Spades

Spades is played with a standard 52-card deck between four players sitting in a circle. The two players opposite each other play as a team. There are many variations of this game. Some have different numbers of players and others don't use teams. For ease of explanation we'll only describe the most commonly used rules here and let the reader follow the links on this page to learn about the variations.

Setup and Bidding

To begin, the dealer shuffles and deals all the cards out to each player in turn. The dealer should rotate from game to game.

The players look at their cards and bid the number of tricks that they expect to take. Teams add their two bids together to determine how many they will take as a team. Bonus points are awarded for being accurate and penalties for being inaccurate. A bid of zero is allowed and gives a bonus if the player is able to avoid taking any trick. There is also a penalty if they fail.

Game Play

Starting to the left of the dealer, the player plays a card from their hand. Continuing clockwise, each players must play a single card from their hand and must follow suit, if possible. The winner of the trick is the person who played the highest card in the suit that was lead. Aces are high. In addition, ♠ spades are the trump suit, hence the name of the game. The highest ♠ spade wins, regardless of the suit that was led.

Leading a trick with a ♠ spade is not allowed until ♠ spades have already been "broken" or played in a previous hand.

The player who wins the trick collects the four cards and places them face down in front of them in a way that allows any other player to easily count and see how many tricks have been won. The winner then leads off the next trick.

Scoring

Once all 13 tricks have been taken, the game is scored and a new game is begun. Typically, the game is played until one team scores 500 points in total. A game is scored as follows:

• If a team took at least as many tricks as they bid, then their points are increased by 10 times their bid plus a bonus point for each trick over their bid. For example, if a team collectively bid 6 tricks and took 8, they would get 62 points.
• If a team took fewer tricks than they bid, then their score is reduced by 10 times their bid. For example, if a team bid 6 tricks and took 4, they would get -60 points.
• If an individual player's zero bid is successful, they receive an additional 100 points for their team. If they are unsuccessful, they receive -100 points for their team.
• To penalize teams that routinely underbid the number of tricks that they will take, there is a sandbagging penalty. Each trick that is taken over the bid amount is called a "bag". This can easily be tracked by looking at the ones digit of the team's score. Over the course of several games, a team may accumulate 10 bags. When this happens, 100 points are deduced from the team's score.