Posted 1:20 PM by Floyd

From 1992 to 2000 I lived in downtown Palo Alto. Yesterday I was doing some errands in the vicinity, and stopped by to do some shopping. One of my stops was at Borders, which is my favorite bookstore. It was built in the old Varsity theater, so it has a neat narrow courtyard in front, and an open and high-ceilinged two story floorplan. Also Borders had a good bridge book selection. (Alas, it was even better a few years ago; now they have one shelf of bridge books instead of two.)

I browsed the bridge books and came across Spades for Winners, by Marty Fleishman. Spades is a trick-taking card game with a trump suit; in the play of the cards it is like bridge where spades is always trumps and there is no dummy -- all four players play their cards. (Actually it is exactly like the bridge ancestor whist. One card play difference in spades is that spades may not be led until broken.) It was interesting to see the bridge concepts repackaged for spades form. Fleishman talks about what to lead from honor sequences, playing high-low to show interest in the suit led by partner, and leading a low card to show interest in that suit.

Not all bridge concepts made their way into his book. For instance, Fleishman gives an example where a player leads a singleton club to his partner's ace. Partner, holding the AK of diamonds, cashes the diamond king before returning a club. The player "cuts" (spades slang for trumping) and knows to lead a diamond back for another cut. A bridge players wouldn't bother with the diamond king; he would just lead his lowest club to show a diamond entry.

Spades bidding is of course very primitive compared to bridge bidding, because the only possible bids are a number of tricks, there being no possibility of an alternate trump suit. Also there is no real possibility of conventional bidding, because you get one chance to express the number of tricks you expect to take.

I do not mean to imply that spades is a simpler game than bridge. In the card play, spades is much more complex. It is harder to play with all the other hands concealed; in bridge the dummy is exposed and you get to see half the deck. Another aspect that makes play difficult is the scoring system for overtricks -- "bags", in spade lingo. In bridge you are always happy to get overtricks. In some forms of scoring they are not important and can be sacrificed to ensure the contract, but overtricks always represent some sort of gain.

In spades, bags are dangerous. Each bag is worth one point, but if you get ten bags, you lose 100 points! So in some situations it is important to dump tricks rather than take them.

The problem with spades is that card play is so difficult -- both to work out the lie of the cards and to get two players to adopt a consistent plan -- that advanced card play is impossible. For instance, Fleishman simply recommends that you always pull exactly two rounds of trumps. In bridge you would know how many trumps are missing, but this information is not available in spades. Even a simple play like a squeeze or an endplay would be something to write home about if accomplished by a spades player.