Spades scoring explained: bags, nil and being set

Spades scoring is simple to state and easy to get wrong, because three separate things are happening at once: the contract, the bags, and nil.

The contract

Add the two partners' bids. That is the contract.

• Made it — ten points per trick *bid*. Bid six, take six or more: sixty.
• Set — minus ten per trick bid. Bid six, take five: minus sixty.

The punishment is on the bid, not the shortfall. Missing by one costs exactly what missing by five costs, which is why an ambitious bid is genuinely dangerous rather than merely optimistic.

Bags

Every trick over your bid is a bag, worth one point.

One point sounds like nothing. The catch is that bags accumulate across hands, and when the count reaches ten most houses take a hundred points off you — with the remainder carrying over, not resetting. A team sitting on nine bags is playing a completely different game from a team on one.

This is the rule that makes Spades a game rather than a race. Without it, the correct strategy would be to bid low every hand and take everything, which removes all the interest. With it, taking a trick you did not bid for is sometimes actively bad.

Worked example

Your team bids 5 and takes 8. You score 50, and take 3 bags. If you were already on 8 bags you are now on 11 — so you lose 100, and carry 1 into the next hand. Net for that hand: minus 50, on a contract you *made*.

That is the whole lesson of bags in one line.

Nil

Nil is a bid of zero. Make it — take no tricks at all — and your team scores a hundred. Take even one and you lose a hundred.

The nil bidder's partner bids normally, and their contract stands on its own. In practice their job stops being about tricks and becomes damage control: taking everything they can so nothing lands on their partner.

Blind nil is nil declared before looking at your cards. Usually two hundred either way, and usually only permitted when your team is well behind. It is a gamble taken on purpose, which is why it makes a table loud.

The part houses disagree about

If a nil bid fails, where do the tricks that broke it go?

• To bags — charged to the team, most common
• To the partner's contract — they count toward the bid
• Nowhere — ignored entirely

This is not a detail. It can change whether the team's contract was made at all, not just the bag count. Agree it out loud before the first deal.

Winning

First team to the target score wins — 500 traditionally, 300 for a night where people want more than one game. If both teams cross in the same hand, the higher score wins. An exact tie means another hand.

Keeping score without arguing

The arithmetic above is not hard, but doing it correctly eleven times while drinking is. Two things help: write the house rules down where everyone can see, and keep one running score that nobody has to reconstruct.

[A Spades night here](/play/spades) does both — the rules go on screen and lock at the first deal, and every hand is scored and kept as a card you can scroll back through when somebody disputes the total.