Techniques for Bidding in Spades

"If you get set, if the opponents defeat you. Now, the game always revolves around this attention level between setting and bagging. You will lose minus eighty points and it brings you down to one-hundred and twenty. That's a big drop. If you make a seven bid because you bid it safely, you would go two-hundred plus seventy equals two-hundred and seventy. Well, there is a heck of a difference between those two. So you see getting set on an eight bid, the actual swing is one-hundred and sixty. The eighty that you overbid and the eighty that you lost so bidding tends to be, as I said before, on the side of caution. It tends to be slightly conservative. The average total bid in a hand is eleven. You wonder why it's not thirteen? Well if every hand was laid out that everybody had a balanced hand and everybody had one ace, and one king, and one queen, and one jack and an equal number of trump who knows, you might see it come out to thirteen. But the typical table bid in a game of table spades is eleven. So if the bid is at nine or ten, somebody is throwing off bags. If the bid is up to twelve or thirteen you're going for set because, if you can set the opponents even if you take a few extra tricks or bags you gain tremendously on the score column. Often one set toward the end of the game will decide the outcome of that game. So again, strategy in bidding, don't bid wreckless nils, bid close but if there is any doubt in the hand then bid one trick lower and that way you allow yourself the luxury of being able to avoid being set. Because, being set is just dreadful and it also gets your partner to roll their eyes back."