How a Bag Is Earned
A bag is a trick you did not need. When you make a numeric bid, every trick above it adds one point to your score and one bag to your pile. Bid six and win eight tricks: the hand is worth 62 points before any bag penalty, and you have two new bags. In the duel the bags are yours alone, and they follow you from hand to hand like unpaid parking tickets.
The Ten-Bag Penalty
Every ten bags cost 100 points, and anything above ten carries forward. Say you already had eight: the two new bags from the example make ten, so that hand becomes 62 minus 100, or -38 points, and your bag count drops back to zero. A hand that looked like a win has just cost you points. Go from nine bags to twelve and the penalty applies once, with two bags left over to start the next pile.
Deciding Whether to Take an Extra Trick
Making your bid always comes first, because missing a numeric contract loses ten points for every trick you bid. Once the contract is safe, glance at the bag counter before you win anything optional. Your hand is fixed once the draw ends, so from the very first lead you can plan which spare tricks to take and which to give away. NIL works differently: it scores +100 when you take no tricks and -100 when you take any, and the tricks from a broken NIL still count as bags, 1 point each, toward the ten-bag penalty.