How to Play Spades: Rules, Bidding and Scoring for Beginners

Spades is a card game for four players in two teams of partners. Everyone gets 13 cards and bids how many tricks they expect to win, spades are always trump, and you must follow the suit that was led if you can. A team that takes at least as many tricks as it bid scores 10 points per trick bid, a team that falls short loses 10 per trick bid, and the first team to reach 500 points wins.

Below are the full rules exactly as Poozee's Spades plays them, with a worked example for every scoring situation, each checked with the game's own rules engine. Where popular house rules differ, we say so. For how to bid and play well, see our Spades strategy guide.

Spades at a glance

On Poozee, you sit at the bottom of the table (South). Your partner, North, sits across from you, and West and East are your opponents. All three are computer players.

How a hand of Spades works

1. Deal. The dealer deals the whole deck, 13 cards to each player. After every hand, the deal passes one seat to the left. On Poozee, East deals the first hand, so you bid first and lead the first trick.
2. Bid. Starting with the player on the dealer's left and going around the table to the left, each player bids once: how many tricks they expect to win, from 0 to 13. A bid of 0 is called Nil, and it's scored in its own way (see below).
3. Play 13 tricks. The player on the dealer's left leads the first trick (not with a spade: see below). Everyone else plays one card in turn, going left, and the winner of each trick leads the next one.
4. Score. Each team counts its tricks and scores the hand against its bid.
5. Deal again, until a team wins the game.

Bidding

Your bid and your partner's are added together into one team bid. It doesn't matter which of you takes the tricks: if you bid 3 and North bids 2, your team needs 5 tricks between you, and 2 of yours plus 3 of North's is just as good as 5 of yours.

Each player bids once, and you hear the bids made before yours. Apart from Nil, the lowest bid is 1, and on Poozee, once North has bid, bids that would take your team past 13 tricks are grayed out.

How much should you bid? Count your likely winners: aces, kings with a card or two of the same suit to protect them, and high spades. For a feel for normal bids, we had four of our Medium computer players play 10,000 games. Across 471,544 bids, they bid 2 or 3 tricks 56% of the time, bid 5 or more 10% of the time, and bid Nil 2.6% of the time. The four bids in a hand added up to 10.8 of the 13 tricks on average, so a trick or two usually goes unclaimed. The strategy guide has a card-by-card way to count your hand.

Playing a trick

• Follow suit if you can. Whatever suit is led, you must play a card of that suit if you have one.
• If you can't follow suit, play anything. A spade will usually win the trick (that's called trumping). Any other card is a throwaway that can't win.
• Who wins: the highest spade, if anyone played one. If nobody did, the highest card of the suit that was led. A card of any other suit never wins, not even an ace.

Here are four tricks, with each card in the order it was played:

When can you lead spades?

You can't lead a spade until spades are broken, which happens the first time someone plays a spade on a trick of another suit because they had none of that suit. There's one exception: if your hand holds nothing but spades, you may lead one, and that breaks spades too.

The rule only covers leading. If another suit is led and you're out of it, you may trump with a spade at any time, even on the first trick. And once a spade is led, everyone who has a spade must follow with one, like any other suit.

Here's what the rules allow in a few spots:

On Poozee, a badge in the corner of the table shows whether spades are broken, cards you can't play are dimmed, and if you tap one anyway, the game tells you why.

How scoring works in Spades

After the 13th trick, each team scores its hand:

• Made the bid: if your team took at least as many tricks as it bid, it scores 10 points per trick bid, plus 1 point for each extra trick.
• Set: if your team took fewer, it loses 10 points per trick bid. Being short by one trick costs as much as being short by five.
• Bags: every extra trick is also a bag, and every 10 bags costs your team 100 points.
• Nil: a player who bids Nil scores +100 for the team by taking no tricks at all, or -100 if they take even one. The partner's bid is scored on its own.

Worked examples

In the first four, you bid 3 and North bid 2, so your team bid 5. Tricks are listed as yours + North's, and "Bags" is the bags your team picked up that hand.

In the next three, you bid Nil and North bid 4:

A few of these need a closer look:

• 3 overtricks, 8 bags already. Your team bid 5 and took 8, so it made its bid with 3 overtricks. But 3 more bags on top of 8 is 11, which crosses 10: 50 for the bid, plus 3 for the overtricks, minus 100 = -47.
• Nil made. Your Nil and North's bid of 4 are scored separately: 100 for the Nil + 40 for North's bid + 1 for North's extra trick = +141.
• Nil missed, North set. You took 2 tricks and North took 3. Your tricks don't count toward North's bid of 4, so North is set: -100 for the Nil and -40 for North's bid = -140. Your 2 tricks still count as bags.

Bags

Poozee shows each team's bag count next to its score. When the count reaches 10, the team loses 100 points and the count starts over with what's left. In the -47 example above, 8 bags plus 3 is 11, so after the penalty your team carries 1 bag into the next hand.

Bags add up faster than you'd think. In our 10,000 computer games, 93% of games had at least one bag penalty. That's why bidding too low isn't free: each extra trick scores 1 point now but brings you closer to losing 100.

Nil

When you bid Nil, you're trying to lose every trick, and your partner usually tries to help by winning the tricks you'd otherwise take. Only your partner's tricks count toward your partner's bid, and any trick you take counts as a bag for the team.

Both partners can bid Nil in the same hand, and each Nil is scored on its own. On Poozee, you can bid Nil after North has, but the computer players never bid Nil when their partner already did. There is no blind Nil (a Nil bid made before looking at your cards) on Poozee.

Winning the game

Scores are checked at the end of each hand. The first team to reach 500 points wins, and the game also ends if a team falls to -200 or below. For example, a team at -150 that's set on a bid of 6 drops to -210, and the game is over. Either way, the team with the higher score wins, and if the scores are tied, you play another hand.

In our 10,000 games between Medium computer teams, a game lasted 11.8 hands on average, and half of all games took between 10 and 13 hands. A team finished at -200 or below in only 0.4% of games.

What a Spades hand looks like

Every deal splits the 13 spades between four hands, so a hand holds 3 1/4 spades on average. Here's how often a hand holds each number of spades, from 1,000,000 hands dealt by Poozee's shuffle:

So 73% of hands hold 2, 3 or 4 spades, and you'll have no spades at all in 1.3% of hands. Each row matches the exact odds for a fair shuffle within 0.2 percentage points. Being out of a suit is what lets you trump, and 5.1% of hands were missing a suit entirely before a card was played, about 1 hand in 20. More players run out of suits as the hand goes on.

House rules: how Poozee compares

Many groups play Spades with their own house rules. Here's what Poozee does, and changes you might run into at other tables:

If you play with friends or family, settle these before the first deal, especially how Nil tricks and bags are scored.

Practice on Poozee

Poozee's Spades has three computer levels, from Easy (which makes frequent mistakes) to Hard, and none of them looks at your cards. Hint suggests a bid or a card when you're stuck. When the rules feel natural, the strategy guide shows how to turn your hand into a bid, when Nil is worth the risk and what bags really cost.

Keep playing

• Play Spades with a computer partner
• Spades strategy, tested over 10,000 computer hands
• Play Hearts, another trick-taking game, where you try not to take tricks
• Hearts strategy for passing, the queen of spades and shooting the moon
• Play Euchre, a faster partnership game with a short deck