Spades

Your bid is a promise

Spades rewards one thing above all: a team that keeps its word. You and your computer partner each name how many tricks you expect, the two numbers are added, and that combined total is what your side must win. Make it and you score ten points per bid trick; miss it and the whole amount is subtracted. Everything else in the game is detail around that promise, which is why honest counting beats optimism every single hand.

Count the way regulars count. Aces are tricks, near enough. A king is a trick when a small card or two guards it, and a hope when it is bare. Queens count for little on their own. Then weigh spades, the permanent trump suit: high spades are the most reliable winners in the game, and length matters too, because with four or more you will still hold trump after everyone else runs dry. A void or singleton in a side suit is worth something even with no honors in it, since you can trump that suit once your card is gone. A sample count: Ace and King of spades with three little ones behind them, an outside ace, and a guarded king adds up to a clean bid of four, with the king as your hedge toward five. Bid the four you can defend, not the six you can imagine.

Bags will sink you

Overshooting is not free. Every trick past your bid is a bag, worth one point now and trouble later: collect ten bags across hands and you are docked 100 points. The rule punishes lazy bidding, and it bends correct play in a direction beginners find strange. Once your team's bid is safe, stop winning. Slip your loose high cards under opponents' winners, duck tricks you could take, and shove extras at the other side, because their bags are nearly as good as your points. The mirror-image error is chronic underbidding to feel safe: a team that bids three and takes six left thirty points on the table and pocketed three bags for the privilege. Watch the bag counts on both sides of the table, too. When the opponents sit at eight or nine bags, every spare trick you can push onto them is a small bomb with a short fuse, and dumping a trick you never wanted becomes an attacking move.

Nil, the bid that plays backwards

Nil is a promise to win zero tricks, for a large bonus made and a matching penalty broken. The right nil hand is low and short in spades: threes, fours, and sevens everywhere, nothing that has to win. Playing one is an exercise in staying underneath, so spend your absolute lowest cards where they are needed most and keep an escape card in every suit you can. Partnering a nil is its own skill: win tricks aggressively over your partner, swallow the dangerous leads, and accept bags cheerfully, because bags are a bargain against a shattered nil. Defending against one flips the logic again. Lead the suits the nil bidder seems long in, save your low cards to duck under theirs, and try to squeeze a single trick onto them. One trick is all it takes.

Trump discipline and tempo

• You cannot lead spades until they are broken, meaning someone has already trumped in on a suit they were void in. Hold your spade leads until the timing suits you.
• Count the trumps as they fall. Thirteen exist, and when the last enemy spade is gone your side-suit winners are finally safe to cash.
• Take your side-suit aces early, before opponents go void and start trumping them.
• When defending against a tight bid, lead suits the opponents are void in and make them spend trump early; a trump spent on a cheap trick is one that cannot kill your winner later.

A young classic

Spades is the youngest of the great trick-taking games. It grew out of the Whist family in the American Midwest in the 1930s, then went everywhere at once in the 1940s as soldiers carried it through the Second World War, and it settled afterward into barracks, campuses, and kitchen tables, becoming an institution in Black American card culture in particular. The match here runs to 250 points, and the arithmetic of tens and bags means the steadier team nearly always arrives first. Bid honestly, protect your partner's nil, and count the trumps; flair is optional.