I’ve been playing Spades since 1979. Through the years, partners have come and partners have gone. Some were good and some were awful. A good and savvy partner in Spades is essential to winning and when you find the right one it is like dancing in perfect rhythm. Give me the right partner and I’ll beat you almost every time.
The basic rules in Spades are as follows.
You play in teams. 2 against 2. Each person is dealt 13 cards.
Spades are trumps.
You bid based on the cards that are in your hand and how many tricks you think you can catch. Each team must place a minimum bid of 4. If you don’t catch 4 tricks, you go in the hole 40 points. If you don't make your bid you go that many points in the hole.
Bidding is tricky because you never know what cards the other team has.
In some versions, if one player doesn’t have any spades in their hand you can call a misdeal or you can go nil,(after looking at your cards) meaning you try not to catch any tricks and depend on your partner to cover you.
If you are down by 100 points you can go blind nil, meaning, you or your partner decided prior to the cards being dealt that one of you will go nil.
After looking at your cards, the person that is going blind nil then passes 2 cards (usually high cards) of their choice to their partner who in turn passes two low cards.
In nil and blind nil, if the person that bid nil catches a trick, you go in the hole.
If you collect 10 overbooks, 100 points is deducted from your score. Overbooks means getting more than what you bid. For instance if your team bid a total of 5 and you got 8 then 3 overbooks are counted.
The first team to reach 500 points wins.
5 years ago I joined Pogo.com. On this site you can team up with other players around the world and play all kinds of different games. Of course, Spades is my favorite. Like I said at the start, finding a good partner is rare and when you find one on Pogo, you friend them. Over the 5 years I’ve only found 3 good partners.
Here are some of the partners I get:
The Sandbagger. This person doesn’t know how to count their tricks and will constantly catch more than they bid, thus putting you in the hole.
The Spade Squeezer. Oh how I hate this kind of partner. They refuse, just flat out refuse to pull out or play the big spades. Instead they will let the other team get trick after trick while holding on to the big spades only playing it when they have to.
The Ender. This person loves to get the last trick of the hand and will do so at any cost. They are closely related to the Spade Squeezer. Just can’t seem to get it through to some people that when you catch a trick, you CONTROL where the game goes next and can use it to your advantage.
The Niller. This player loves to go nil. You can accumulate points faster going nil but more often than not they place their team and partner in danger. Going nil when you have nothing I understand, but going nil all the time makes me mad.
The Dunce. This person doesn’t watch and keep track of the cards that have been played. This is especially important when someone on the other team is going nil or blind nil. If the nil person is out of hearts and is throwing off high cards from another suit then STOP playing hearts.
The key to trapping someone who has gone nil is throwing off your high cards first, especially if you go after them. This is especially true for the high spades (Ace,King,Queen and Jack). The other team messes up most of the time by leading with their high spades. Usually someone going nil will have one or more spades and will be counting on someone with the high spades to lead with them, thus covering their spades. If you throw off your high spades to make a trick first, you can get them almost every time. But, this doesn’t seem to compute to some players.
Now that I’ve given you a short lesson in Spades, listen to what happened this weekend.
Saturday night, unable to sleep, fighting an intense headache and on medication, I logged on to Pogo.com for a diversion to the pain.
I got a pretty good partner. We played and won 3 games while different players would come in and out of the room. The third game with 2 ladies got intense. They lost the game on the last hand because of overbooks and partner 1 let partner 2 verbally have it. I guess partner 2 must have got the message because things changed when the next game began.
Right off the bat they began throwing away catches, refusing to catch a trick, bidding the required minimum of 4 most of the time. As a result, me and my partner were collecting overbooks like they were going out of style.
I adjusted my bidding and added 2 to what I knew I had in my hand. Meanwhile, the other team was throwing off like crazy and as a result, I was getting tricks with jacks of suits other than spades, catching them with 5’s and 2’s.
The last hand, with my team 2 away from going down 100 points due to overbooks, I took a chance and went nil because when you go nil, overbooks don’t count. I did have catches in my hand, but if the cards fell just right and my partner didn’t do something stupid, we could win.
Before the first card was played, my partner who had been very cordial during our previous 3 games said via the chat box:
“Partner, you seriously need to reassess the way you make your bids. It is getting very hard for me to compensate for your sandbagging”
WHAT….???!!!
She couldn’t be serious. Surely she had enough sense to see what the other team was going. I mean, that is a very common tactic for some people in Spades, to under bid, throw off catches and let the other team get overbooks.
So, I wrote back that I wasn’t accustomed to counting jacks, fives and twos and that no one in their right mind would count the 2 of diamonds as a catch.
The snappy bitch sitting to my right snapped back with a smart ass comment and despite the anger that was welling up inside, I let it pass.
We ended up winning the game and I left the table. Still, it festered inside me all day Sunday.
I knew from the conversation prior to the very last hand that my partner, who had added me to her friends in game 2, would be playing again Sunday night. I also knew that I could go to her profile and see what she was playing, what room and table.
With this information I contacted one of my favorite partners. Told him the story and we hatched a plan to be on Pogo at the same time. I would look and see what room she was in, we would go to that room page and wait until seats were available at her table, team up against her and sandbag like crazy.
That is exactly what we did. By round 3, she and her partner were down 100 points due to overbooks.
It was then my partner took the opportunity to tell her:
“I think you should seriously reassess the way you make your bids. “
ROFL….And then it was on like donkey kong!
Oh she was mad but was determined to play dirty right along with us.
We played a total of 3 games and WON THEM ALL.
The moral of this story is, DON’T START NONE AND THERE WON’T BE NONE.
