Spades is a partnership trick-taking game for four players in two teams. Before a single card is played, every player announces how many tricks they intend to win. That number is a contract. Make it and your team scores ten points per trick bid; miss it and you lose the same amount. Everything interesting about Spades — the nil bids, the deliberate underbidding, the agonising decision about whether to take a trick you don't want — grows out of that one commitment.

The rules take about five minutes to learn. This guide covers the standard four-player partnership game, the scoring maths in full, and the house variants you're most likely to meet. Where Cards4.net's tables make a specific choice, it's called out explicitly.

Deck, Players, and Partnerships

Spades uses a standard 52-card deck with no jokers. Four players sit at the table in two fixed partnerships, partners opposite each other. If you are sitting North, your partner is South and your opponents are East and West.

Cards rank in the normal order within each suit: Ace high, then King, Queen, Jack, 10 down to 2. There is no ranking between suits except the one rule that gives the game its name — spades are permanently trump, and any spade beats any card of any other suit.

The Deal

The whole deck is dealt out, thirteen cards to each player. Nothing is left over, there is no kitty, and there is no stock to draw from. The deal rotates clockwise after every hand.

Because all 52 cards are always in play, Spades rewards counting far more than most casual card games. Every card you don't hold is in exactly three other hands, and by the fourth or fifth trick a careful player has a good idea of which.

Bidding

After the deal, each player looks at their own thirteen cards and bids the number of tricks they expect to win. Bidding starts to the dealer's left and goes clockwise, so later bidders have the advantage of hearing what came before.

A bid is a whole number from 0 to 13, though in practice almost every bid falls between 1 and 6. Your bid and your partner's bid add together into a single team contract. If you bid 4 and your partner bids 3, your side has contracted for 7 tricks between you. There is no requirement that each partner individually make their number — only the combined total matters, apart from nil bids, which are scored per player.

The total of all four bids does not have to equal 13. It usually doesn't. If every player bids optimistically the table might contract for 15 tricks out of a possible 13, which guarantees that at least one team is going to be set.

Nil and Blind Nil

A nil bid is a promise to win no tricks at all. It scores 100 points for your team if you take zero tricks, and costs your team 100 points if you take even one. A nil is scored separately from your partner's bid: your partner still bids a number, still has to make it, and the two results are added together.

A blind nil is the same promise made before you look at your cards. It is worth 200 points if it holds and costs 200 if it fails. Because it must be declared without information, it is only available as the very first bid of the hand — on Cards4.net's tables, blind nil is offered only when no one at the table has bid yet.

Nil is where most of the game's drama lives, and it is covered in depth in the nil bidding guide.

Playing a Trick

The player to the dealer's left leads the first trick. Play proceeds clockwise. Each player must follow suit if they hold a card in the suit that was led. A player with no cards in the led suit may play anything, including a spade.

The trick is won by the highest spade played, or — if no spade was played — by the highest card of the led suit. The winner of a trick leads the next one. Thirteen tricks are played, and then the hand is scored.

Breaking Spades

Spades may not be led until they have been "broken." Spades are broken the first time somebody plays a spade on a trick led in another suit, which happens when they are void in the led suit and choose to trump it.

There is one exception. If spades are the only cards left in your hand, you may lead them whether or not they've been broken. Cards4.net's tables enforce exactly this: while spades are unbroken, the legal-move set for a player on lead excludes spades unless the player holds nothing else.

Note that the restriction applies to leading only. You may trump a trick with a spade at any point in the hand, and doing so is what breaks them in the first place.

Scoring

At the end of each hand, each partnership compares the tricks it actually won against the tricks it contracted for.

Contract made. If the team took at least as many tricks as it bid, it scores 10 points per trick bid, plus 1 point for each extra trick. A team that bid 7 and took 8 scores 71 — seventy for the contract, one for the overtrick.

Contract set. If the team took fewer tricks than it bid, it scores minus 10 points per trick bid, and the tricks it actually won count for nothing. A team that bid 7 and took 6 scores −70. Bidding higher is not just a bigger reward, it's a bigger loss.

Nil. Added on top of the partnership result: +100 for a nil that holds, −100 for one that breaks, +200 and −200 for blind nil. A partnership can therefore have a hand where one partner makes their number, the other breaks nil, and the team still ends up negative.

Bags

Each overtrick is worth one point, and those single points are called bags (or sandbags). They look harmless. In the standard game they are not: once a team accumulates ten bags across the match, it takes a 100-point penalty and its bag counter resets to zero. A team that quietly overbids by one trick every hand hands back a full contract's worth of points every ten hands.

That penalty is the reason careful players bid what they can actually take rather than shading low for safety. Underbidding is not free.

On Cards4.net: the tables score overtricks as +1 point each and apply the penalty exactly as above — ten bags costs your partnership 100 points and the counter resets. Both numbers are table settings, so a private table can change the threshold or the penalty. The running count for each partnership is shown next to the score during play, and it warns you once you are within three bags of the next penalty.

Winning the Game

The match is played to 500 points. The first partnership to reach 500 wins. If both teams cross 500 in the same hand, the higher score takes it.

Bags are settled before the win is checked, which matters more often than you would think: a partnership that reaches 505 on the same hand that takes it across ten bags is on 405 and the match continues.

Because a set costs ten points per trick bid and a nil swings 200 points between the teams, scores move in large steps. A team can be 150 points behind with three hands left and still be a genuine favourite if it gets one good nil hand.

Common House Variants

Spades has more house rules than almost any other trick-taking game, and it's worth agreeing which are in play before the first deal.

Mirror or "blind" bidding removes the choice entirely: each player bids the number of spades they hold. Suicide forces one partner on each team to bid nil every hand. Whiz requires every player to either bid the number of spades in their hand or bid nil. 10-for-200 makes a bid of exactly 10 tricks worth 200 points instead of 100, and −200 if set. Jokers adds two jokers as the top two trumps and removes the two lowest cards; the joker variants are common in American house play and change the trick count arithmetic considerably.

Cards4.net's default tables run the plain partnership game described above: standard 52-card deck, nil and blind nil both allowed, first team to 500.

FAQ

Do the four bids have to add up to 13?

No, and they usually don't. Each player bids independently, and the totals routinely come to 12, 14 or 15. When the table overbids, at least one partnership is mathematically guaranteed to be set, which is exactly why hearing the earlier bids is worth so much to the later bidders.

Can I lead a spade on the first trick?

Only if spades are already broken, which they can't be on the very first trick of a hand — or if your hand contains nothing but spades, which is vanishingly rare with thirteen cards. In practice: no. Lead something else.

What happens if I bid nil and my partner also wants to bid nil?

Both nils are legal and both are scored independently, so a double nil is worth +200 if they both hold. It's also extremely dangerous, because neither partner is taking tricks and the opponents can lead whatever suit they like at whoever looks weakest. Most experienced pairs treat a double nil as a desperation play when far behind.

Is a nil bid worth the same as three tricks?

Roughly, in raw points — a nil is 100, and bidding and making 10 tricks is 100. But the comparison is misleading, because a failed nil doesn't just score zero, it costs 100, a 200-point swing. Nil is closer in risk profile to a 10-trick contract than to a 3-trick one.

Why did my team score less than the tricks we won?

Almost certainly because you were set. When a partnership takes fewer tricks than it bid, the tricks it did take earn nothing at all — the score is minus ten per trick bid, full stop. Winning 6 tricks on a 7 bid scores −70, not −10.