Basic Rules of Spades

Video Transcript

"As is the case with any card game, Spades has its own set of rules, some of them are similar to games such as Bridges or Bid Whist, or Pinochle, or Hearts, and the basic premise of most card games, not all, is the fact that you absolutely have to follow suite. If you have a Club and a Club is lead, and it's your turn next and you have a Club in your hand you have to follow suite. You don't necessarily have to play high you don't necessarily have to play low you have to do one or the other because there's no two six of clubs. The basic rule of the game is follow suite. If you cannot follow suite then you have the option of either discarding which means throwing off another suite or you can trump. Once spades have been played the suite is then determined to have been broken or played previously and there for spades can be lead. Now there are restrictions in the game of Spades, keep in mind however are also variations so that people can play according to what they call house rules, but when you go onto the internet, you go onto Grab.com you go onto any, you go to any tournament the rules are pretty standard. Number one there's one round of bidding, you have a chose of bidding a numbered bid, you have a chose of bidding a nil bid, a nil bid is a bid to bid zero, were going to cover that later. Number two when the auction is completed there's a score sheet which looks something like this. This one happens to be from one of our tournaments and the scorekeeper will mark the bids down. For example if we had a bid of four, and two, and one, and two we have a total of nine tricks bid, obviously there's thirteen tricks in the hand and somebody is going to be taking the extra tricks, those happen to be called bags. Bags are over tricks. So basically the team play you work together as a team, if I bid four and you bid two our contract is six, doesn't matter if I take all six and you don't take any or you take five and one, three and three, and so forth. When there hand is finished the number of tricks taken are added and your points are scored in the following fashion for every trick that you bid and score you get ten points. If I bided six tricks three and three we would get a total of sixty points between us if we successfully made our contract again."