Bidding a Three Suit Hand When Playing Spades

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dan Kimbrough on behalf of expertvillage.com, in this clip we are going to discuss how to properly bet a hand that is missing a suit. As you could see from this hand here there are no clubs in the hand. Again we are talking about bidding when you don't have a suit and so what you want to do is first count the cards the way that you normally would. So you got your big joker, you got the ace, the king and the queen. Between those four you are going to get three of them because the little joker will take care of one of them, that is the only card in the middle that is going to stop those so you have a definite three. Now you have no clubs which means as soon as clubs are lead you are going to be able to cut. So these four that you have already accounted for. You have these two here, if you got three you also now have another two because you could cut clubs and so instead of bidding the three that you normally would, you would bid 5 because you are counting for the extra books that you could take by not having clubs. This is to your advantage to be missing a suit because as soon as a club comes out you are going to play it. There is 13 clubs in the hand, you have none which means that between them even if it is spread evenly you got 4, 5 and 4 some where. So for at least 4 hands if it is distributed evenly you could cut with your spades. Now if you wanted to, hoping that it is all 5, you could use all of these to cut giving you 5 technically 6. You have a spades that point in time but you have taken the 6 books. In your original bid if you do it this way it is 5, so you actually got a extra one. So you just need to remember if you are missing a suit in your hand, smaller spades then become books because you could cut to fill in for those and so remember to always add that to your biddings so that you don't sandbag. "