Playing Board in the Game of Spades

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dan Kimbrough on behalf of expertvillage.com, in this clip we are going to discuss board. Board in the game of spades is the minimum bid that you are allow to enter. Whether you are playing teams or individual board is usually set at four, saying that you have to get at least books. Now if you go board and you don't get it you are down 40 points. This can be a very bad thing if you truly have a bad hand but is to keep people from bidding extremely low bids. When board is in effect you usually can't go for nil or a blind nil or things in that nature because that is a bid of zero and again board is the minimum that you are allow to get. So what happens is the cards are dealt you have 2 and your partner could get 1, you have to go board even though you could only get 3. Where this comes in handy is that the other team then knows have nothing, so we could bid a little higher. You could use board to your advantage by going board, making it seems like have a bad hand and suckering the other team into bidding higher than they could actually get. Now if you play the sandbags and they come back to haunt you but if you don't play sandbags it is very effective technique for setting the other team. Again board is when you set a minimum level, it is usually 4 in a game but some people play a board as 5 or some people play a board as 3, it depends where you are playing at and what the house rules are. "