Spades Free

Spades is a trick-taking card game devised in the United States in the 1930s. It can be played as either a partnership or solo game. The object is to take at least the number of tricks that were bid before play of the hand began. Spades is a descendant of the Whist family of card games, which also includes Bridge, Hearts, and Oh Hell. Its major difference as compared to other Whist variants is that, instead of trump being decided by the highest bidder or at random, the Spade suit is always trumps, hence the name. #GAME PLAY #The Deal The first dealer is chosen by a draw for "first spade" or "high card", and thereafter the deal passes to the dealer's left after each hand. The dealer shuffles, and the player to the right is given the opportunity to "cut" the cards to prevent the dealer stacking the deck. The entire deck is then dealt face down one card at a time in clockwise order (with four players, each player should receive 13 cards). The players then pick up their cards, verify the correct count of the cards, and arrange them as desired (the most common arrangement is by suit, then rank). #Misdeal A misdeal is a deal in which all players have not received the same number of cards or a player has dealt out of turn. A misdeal may be discovered immediately by counting the cards after they are dealt, or it may be discovered during play of a hand. If a single card is misdealt and discovered before players in question have seen their cards the player that is short a card can pull a card at random from the player with an extra card. Otherwise a hand is misdealt, the hand is considered void and the hand must be redealt by the same dealer. #Bidding Each player bids the number of tricks they expect to take. The player to the left of the dealer starts the bidding and bidding continues in a clockwise direction, ending with the dealer. As Spades are always trump, no trump suit is named during bidding as with some other variants. A bid of zero is called nil, the player must bid at least one if you don't want to bid nil. In partnership Spades, the standard rule is that the bids by each member of the partnership are added together. #Blind and Nil Bidding Two very common variants of bidding are for a player or partnership to bid "blind", without having looked at their cards, or to bid "nil", stating that they will not take a single trick during play of the hand. These bids give the partnership a bonus if the player exactly meets their bid, but penalizes them if the players takes more or fewer. A combined bid of 2"blind nil" is usually allowed, and is worth both the blind and nil bonuses or penalties. In some variants, the player bidding nil passes 1 or 2 of his cards (depending on the variant rules) to his partner and the partner passes an equal number of her cards back in what is considered "nil passing". Nil passing may be allowed only in the case of a blind nil.