Playing With No Spades

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dan Kimbrough on behalf of expertvillage.com, in this clip I'm going to discuss whether you should call a misdeal or play a hand when you were dealt no spades at all. In this hand there is no spades what so ever. This is the way that it was dealt and so you have the option of either A, calling a misdeal because you have no spades, in the game of spades you don't have to trump you could call a misdeal or you could just play it out. If you are going to call a misdeal you have to do it before you and your partner start discussing how much you are going to bid or anyone starts talking at the table. If you decide you are going to play it, the way that you want to play a hand like this is to use what you have in your advantage. As you could see this hand has a lot of clubs, now you have no spades. If you are playing with jokers, there is 15 trump cards. If you are playing with the 2s there is 13. The chances that there is 5, 5 and 5 or 4, 4, 4 and one person has 5 and it is evenly distributed are very very slim. So you hope that your partner has the bulk of that spades seeing that you don't and so you could play this very easily because what you are going to do is you are just going to throw these clubs out and see what happens. By playing all these clubs you are going to help someone out, hopefully it is your partner you would see very early in the game. What you want to do is lead with the king. The ace is out there, someone's got the ace, your partner doesn't have it, whoever has it is going to play the ace. They are going to come back with something else, they are going to realize in the begin of a game you can't cut and so they are going to think that you are out of it but what you could do is help your partner by feeding whatever suit they are less because if you got no spades that means someone has very little of one of the suits that you have a lot of, so if it is your partner you could feed those to them so they continuously cut, cut and cut. Again you hope that it is club because that would work out great. Your partner has a lot of spades and no club but you have a lot of clubs and no spades at all. Another way if you are looking at this and you get your hand up and you realize that you got no spades, is you could say that you are going to bid nil. Saying that you are not going to take anything with a hand like this it would not be hard to do because you have enough low cards that you could start leading with the 7 or the 2, 3, 8 and 6 of your clubs and what you are going to do then is wait until someone cuts something and use that time to get rid of your higher cards and make 50 points at least out of a hand that you would of scratch and redealt anyways. "