How to Play Spades: Your First Hand

Step-by-Step Hand Flow

Reading Your Hand Into a Bid

The bid decides the hand. Everything that happens afterwards is just delivering the number you promised, so this is the one skill worth learning properly before any other. A bid is not a wish. It is a count of the tricks you expect to win.

Count in three passes.

1. Certain winners. An ace wins almost every time. A king with at least one small card behind it (K x) usually wins, because you can let the ace go first. A bare king often loses, because it has nowhere to hide.
2. Spade length. Spades are trump, so a long spade suit wins tricks its ranks do not justify. Holding five or six spades means your two smallest will still be winners late in the hand, once everyone else has run out.
3. Voids and singletons. A suit you do not hold at all lets you trump the first time it is led. That is worth roughly a trick, provided you have spades left to do it with.

Example hand

♠ A 9 4 ♥ K 8 ♦ A 7 3 ♣ Q 10 6 5

Pass one gives you two certain tricks, the ace of spades and the ace of diamonds. The king of hearts is a maybe: with only one card behind it, it falls under the ace often enough that you should count it as half a trick. Pass two adds nothing, because three spades is ordinary length and the 9 and 4 will not win on their own. Pass three adds nothing either, since there is no void and no singleton.

Two certain plus one likely is a bid of 3. Bidding 4 is defensible if your partner has already bid low and the team needs tricks, but 3 is the honest count. Beginners lose far more points to bids they could not make than to bids they comfortably beat.

A hand that is worth bidding high

♠ A K Q 7 5 2 ♥ 4 ♦ K 9 ♣ 8 6 3

Six spades headed by the ace, king and queen. Those three are certain. The 7, 5 and 2 become winners once the other three players are void in spades, which with six in your hand will realistically happen for two of them. The singleton heart means the second round of hearts is yours to trump. Three plus two plus one is a bid of 6.

Following Suit, and When Spades Can Be Led

Following suit is not optional. If a heart is led and you hold any heart at all, you must play one, even when playing it loses the trick. Only when you are completely out of the led suit may you choose: discard something useless from another suit, or play a spade and take the trick.

Spades are trump, so any spade beats any card of any other suit. A 2 of spades beats an ace of hearts. Within a single suit the ordinary order applies, ace high down to 2 low.

The one restriction is that you cannot open a trick with a spade until spades have been broken, meaning someone has already played a spade on a trick where a different suit was led. The exception is a hand containing nothing but spades, where you lead one and spades are broken immediately. The rule exists so that trump cannot be stripped out of everyone hands on the very first trick.

A Hand, Trick by Trick

Your team bid 6 and the opponents bid 5. You are holding the first example hand above, and the player to your right leads.

Trick five is the habit that separates a beginner from a partner people want to play with. Once the bid is covered the goal reverses: you stop trying to win and start trying to lose cleanly.

What the Scoring Actually Does

Make your team bid and you score ten points per trick bid, plus one point for each trick over it. Miss the bid, by even one trick, and you lose ten points per trick bid and score nothing at all for the tricks you did win.

Read rows two and three together. Two tricks too many is worth two points. One trick too few swings 142 points against the row above it. That asymmetry is the entire reason experienced players bid conservatively.

Bags, and Why They Are a Trap

A bag is a trick won beyond your bid. Each one adds a single point, which feels harmless. They accumulate across the whole game, and on the tenth bag your team loses 100 points and the counter resets to zero.

So ten bags earn you ten points and cost you a hundred. A team quietly collecting two or three a hand hands back 100 points roughly every four hands, which is more than most teams score in that time. This is the most common way a beginner loses a game they were winning.

The defence is simple and completely unnatural: once the bid is covered, deliberately lose tricks. Lead low. Throw winners under someone else. Let the opponents take what they were going to take anyway.

NIL: Bidding Zero on Purpose

A NIL bid is a promise to win no tricks at all. Succeed and your team gains 100 points on top of whatever your partner bid. Take a single trick and you lose 100 instead.

A hand suited to NIL has no aces, no unprotected kings, and short spades, ideally nothing above a 5. What kills a NIL is not a big card, it is a card with nothing below it: a lone queen has to be played eventually, and by the endgame it may be the highest card left in the suit.

A hand worth bidding NIL on

♠ 4 2 ♥ 9 7 6 3 ♦ 8 5 2 ♣ J 9 6 4

Two low spades, nothing above a jack, and length in the suit where that jack can hide. The single risk is the club jack, which you should throw away at the first safe opportunity rather than hold until the end.

When your partner bids NIL your job changes completely. Play high, take tricks aggressively, and lead the suits where they are long so their small cards are covered by yours.

Five Mistakes That Cost Beginners the Most

1. Bidding what the hand feels like instead of counting it. Three face cards in a weak suit is not three tricks. Run the three passes above and take the number they give you.
2. Playing a big card when a small one wins. If you are trumping, the 2 of spades takes the trick just as well as the ace, and the ace is still there for the next one.
3. Winning tricks after the bid is safe. Every one is a bag and ten of them cost 100 points. Once you are covered, start shedding.
4. Leading a suit your partner is void in. They are forced to trump or discard, which either burns a spade they needed later or throws away a winner.
5. Ignoring the score. Trailing by 200 in the last hand calls for an aggressive bid, not a safe one. Leading by 200 calls for a low bid and handing the opponents their bags.

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