Spades Bidding Rules: Nil, Blind Nil and Bags

As soon as the hand is dealt, before the first card is led, every player commits to a number: how many of the thirteen tricks they expect to win. That number is a promise, not a guess you get graded on gently — meeting it pays you, missing it in either direction costs you.

Bid low and win more tricks than you promised, and you still only score for the number you bid — the extras become bags, covered below. Bid high and come up short, and you lose points for the bid you couldn't back up. The only bid that rewards winning nothing at all is nil.

A nil bid is a separate promise from a number bid: you are committing to win exactly zero tricks for the whole hand. Succeed and your side scores a flat +100. Fail — take even a single trick — and it costs −100 instead. Your bid number for scoring purposes is separate from this bonus, so nil is really a side bet layered on top of the hand.

Nil only makes sense with a genuinely weak hand — no spade higher than a middling one, and no long suit likely to run into winners. In partnership play, your partner still bids and plays their own hand normally; a lot of a nil succeeding comes down to your partner covering the tricks your low cards would otherwise lose, by taking the lead in suits you're weak in before you're forced to win one.

Blind nil is nil bid before you've looked at your cards at all — it's only available as the very first bid of the hand, before anyone at the table, including you, has committed to a number yet. You lock it in on faith, then see your hand.

The reward matches the risk: succeed and your side scores +200, double a normal nil. Fail and it costs −200. It's a bid you reach for when your side is well behind and a normal nil isn't enough swing to matter — not something to take on a strong hand, since you don't get to change your mind once your cards are dealt.

Making your bid scores 10 points per trick bid, plus 1 point for every trick you win beyond it. Those extra tricks look free in the moment — you're still up points either way — but each one is also logged as a bag, and bags carry over from hand to hand.

Reach 10 accumulated bags and the penalty hits automatically: an immediate −100 points, and your bag count drops back by 10 rather than resetting to zero. Overbid and fail your number entirely, and there's no partial credit either — you simply lose 10 points per trick you bid, whether you missed by one trick or seven.

In partnership games, it's tempting to think of your bids as combining into one team number — bid 3, your partner bids 4, the team needs 7. That's not quite how the scoring works here: you and your partner each bid your own number, and each of you is judged against your own bid individually. What you share is the scoreboard — both results land in the same team total, but your overtricks don't rescue their shortfall and their success doesn't erase your failure.

That makes in-play communication matter more than the bid itself. There's no bidding chat between partners, so the information has to travel through the cards — what you follow with, what you're clearly void in, when you let a trick go rather than fight for it. Reading that is most of what separates a good partnership from two people bidding alone at the same table.

Because the penalty only fires once your running total reaches 10, the count itself becomes something to manage, not just something that happens to you. Sitting on 7 or 8 bags with a comfortable lead is a real moment to bid tight and take exactly what you promise — one careless overtrick away from a 100-point hit you didn't need to take yet.

The flip side is timing it on your terms instead of the board's: if the penalty is coming either way, a lot of players would rather eat it on a hand where they're already bidding aggressively for a big score, than have it land quietly on a hand where every point was going to matter. You can't avoid the bags a made bid earns you, but you can choose how hard you push for extras once you're close to the threshold.