History Of Spades

Nearly every part of Spades already existed before anyone called it Spades. Whist, the game it descends from, had four players in two fixed partnerships, 52 cards, thirteen tricks, the duty to follow suit if you can, and the rule that the highest card of the suit led wins unless someone trumps. Spades keeps all of that untouched, which is why reference works file it beside Whist and its relatives Bridge, Pinochle and Euchre.

What Spades changed was how the trump suit is chosen and what a bid means. Whist turns up a card to set trumps and has no bidding at all. Contract Bridge auctions the right to name trumps and adds a dummy hand and its own scoring on top. Spades takes the idea of a contract but strips it to a bare number of tricks, and settles the trump question for good by making spades trump in every deal.

The result is unusual: a contract with no auction. It reads like Bridge with the slow parts taken out, and Wikipedia describes it in much the same way. Who did the taking out, and why, neither reference says.

Wikipedia's article on the game places its invention in the Midwest of the United States in the late 1930s, and credits the bridge writer George Coffin with tracing it to Cincinnati, Ohio, between 1937 and 1939. Pagat, the card-game rules reference, is vaguer: it says only that Spades was invented in the USA in the 1930s.

It is worth being clear about how much weight that carries. Neither reference names an inventor, and neither points to a rulebook, a newspaper report or a club record from those years. The Cincinnati detail rests on one researcher's work rather than on any document from the period that either reference quotes.

So the fair position is this: the late-1930s American origin is consistent across the references, while the Cincinnati specifics come from a single researcher and are best held a little more loosely than they usually are. If anyone recorded the first game of Spades ever played, neither reference cites it.

The usual story puts the game's breakthrough in the Second World War, with soldiers carrying it from posting to posting. Wikipedia tells it that way, though that passage cites no source, so read it as the traditional account rather than a documented one. The explanation it offers is practical: Spades is simpler than Bridge or Euchre and easier to interrupt than Poker, and soldiers played all three. A hand takes a few minutes, the rules fit into one deal of teaching, and a game can be dropped when the call comes and picked up later.

One detail fits that story well. Pagat notes that, until fairly recently, Spades was little known outside the United States except in a few places where American troops were stationed, such as parts of Germany. A game that shows up around foreign bases and almost nowhere else has probably been travelling in somebody's kit bag.

If the account is right, Spades did not travel because it was better than Bridge. It travelled because it suited the circumstances: quick to teach, easy to put down, easy to pick up again. Convenience can carry a game a long way.

Here the record is firmer. After the war, veterans brought the game back home, and thanks to the GI Bill it spread among college students and into games at home, a point Wikipedia backs with a citation. It is a dormitory game almost by design: four people, one deck, no study required, and hands short enough to fit between lectures.

The rules wander, and Pagat shows how far: its basic rules are followed by a long collection of variations, which it notes are still common in face-to-face social games. Blind nil, the exact bag penalty, whether ten-for-two counts as a bid, what happens when the bids add up to less than thirteen, whether the game runs to 250 or 500: all of these change from one group to the next, and each group tends to believe its own version is the standard.

Under the variations, the core is the same wherever you look: spades are trump, thirteen tricks, follow suit, no leading spades until they are broken, ten points per bid trick, nil worth 100, and bags piling up to a 100-point penalty at ten. Those are Pagat's basic rules, and the ones this site plays.

The clearest trace of this in the reference works turns up in an unexpected place: the variations. Among the versions Pagat records is one contributed by Dennis J. Barmore, who used to run a mailing list for Spades, Bid Whist and Pinochle clubs in the United States, and Pagat describes it as widely played by African Americans.

It is a recognisable twist on the basic game. A pack with two distinct jokers is used, the twos of clubs and hearts are taken out so it still holds 52 cards, and the two jokers become the highest trumps, with the two of spades right behind them. For following suit, the jokers count as spades. Nobody needs a rulebook for that; it is the kind of rule you learn from the people across the table, and keep because they keep it.

Origin and culture are different questions, and it helps to keep them apart. The documented origin is the Midwest of the late 1930s, and neither reference ties the invention to any particular community. Who invented a game and who kept it alive are separate stories, and the second is often the richer one.

The 1990s did for Spades what the war had done half a century earlier: they put it in front of people who had never met anyone who played it. Pagat dates the shift to the mid-1990s, from when Spades became popular internationally because it was so easy to find in online card rooms.

Think about what that changed. A game that had travelled for decades by being taught across a table could suddenly be learned by anyone with a modem and a free evening, from strangers who might live on another continent.

Online play also did something the kitchen tables never managed. As Pagat puts it, online play and tournaments brought some standardisation to the rules. Software has to pick one number for the bag penalty; a kitchen table can argue about it all night. Game to 500, ten bags for minus 100 and nil at 100 are the values in Pagat's basic rules, and the ones this site uses.

Most of what changes from table to table happens around the edges: scoring values, jokers, extra bids. The middle holds. Spades is still a trick-taking game of thirteen tricks with a plain number for a bid and no auction attached, and that simplicity is the whole personality of the game. The bag penalty reads like a fix for players who underbid and coast on overtricks, though neither reference says who introduced it or when. And Pagat still describes the four-player partnership game as the usual one, with versions for two, three and six players alongside it.

That is the whole history in a sentence: a game put together in the late 1930s from parts that already existed, carried home by veterans and onto campuses, kept going for half a century at kitchen tables rather than in institutions, then handed a global audience by online card rooms. Not a long history, but a well-travelled one.