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Spades Strategy

Bid what you can count, guard your partner's nil, and treat every bag like a small debt.

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Spades looks like a game about winning tricks. It is actually a game about keeping promises cheaply: a made contract pays 10 points per trick bid, an overtrick pays a single point and quietly counts as a bag — and the tenth bag costs your side 100 points. Everything below follows from that arithmetic.

Bidding — count, don't hope

  • Aces are tricks; kings are maybes. Count every ace as one. A king with a small card behind it is worth about half — someone's ace may be waiting for it.
  • Count your spades past the third. Because spades are always trump, length wins: with four or more, each spade beyond your third is close to a sure trick once the high trumps have fought it out.
  • Count voids with trumps to spare. No diamonds and three spades? That is at least one ruff — a trick your high cards never had to earn.
  • Underbid by half a trick, not two. Failing a contract costs 10× the bid, but chronic sandbagging is how sides drift to ten bags. If your honest count is 4, bid 4 — the team that always bids 3 "to be safe" pays the −100 eventually.
  • Read the table before you bid. Your partner's bid plus yours is the team contract. Opposite a partner who bid 5, a 1-count in your hand is fine; opposite a nil, your bid must carry the whole hand.

Nil — when to bid it, how to survive it

A successful nil is +100; a broken one is −100, and any tricks the nil bidder takes turn into team bags when the contract is made. Bid nil on shape, not on weakness:

  • The spade holding decides. Zero to two low spades is nil territory. Three spades or one honour, and a forced trump trick will break you through no fault of your own.
  • High side cards need escorts. A king is survivable with two small cards to hide it under — bare, it is a trap.
  • Duck under, not over. On each trick, play the highest card that still loses. Burning your dangerous middle cards early, under other people's winners, is the whole craft.

Covering a partner's nil is the other half: win tricks in front of them, lead your aces early so they can shed danger cards, and never lead a suit they have shown weakness in. As a defender, do the opposite — lead low cards and force the nil hand to win something.

Bag discipline

  • Once the contract is safe, stop winning. Every extra trick is +1 now and part of a −100 later. Throw your losers with pride.
  • Count both bag totals. A side sitting on eight bags can be pushed: feed them cheap tricks they cannot refuse and let the rollover do 100 points of work for you.
  • Bags decide close games. Between evenly matched sides, the race to 500 is usually lost by the team that treated overtricks as harmless.

Playing the hand

  • Lead your long side suit early — establish it before the trumps come out.
  • Spades cannot be led until broken, so the first player to run out of a side suit chooses when the trump war starts. If your side has the length, break early; if not, delay.
  • Never trump your partner's winner. If their king is already taking the trick, your spade is a wasted bullet and an extra bag.
  • Count to thirteen spades. When you have seen them all, your remaining side-suit winners are unbeatable — cash them, or duck them, with total confidence.
  • Watch what the opponents stopped following. A player who sheds hearts is void — do not lead hearts into their trumps.

The race to 500

  • Ahead late: bid honestly, refuse bags, and make the leader's arithmetic do the work.
  • Behind late: nil is your friend — one made nil plus a modest contract swings 130+ in a hand.
  • Never forget the floor: fall to −200 and the match ends on the spot.

Five habits that lose Spades games

  1. Bidding on face-card beauty instead of counted tricks.
  2. Nil bids with three spades "because the rest is weak".
  3. Winning proud, pointless overtricks with the contract already made.
  4. Trumping a trick your partner owned.
  5. Leading a suit an opponent has shown void.

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