How to play Spades
Spades is a partnership trick-taking game built on a promise. Before a card is played, you and your partner say how many tricks you will take. Make it and you score; miss it and you lose the lot.
There is a bidding drill further down — the one skill worth practising before you play for real.
What you need
Four players in two partnerships, partners opposite each other, and a full 52-card deck. Cards rank A high down to 2. Spades are always trump — there is no bidding for trump, which is what makes the game quick to teach.
The deal
Deal the whole deck, thirteen cards each.
Bidding
Starting to the dealer's left, each player states how many tricks they expect to take. Everyone bids, and the two partners' bids are added together to form the partnership's contract. There is no passing and no raising — one number each, and it stands.
A bid of nil is a promise to take no tricks at all. It is worth a large bonus and an equally large penalty, and your partner still bids normally and plays to cover you.
Playing the tricks
The player to the dealer's left leads. Follow suit if you can. If you cannot, play anything, including a spade. The highest spade wins the trick; if no spade was played, the highest card of the led suit wins.
Spades must be broken before they are led. You cannot lead a spade until a spade has already been played on an earlier trick as a discard — unless spades are all you hold.
Scoring
| Outcome | Score |
|---|---|
| Partnership makes its bid | 10 points per trick bid |
| Each trick over the bid (a bag) | 1 point, and it counts against you later |
| Partnership falls short | Minus 10 per trick bid, and nothing for tricks taken |
| Ten bags accumulated | Minus 100, and the bag count resets |
| Nil made | Plus 100 |
| Nil failed | Minus 100 (the tricks still count toward the partner's bid) |
First partnership to 500 wins. Some groups play to 300 for a shorter evening.
Bags, and why they matter
A bag is a trick you took that you did not bid. One bag is a point, which sounds harmless. Ten bags is minus 100, which is most of a game.
This is the rule that makes Spades a real game rather than a race to take tricks. Bidding accurately — including deliberately bidding high to avoid collecting bags — matters as much as playing well. Keep the bag count written down where both partnerships can see it.
Bidding drill
Everything in Spades rests on bidding accurately, and accuracy is a trained skill rather than a rule you can read. So: here is a hand. Say how many of the thirteen tricks it takes, then see what it actually takes.
Spades are outlined, because length in trumps is the thing beginners undercount.
Loading the drill…
Your hand — spades are trump
The answer is measured, not estimated: the hand is dealt against four hundred random oppositions and played out, then averaged. So it is what a table of reasonable players would take — which is the number worth bidding. Individual deals vary widely; the average is what you bid against.
Three things beginners get wrong
Underbidding to feel safe
Bidding four when you can see six tricks does not protect you. It hands you two bags, and eventually a minus hundred. Bid what you can actually take.
Leading spades early
Besides being illegal until they are broken, drawing trumps early strips your own partnership of the spades you needed to win tricks in other suits.
Abandoning a partner's nil
When your partner bids nil, your job changes. Lead high to draw out the cards that could force them to win, and take tricks they would otherwise be stuck with. A made nil is worth more than an extra trick or two on your own bid.
Common variations
- Blind nil — bid nil before looking at your hand, for double.
- Jokers as top trumps, with two cards removed to keep the deal even.
- Ten for two — a combined bid of ten or more scores double, and costs double.
- Cutthroat spades for three players, no partnerships.
The vocabulary, and where to read more
Card games assume a shared vocabulary that nobody ever teaches. Our glossary defines every term used on this page in plain English.
For the games we have not written up yet, the four reference books we recommend cover several hundred between them.