Every Rule Spadesinator Enforces · And Where Each One Came From
Ask four players the right way to play spades and you will get five answers. This page is the whole ledger: every rule a Spadesinator table can turn on, what it does, and the history behind it where anyone wrote that history down. Every number below is the house default, and every one of them is adjustable when you set your table.
Where the origin is honestly unknown, the ledger says so. No invented history.
Three decks, one choice, made before the first deal.
The deck the game was invented with. Every suit ranks normally and the ace of spades is the boss of the whole table.
Spades itself dates to Cincinnati, Ohio in the late 1930s, the youngest child of the Whist family. It spread through the barracks and troop ships of the Second World War, because it deals fast, interrupts clean, and resumes without complaint.
The 2 of hearts and 2 of clubs come out, and the top three trumps become Big Joker, Little Joker, then the 2 of spades, all ranking above the ace.
The joker is an American invention of the 1860s, added to the deck so euchre players could have a top trump called the Best Bower. Spades players putting the jokers over the ace are returning the card to the exact job it was printed for. Joker variants have been a fixture of African American spades tables for generations, and that tradition is where this deck lives.
Same as above, but the 2 of diamonds joins the trump suit as well, slotting between the Little Joker and the 2 of spades. Fifteen trumps in all, and the 2 of diamonds never has to follow a diamond lead again.
The deuces-high family grew up alongside the joker decks at the same tables. Promoting a deuce, the lowest card in the deck, to the top of the trump suit is the house-rule instinct in its purest form: the last shall be first.
At a casual table, teammates talk before committing to bids. Tournament style opens the bidding immediately, no discussion, the way sanctioned play runs it.
The war over table talk is older than spades. Whist and bridge circles spent the nineteenth century writing increasingly stern rules against signalling your partner, and every kitchen table has spent the years since cheerfully ignoring them. Both camps are right, which is why it is a switch.
The two bids on a team must add up to at least the board. Nobody hides under the table.
The word comes from the Bid Whist world, where four is the floor a bid can start from. How it crossed into spades nobody wrote down, but it crossed early and it stuck.
The first hand is played open, ten points a trick, and the bidding starts in round two once everyone has seen how the cards are running.
A mercy rule for mixed tables, letting new players see one hand before being asked to predict one. Its history is the history of every uncle who ever said "first hand is just a warmup." No book records it. Every family knows it.
Ways to promise more than the cards suggest you should.
Bid to take no tricks at all. Make it and the team banks 100. Take even one trick and the 100 goes the other way. The house can also require the nil bidder's partner to still make their own bid, and can let a failed nil's tricks count toward the partner's total.
The zero contract is older than spades. Card games were selling nullo bids, the promise to lose, back in the whist and early bridge era a century ago. Spades made it a household word: everybody at an American table knows what going nil means.
Nil, bid before looking at your cards. Only available to a team trailing by 100 or more, because it is a desperation play and the house treats it as one.
Bidding blind is an old gambler's flourish; poker has run on blind bets for two centuries. Spades borrowed the nerve and attached it to the nil, and the deficit requirement is the traditional guard that keeps it a comeback weapon instead of a standing dare.
Both partners bid nil on the same hand, seen or unseen. The whole team promises to take nothing while the opponents take everything. The rarest bids on the site.
A doubling of a doubling, from the same escalation instinct that gave whist its redouble. If any table played this before the internet era, they kept it to themselves; the ledger honestly cannot say who did it first.
The opposite temper of blind nil: bid big, sight unseen, and get a premium on every trick if the bid lands. A trailing team's way of playing for the table instead of folding toward it.
Bid Whist tables have awarded premiums for blind bids for generations, and this is that idea wearing spades clothing. The exact rates vary house to house, which is why the house lets you set them.
A team that bids ten or more of the thirteen tricks is playing for a flat 200, win or lose. The most widely played bonus bid in spades.
Documented at real tables for decades and carried into nearly every spades app since, though who first priced ten tricks at exactly 200 is lost. It survives because the arithmetic is beautiful: the bid is a promise so large the score stops pretending to count it normally.
A one-player blind contract scored on precision: hit your count exactly for the premium, come in under and pay, come in over and the extras score nothing but bags.
A house special. You will not find this one in Hoyle, and the ledger will not pretend otherwise. It exists because exactness is a different skill than volume, and some tables wanted to pay for it.
Turns the humblest bid in the game into a contract of its own: bid one, take exactly one, and it pays like it mattered, because now it does.
Another house special, born of sympathy for the one-bid. In standard scoring a bid of one is barely worth writing down; boosted, it becomes the shortest tightrope in the game.
Every trick over your bid is a bag, and the tenth bag costs the team 100 points. The rule that makes underbidding a strategy with a bill attached.
A sandbagger, in the American slang of the 1880s, was a bruiser who hid his weapon and played weak until it paid to stop. Card players borrowed the word for the art of underbidding, and spades built the fine directly into the score sheet.
Miss your bid and you are set. The house default charges ten points per trick bid; other tables prefer a flat fine, or the harsher double-deficit style that charges by how far short you fell.
Set is the spine of the whole game and arrived with it: a bid that costs nothing to miss is not a bid. The variants are regional accents on the same sentence.
Failing to follow suit when you could have. Spadesinator catches it automatically, and the house picks the punishment: three tricks forfeited, a flat fine, the round voided, or the opponents credited with their bid outright.
The oldest law on this page. Edmond Hoyle's whist treatise of 1742, the book that made "according to Hoyle" a phrase, already ruled on the revoke and what it cost. Every spades table arguing about a renege is continuing a 280-year-old argument.
First team to the target wins the game. The house default is 300 for a game played in one sitting; 500 is the traditional long haul.
Five hundred is the number the old rule cards printed, inherited from the whist family's long-game habit. Shorter targets are the modern table's answer to the modern evening.
Run the table in a single hand and the game is over on the spot, whatever the score says. The rarest sight in spades, and Spadesinator ends the game with the ceremony it deserves.
The name walked over from Bid Whist, where running every book has been called a Boston for as long as anyone can testify. The trail runs further back to Boston itself, a whist-family game of the 1770s named while the siege of that city was in the news, in which the grand contract was to take everything. Two and a half centuries later, taking everything still gets the city's name.
Spadesinator will call them tricks or books, whichever your table says. Every rule on this page reads either way.
Books is the word at Black American tables, where much of the game's living tradition was built; tricks is the word the rulebooks inherited from whist. Why a taken trick became a book, nobody reliably wrote down. The ledger suspects it is because you close it and put it away.
Every rule above is a switch, and every number is yours to change. Play spades online free, with the rules your table swears by.
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