My knowledge of card games is limited to Texas No-Limit Hold ‘em poker and I can finish a game of Solitaire on the computer. As long as it did not involve too much thinking, I will be okay. Well, maybe except for poker, but I was kind of forced to learn that one as I need to keep up with my friends every Saturday.
Just recently, I had come across a card game called Spades. I am not entirely sure how it is played, but from what I understand, there are three ways to play it: Individual (four players), Cutthroat (three players) and Partnership (two pairs against each other). You can learn how to play online spades on Spadester.com.
Spades is an all-American card game invented in Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1930’s and had grown in popularity during the 1940’s. The game rose in popularity during World War II because the soldiers from Cincinnati had introduced the game to other soldiers in various military stations worldwide. Veterans brought the game back home to the US after the war, and eventually also became popular among college students and as home games, as an alternative to poker.
Spades is a trick-taking card game in which the partnerships’ objective is to take the lowest amount of tricks they bid on before the game began. Spades, along with Bridge, Hearts and Oh Hell, are all parts of the Whist family of card games. In spades rules, the trump suit is always the spade, unlike in the other games where the trump is decided randomly or by the highest bidder.
The most common game of spades is the Partnership, which is the kind featured in Yahoo Spades. In Spades Partnership, partners sit across each other on the table. A standard 52-card deck is dealt and the suits are ranked from highest to lowest: spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds. The cards are ranked from highest to lowest as follows: A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 and 2. The players are dealt the same number of cards at the beginning of the game and each player is asked to make a bid. The player to the dealer’s left leads the game with any card except a spade and this continues in a clockwise manner. If a spade or the highest card of a common suit is played, that means that a trick is taken.
It is possible to play free spades online and Spadester.com offers a wide range of possibilities for you to enjoy this. Playing online spades there is far better than doing so at Yahoo Spades, MSN Spades or Pogo Spades, if only because you can customize how you want to experience your game of spades. All you need to do to get started is download a simple software, like you do with online poker sites, and then take it from there. For beginners, it is better to start playing the free games first, before moving on to the real money games.
