bid 7 and only took 6 tricks, then you lose 60 points. For a nil bid you get 100 points plus whatever your partner bid. For example, if you bid nil and your partner bid 4 then you would get 140 points as long as you didn’t take any tricks and your partner got 4 tricks.
Any tricks over your bid results in a bag and only counts as 1 point. Once you accumulate 10 or more points your team loses 100 points. The first team to 500 points wins.
Spades Tips & Tricks
Be sure to bid as accurately as you can. Pay attention to the total bid each round. If there’s only 9 or 10 bids total, there’s a lot of bags for that round. Which means it’s likely you’ll get your bid so don’t play as aggressively. Avoid taking extra tricks by dumping high cards or trump.
Conversely, if there’s 12 or 13 bids be sure to play as aggressively as you can. It’s likely one team will get set (not make their bid) when there’s 13 bids total.
Some players tend to develop habits such as underbidding or overbidding. Take your partners style into account when bidding. If your partner bids nil a good strategy is to bid a bit more since there tends to be a lot of bags during a nil bid round.
Summary
Spades is a fun card game that requires a bit of skill to win. It’s a fairly simple game to learn and very rewarding to play with friends.
How to Play Spades brought to you by: David M.
I’m David M. I’ve been playing video games a long time, my pong game was fire. Now, my kids run circles around me but we always have a good time. We mostly play party and family games. Strategy and battle games are still among my favorites. I like writing about games almost as much as I do playing them. My favorite games are: Moving Out 2, Out of Space and Overcooked All You Can Eat.
