11 ms·

How you play Spades is how you play life

163 points by feross 5y ago

cool_dude85 5y ago
Apparently no mention of the variant that, in my experience as a kid, was by far the most common: no bidding, 1 point to the winning team, or 2 if you win 10 books. Commonly, you bet 5 or 10 as a team and won for being first to the amount bet. I played or watched probably thousands of games in middle and high school and I don't think I ever saw anyone play the formal way.
- Avshalom 5y ago
  Yeah and as a result my bidding is still for shit. I always chalked it up to half the class sharing/standing-around one deck so we had to keep swapping out who was playing any given hand.
- sixstringtheory 5y ago
  Never heard of that variant myself. Played constantly in high school, mostly during calculus and comp sci; wrote a game engine for it in C++ in that class. Like poker, it's less about the cards and more about the social aspects. Actual card strategy is just table stakes. Can you bluff the other team into bidding too low or high? Can you read how your teammate bids and close the round accordingly? I've won plenty of games by forcing the other team to sandbag. By leaving bidding out you are playing glorified war. I can see it for kids but it's not terribly interesting. The only variant we'd play was a three player game where we'd have to remove a few cards to make the deck size a multiple of 3. Called it cutthroat because it's everyone for themselves. But we'd only play that if we couldn't get a fourth.
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >The only variant we'd play was a three player game where we'd have to remove a few cards to make the deck size a multiple of 3. We always just removed the 2 of clubs. 51/3=17 cards each.
    - sixstringtheory 5y ago
      Yes, thanks :) It's been a while and I didn't do the math...
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
  I've never heard of no-bidding. One of the nice things about bidding is that it allows you to infer information about the hands that are being held by the various people at the table. If you don't have any bidding, then you are playing a weird version of the card game War.
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zdw 5y ago
I (as a white American) didn't know about this history, and have played Spades as a family game for as long as I can remember. Some interesting variations - we usually played with no Jokers, no bag, but with a negative score rule when not meeting bid. Also, a card selection mechanic if 2 players are playing - the players would alternating picking cards from from the deck, decide whether they wanted it, then keep it and discard the next card, or discard and have to keep the next card. This prevents knowing exactly what the other player has in the 2 player scenario.
- saghm 5y ago
  Those are the exact rules I learned from my father as well (both of us white Americans)
- LynxInLA 5y ago
  I (also white American) play the same rules and was taught them by my grandfather. He said he learned the game in the Navy during WWII, but I'm not sure if that timeline lines up.
  - zdw 5y ago
    I don't know the lineage past my parents, but my grandparents did play a lot of cards (I learned Canasta from my grandmother), and my grandfather was in the Navy in WWII, so it's definitely possible.
    - dctoedt 5y ago
      > I learned Canasta from my grandmother Same here, sort of: My grandmother lived several states away but would visit for several weeks during summers — and I'd have to re-learn Canasta and Hearts every visit. Right now I have not a clue how either game is played.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    Can confirm that I played a lot of spades during the boring parts of my ~5 year Navy enlistment.
the_jeremy 5y ago
> How you play spades, is how you play life. When playing spades, you're dealt a hand and have no control over the cards you get -- unless you're cheating. Your primary goal is to play each round to the best of your abilities... This is just "life is like a box of chocolates". I was hoping for some sort of actual prediction, where playing aggressively correlated with certain behaviors.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  I was hoping for that as well. There's certainly a wide variety of play styles demonstrated by my (white, non-military, American) family and friends. Some are sandbaggers, some are risk-takers, some focus more or less on the bidding versus the actual cards being played, some prefer rule variants that add more randomness, some prefer rules that make it more tactical or information based...though I can't say I could draw a link between those game habits and real life personalities.
donio 5y ago
> Scroll right to start I'd rather not.
gumby 5y ago
I am normally ticked off by inventive presentations on the web (just give me a wall of text, please!) but really enjoyed this one.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Frustrated the shit out of me (on FF Android), until I was saved by remembering Reader Mode.
traceroute66 5y ago
I have to say... what terrible UX ! Scroll right? In a world where literally everyone else scrolls down ? Its completely un-natural if you're not using a tablet or smartphone ! Unless you have one of those fancy mice with the horizontal scroll button, but most people won't and will have to click and drag (rinse and repeat).
- munk-a 5y ago
  Additionally the "cards" holding text sometimes ended up being too small to actually display all their text - causing sudden truncation and unreadable sentences. I really dislike that everyone needs to avoid just having a string of paragraphs. Lastly, the UX decisions made text unselectable for copying - and has prevented the author from actually injecting footer references for survey data and the like. It's a UI that makes the author fight against it to actually convey information.
- wilg 5y ago
  Works great on a Mac, which have horizontally-scrolling trackpads or mice. But obviously they did this as a fun layout for a card game!
  - traceroute66 5y ago
    > which have horizontally-scrolling trackpads or mice. Same category as tablets and smartphones my friend. How about the billions of other internet users who have a keyboard and mouse ? At least make it keyboard tap or mouse-click friendly !
    - jacobolus 5y ago
      The right and left arrow keys scroll one card at a time.
      - wilg 5y ago
        It should say that though.
ratherlongname 5y ago
What score do people typically play to? I don't know. I can't read the font. Sigh guess I'll never know.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  250, 300, 350, 500, and "other". The counts for each are 40, 33, 67, 151, and 40 (respectively).
darkwizard42 5y ago
Loved the article. I come from a family of four and sometime when I was in college we picked up Spades as a family. Definitely resonated with me as a way to bond with friends and family. also for those interested: https://www.trickstercards.com/home/spades/ https://www.trickstercards.com/home/spades/ is an excellently developed FREE online spades site that we used during the pandemic
jandrewrogers 5y ago
Spades has long been the standard card game in the US military, which is at least partly responsible for its widespread propagation. That is where I learned it, and most other people I know either learned it in the military or from someone that was in the military. That said, I never played it that much outside the military. These days everyone seems to play poker.
- deleted 5y ago
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- KentGeek 5y ago
  I learned Spades in the USNavy, and didn't realize that it was intimately associated with African-American culture at all. I preferred Spades, but the most popular card game (at that time, in that setting) was Euchre.
  - jandrewrogers 5y ago
    I was not aware of the association with African-American culture either. I always associated it with spending time in the military. My grandfathers knew how to play from their service in WW2.
- deleted 5y ago
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bifurcations 5y ago
I had no idea about this cultural history. A bunch of us in high school comp sci used to play the online version bundled with Windows XP once we were done with our assignments...we'd try to queue up at the same time to get matched in the same game.
ALittleLight 5y ago
There was a line in there that reminded me a bit of a thing you might write in a school essay - "When playing Spades, you’re dealt a hand and have no control over the cards you get—unless you’re cheating." I'm having trouble thinking of a card game where you do get control over the cards you're dealt. Maybe there is one? I'm reminded of a time in high school where for some reason I had to write an essay connecting Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to some more modern environmentalism ideas. These "You don't control the hand you're dealt" are exactly the kind of thing that filled those essays in school. "The monster, representing the unchecked progress of technology, causes great harm to the world..." You can just draw random connections between any two ideas if you don't limit yourself to strong, unique, or meaningful connections.
- spullara 5y ago
  In games like Magic: The Gathering you do get to decide what possible cards you can be dealt.
  - dagw 5y ago
    And richer players have access better to cards that poorer payers can never hope to be dealt.
    - qsort 5y ago
      You do have a point, but this trope is overstated in a way that doesn't reflect reality IMO. At a competitive level the playing field is completely level. You have to assume players have access to all the cards, otherwise games like it make zero sense. Sure, it's an expensive game, but so are many other games and sports. It's an accessibility issue, not a balance issue: it's not like you can buy your way to victory. Plus, you can always play sealed and draft, if you really hate constructed formats!
      - taneq 5y ago
        > It's an accessibility issue, not a balance issue: it's not like you can buy your way to victory. It's only 'not a balance issue' because you consider access to all of the cards to be table stakes.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I used to hate spades, because I would get excoriated by my partner, for every mistake, and never given credit for doing well. I preferred Hearts, where I got to "stick it" to others. Yeah...I have issues.
Huwyt_Nashi_065 5y ago
I have a hunch this black author isn't fond of White people...
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I've never heard of spades until this article. I've played hearts (and always forget how), but not spades. Is this a UK thing?
- jasonladuke0311 5y ago
  As another commenter mentioned, a lot of people in the US learned to play Spades in the military.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  It's a US game, actually there are two games. Both follow from Whist and Bridge. There are, in the US, two games that go by the name of Spades but (as the primary differentiating characteristics) have different rules regarding bidding and scoring. In Black communities (the version discussed in the article) it's often played with a standard deck plus jokers (possibly removing other cards to make room for the jokers), and scoring is based on winning a bid and making book and some number of tricks over book (though not always, but the common form) which is similar to Contract Bridge and Whist. The other form is played with a standard deck and both partnerships can get points on each hand based on their bids, no need to make book (6 tricks as a base before getting points) just make your bid.
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    I am in my mid 40s, and as a kid in Cajun country you usually had a pretty good idea of how often older folks (grandparents and older) socially interacted on a casual basis with the other side of the white / black divide by how well they knew the rules to four card games. The black communities usually played either Hearts or Spades. The white communities would instead play either Bourre (boo-ray) or the Louisiana variant of Pedro (pee-droh). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourr%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourr%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_(card_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_(card_game) In unknown mixed company, most would settle on Hearts at first as it's the easiest to understand, and then usually alternate between Pedro and Spades.
- cschep 5y ago
hogFeast 5y ago
I have heard that Bezos, Brin, and Ellison have a Spades group together. Huge lessons for business strategy.
Huwyt_Nashi_066 5y ago
White-hating blacks are so awkward sometimes. They apparently cannot stop thinking about us, take childish pleasure in capitalizing "Black" but not "white" at every opportunity, and constantly perpetuate the hopeful idea that black culture is the envy of the world. And literally says that rules may be suspended if fried chicken is present...
GZJOHN 5y ago
Interesting, I was surprised to see this presented as an African American originating game as it's been widely played for generations all over Canada.
8note 5y ago
Hmm I learnt it from Microsoft, playing on either windows or the zine against computers only
SMAAART 5y ago
How you play any game, is how you play life. Especially games like Monopoly.
anigbrowl 5y ago
Fantastic presentation and very cool project. Would have liked a 'what is Spades?' card for people who are not familiar with the game and might miss out on all the good stuff due to disorientation.
chris_st 5y ago
There used to be a fantastic spades app on the Palm Pilot (!) which played pretty well, including fairly sensible partner play. There was a URL where you could get the source, but it was a dead URL, alas. Anyone know a good spades app for iOS? I have "Spades card classic", which features pretty abysmal play, and "Spades Masters", which is online-with-other-people only.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
I spent a good amount of time in the Midwest in an environment where about half the people were black, half white, and there was a good amount of card playing going on. The black people pretty universally wanted to either play Spades or Bid Whist. The white people played Euchre. There was little or no crossover among the groups. I only recall one white person who knew how to play Bid Whist, and one black person who knew how to play Euchre.
propter_hoc 5y ago
Really surprised to read this history, I had no idea that there was any ethnic background to this. I'm really a bridge player, but have played spades, hearts and euchre at times as well. All great games.
prepend 5y ago
I find it funny when people assume that something that is common within their subgroup is unique to their subgroup. I liked that this article called out spades’ role in African American culture. But the game isn’t unique to US African American culture. So it’s interesting how it’s presented as unique or special to a particular culture or subgroup. It would be like if I grew up in Iowa and everyone played spades, and I didn’t read the Wikipedia article or research the history of spades and thought it was a unique Iowan cultural experience. Instead of a common game places across many cultures and locations.
- WesternStar 5y ago
  Do you feel the same way about when Americans claim baseball is the national pastime or say "As American as apple pie".
  - mpalmer 5y ago
    Do you feel differently? Why be oblique if you have a constructive point to make?
  - retsibsi 5y ago
    Non-American here, but I'd say yes on the apple pie, no on the baseball. I'm used to multiple countries sharing a 'national sport' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_sport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_sport) so it doesn't seem like a claim about baseball being uniquely American, so much as Americans being really into baseball. Also the sport really was developed in the US and then exported, so I think they have the right to claim some kind of spiritual ownership if they want to. edit: looks like that last point applies in the case of African-Americans and spades, too
- blahedo 5y ago
  It doesn't have to be unique to the group to be special to the group.
  - prepend 5y ago
thr0wawayaway 5y ago
This might sound really inflammatory, but it's a genuine question that I just haven't ever heard anyone give an answer to. Can someone explain this? > "African-Americans were dealt a hell of a hand when we were forcibly brought to the American colonies as enslaved laborers." When I look at the median (and bottom-quartile) African-American vs. African, the former seem to live vastly better lives in almost every conceivable dimension, and I don't know a single one of the former who wishes that they were still living in Africa now. So, why is this a "hell of a hand"?
- aaronbeekay 5y ago
  Firstly, regardless of where a person ends up, if they get there by having several generations of their family kidnapped, enslaved, and systematically mistreated, I think it counts as “a hell of a hand”. Secondly, it sounds like your thinking isn’t too far away from “well, aren’t they better off now?”, but you’re assuming that the development of African nations and societies progressed completely independently from the colonization and enslavement of their populations by Europeans. If you’re going to construct an alternate timeline where nobody was kidnapped, why does it follow that African nations would have developed in the exact same ways as if they were? Didn’t the United States reap massive economic benefit from the labor of those enslaved people, benefit which certainly didn’t make it back to Africa? And isn’t a lot of the quality of life that we in the United States currently enjoy built on the back of that economic benefit? I’m engaging here because I do think you’re being earnest, but you should probably be aware that many people would find your question quite offensive, and I can see why. I think you’ve anticipated this, but I hope you don’t dismiss that offense as being “overly sensitive”, and instead ask yourself what you might be missing that would cause you to overlook the causes of such a strong emotional reaction.
  - sertsa 5y ago
    They weren't kidnapped. 90% were purchased from black Africans in Africa and then brought here. The slave trade had been going on internally in Africa and into the middle east for centuries before the Europeans wanted cheap labor after finding the Americas. African nations profited immensely from the slave trade. The colonization of Africa did not occur until after the new world mostly abolished slavery. This does not change the hand dealt to the people bought and brought to the New World however.
eplanit 5y ago
Geezus, now card games are being ruined by racial narrative, too. I and many other people grew up playing Spades, and this is the first whiff of any such historical rewriting that I've encountered (though I shouldn't be surprised). I have no doubt that blacks as a group developed an affinity for the game -- but this piece tries to claim what is otherwise a unifying game is really all about black history. This is right up there with last year's "Police were invented to hunt escaped slaves". Wikipedia is no ultimate source, but even there the history relates it to other, similar games, and reinforces that it was made very popular by GIs during WWII. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spades_(card_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spades_(card_game)
- arein3 5y ago
  typical behavior
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
  But US policing does have roots in slave patrols. Unless it is your belief that the American Bar Association is rewriting history. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/how-you-start-is-how-you-finish/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
  - staysafeanon 5y ago
    That is an opinion piece written by a professor of justice studies at a sociology department (shocked I tell you, shocked). She's never been an attorney, has never been a member of the American Bar Association, and her opinions are her own. That piece was included in the ABA's quarterly magazine as an op-ed, and does not reflect upon the opinions of the ABA. Your line "unless it is your belief that the American Bar Association is rewriting history" is categorically wrong as I just laid out above. Your core claim isn't entirely true either: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-origins-of-policing-in-the-united-states/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-origins-of-policing-in... The US Democratic party similarly has roots in slavery. By your logic it should similarly be defunded/disbanded.
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bargle0 5y ago
I learned spades from black students in college. My friends came up with a variation called “Nil Watch”, where one player in each partnership had to bid nil unless logically impossible (holding the big joker, holding the little joker and the 2, etc.). Then there was the drinking game version of that, called Death Watch. We used the jokers and the two of spades as trumps, but not the two of diamonds. We pulled out the two of hearts and the two of diamonds.
me_me_me 5y ago
The slide about learning the game is a bit shocking. 25% of players would not teach you the rules unless you convince them. only 55% would if you ask. Can somebody comment on the reasons? I have been asked few times in my life to teach chess and that was always a great boon. 'Someone wants to get into my hobby and I can be the one to show them the ropes' was always my though.

163 points by feross 5y ago

Apparently no mention of the variant that, in my experience as a kid, was by far the most common: no bidding, 1 point to the winning team, or 2 if you win 10 books. Commonly, you bet 5 or 10 as a team and won for being first to the amount bet. I played or watched probably thousands of games in middle and high school and I don't think I ever saw anyone play the formal way.

Avshalom 5y ago
Yeah and as a result my bidding is still for shit. I always chalked it up to half the class sharing/standing-around one deck so we had to keep swapping out who was playing any given hand.
sixstringtheory 5y ago
Never heard of that variant myself. Played constantly in high school, mostly during calculus and comp sci; wrote a game engine for it in C++ in that class. Like poker, it's less about the cards and more about the social aspects. Actual card strategy is just table stakes. Can you bluff the other team into bidding too low or high? Can you read how your teammate bids and close the round accordingly? I've won plenty of games by forcing the other team to sandbag. By leaving bidding out you are playing glorified war. I can see it for kids but it's not terribly interesting. The only variant we'd play was a three player game where we'd have to remove a few cards to make the deck size a multiple of 3. Called it cutthroat because it's everyone for themselves. But we'd only play that if we couldn't get a fourth.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >The only variant we'd play was a three player game where we'd have to remove a few cards to make the deck size a multiple of 3. We always just removed the 2 of clubs. 51/3=17 cards each.
  - sixstringtheory 5y ago
    Yes, thanks :) It's been a while and I didn't do the math...
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
I've never heard of no-bidding. One of the nice things about bidding is that it allows you to infer information about the hands that are being held by the various people at the table. If you don't have any bidding, then you are playing a weird version of the card game War.

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zdw 5y ago

I (as a white American) didn't know about this history, and have played Spades as a family game for as long as I can remember. Some interesting variations - we usually played with no Jokers, no bag, but with a negative score rule when not meeting bid. Also, a card selection mechanic if 2 players are playing - the players would alternating picking cards from from the deck, decide whether they wanted it, then keep it and discard the next card, or discard and have to keep the next card. This prevents knowing exactly what the other player has in the 2 player scenario.

saghm 5y ago
Those are the exact rules I learned from my father as well (both of us white Americans)
LynxInLA 5y ago
I (also white American) play the same rules and was taught them by my grandfather. He said he learned the game in the Navy during WWII, but I'm not sure if that timeline lines up.
- zdw 5y ago
  I don't know the lineage past my parents, but my grandparents did play a lot of cards (I learned Canasta from my grandmother), and my grandfather was in the Navy in WWII, so it's definitely possible.
  - dctoedt 5y ago
    > I learned Canasta from my grandmother Same here, sort of: My grandmother lived several states away but would visit for several weeks during summers — and I'd have to re-learn Canasta and Hearts every visit. Right now I have not a clue how either game is played.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  Can confirm that I played a lot of spades during the boring parts of my ~5 year Navy enlistment.

the_jeremy 5y ago

> How you play spades, is how you play life. When playing spades, you're dealt a hand and have no control over the cards you get -- unless you're cheating. Your primary goal is to play each round to the best of your abilities... This is just "life is like a box of chocolates". I was hoping for some sort of actual prediction, where playing aggressively correlated with certain behaviors.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago
I was hoping for that as well. There's certainly a wide variety of play styles demonstrated by my (white, non-military, American) family and friends. Some are sandbaggers, some are risk-takers, some focus more or less on the bidding versus the actual cards being played, some prefer rule variants that add more randomness, some prefer rules that make it more tactical or information based...though I can't say I could draw a link between those game habits and real life personalities.

donio 5y ago

> Scroll right to start I'd rather not.

gumby 5y ago

I am normally ticked off by inventive presentations on the web (just give me a wall of text, please!) but really enjoyed this one.

CRConrad 5y ago
Frustrated the shit out of me (on FF Android), until I was saved by remembering Reader Mode.

traceroute66 5y ago

I have to say... what terrible UX ! Scroll right? In a world where literally everyone else scrolls down ? Its completely un-natural if you're not using a tablet or smartphone ! Unless you have one of those fancy mice with the horizontal scroll button, but most people won't and will have to click and drag (rinse and repeat).

munk-a 5y ago
Additionally the "cards" holding text sometimes ended up being too small to actually display all their text - causing sudden truncation and unreadable sentences. I really dislike that everyone needs to avoid just having a string of paragraphs. Lastly, the UX decisions made text unselectable for copying - and has prevented the author from actually injecting footer references for survey data and the like. It's a UI that makes the author fight against it to actually convey information.
wilg 5y ago
Works great on a Mac, which have horizontally-scrolling trackpads or mice. But obviously they did this as a fun layout for a card game!
- traceroute66 5y ago
  > which have horizontally-scrolling trackpads or mice. Same category as tablets and smartphones my friend. How about the billions of other internet users who have a keyboard and mouse ? At least make it keyboard tap or mouse-click friendly !
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    The right and left arrow keys scroll one card at a time.
    - wilg 5y ago
      It should say that though.

ratherlongname 5y ago

What score do people typically play to? I don't know. I can't read the font. Sigh guess I'll never know.

Jtsummers 5y ago
250, 300, 350, 500, and "other". The counts for each are 40, 33, 67, 151, and 40 (respectively).

darkwizard42 5y ago

Loved the article. I come from a family of four and sometime when I was in college we picked up Spades as a family. Definitely resonated with me as a way to bond with friends and family. also for those interested: https://www.trickstercards.com/home/spades/ https://www.trickstercards.com/home/spades/ is an excellently developed FREE online spades site that we used during the pandemic

jandrewrogers 5y ago

Spades has long been the standard card game in the US military, which is at least partly responsible for its widespread propagation. That is where I learned it, and most other people I know either learned it in the military or from someone that was in the military. That said, I never played it that much outside the military. These days everyone seems to play poker.

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KentGeek 5y ago
I learned Spades in the USNavy, and didn't realize that it was intimately associated with African-American culture at all. I preferred Spades, but the most popular card game (at that time, in that setting) was Euchre.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  I was not aware of the association with African-American culture either. I always associated it with spending time in the military. My grandfathers knew how to play from their service in WW2.
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bifurcations 5y ago

I had no idea about this cultural history. A bunch of us in high school comp sci used to play the online version bundled with Windows XP once we were done with our assignments...we'd try to queue up at the same time to get matched in the same game.

ALittleLight 5y ago

There was a line in there that reminded me a bit of a thing you might write in a school essay - "When playing Spades, you’re dealt a hand and have no control over the cards you get—unless you’re cheating." I'm having trouble thinking of a card game where you do get control over the cards you're dealt. Maybe there is one? I'm reminded of a time in high school where for some reason I had to write an essay connecting Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to some more modern environmentalism ideas. These "You don't control the hand you're dealt" are exactly the kind of thing that filled those essays in school. "The monster, representing the unchecked progress of technology, causes great harm to the world..." You can just draw random connections between any two ideas if you don't limit yourself to strong, unique, or meaningful connections.

spullara 5y ago
In games like Magic: The Gathering you do get to decide what possible cards you can be dealt.
- dagw 5y ago
  And richer players have access better to cards that poorer payers can never hope to be dealt.
  - qsort 5y ago
    You do have a point, but this trope is overstated in a way that doesn't reflect reality IMO. At a competitive level the playing field is completely level. You have to assume players have access to all the cards, otherwise games like it make zero sense. Sure, it's an expensive game, but so are many other games and sports. It's an accessibility issue, not a balance issue: it's not like you can buy your way to victory. Plus, you can always play sealed and draft, if you really hate constructed formats!
    - taneq 5y ago
      > It's an accessibility issue, not a balance issue: it's not like you can buy your way to victory. It's only 'not a balance issue' because you consider access to all of the cards to be table stakes.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I used to hate spades, because I would get excoriated by my partner, for every mistake, and never given credit for doing well. I preferred Hearts, where I got to "stick it" to others. Yeah...I have issues.

Huwyt_Nashi_065 5y ago

I have a hunch this black author isn't fond of White people...

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I've never heard of spades until this article. I've played hearts (and always forget how), but not spades. Is this a UK thing?

jasonladuke0311 5y ago
As another commenter mentioned, a lot of people in the US learned to play Spades in the military.
Jtsummers 5y ago
It's a US game, actually there are two games. Both follow from Whist and Bridge. There are, in the US, two games that go by the name of Spades but (as the primary differentiating characteristics) have different rules regarding bidding and scoring. In Black communities (the version discussed in the article) it's often played with a standard deck plus jokers (possibly removing other cards to make room for the jokers), and scoring is based on winning a bid and making book and some number of tricks over book (though not always, but the common form) which is similar to Contract Bridge and Whist. The other form is played with a standard deck and both partnerships can get points on each hand based on their bids, no need to make book (6 tricks as a base before getting points) just make your bid.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  I am in my mid 40s, and as a kid in Cajun country you usually had a pretty good idea of how often older folks (grandparents and older) socially interacted on a casual basis with the other side of the white / black divide by how well they knew the rules to four card games. The black communities usually played either Hearts or Spades. The white communities would instead play either Bourre (boo-ray) or the Louisiana variant of Pedro (pee-droh). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourr%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourr%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_(card_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_(card_game) In unknown mixed company, most would settle on Hearts at first as it's the easiest to understand, and then usually alternate between Pedro and Spades.
cschep 5y ago

hogFeast 5y ago

I have heard that Bezos, Brin, and Ellison have a Spades group together. Huge lessons for business strategy.

Huwyt_Nashi_066 5y ago

White-hating blacks are so awkward sometimes. They apparently cannot stop thinking about us, take childish pleasure in capitalizing "Black" but not "white" at every opportunity, and constantly perpetuate the hopeful idea that black culture is the envy of the world. And literally says that rules may be suspended if fried chicken is present...

GZJOHN 5y ago

Interesting, I was surprised to see this presented as an African American originating game as it's been widely played for generations all over Canada.

8note 5y ago

Hmm I learnt it from Microsoft, playing on either windows or the zine against computers only

SMAAART 5y ago

How you play any game, is how you play life. Especially games like Monopoly.

anigbrowl 5y ago

Fantastic presentation and very cool project. Would have liked a 'what is Spades?' card for people who are not familiar with the game and might miss out on all the good stuff due to disorientation.

chris_st 5y ago

There used to be a fantastic spades app on the Palm Pilot (!) which played pretty well, including fairly sensible partner play. There was a URL where you could get the source, but it was a dead URL, alas. Anyone know a good spades app for iOS? I have "Spades card classic", which features pretty abysmal play, and "Spades Masters", which is online-with-other-people only.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

I spent a good amount of time in the Midwest in an environment where about half the people were black, half white, and there was a good amount of card playing going on. The black people pretty universally wanted to either play Spades or Bid Whist. The white people played Euchre. There was little or no crossover among the groups. I only recall one white person who knew how to play Bid Whist, and one black person who knew how to play Euchre.

propter_hoc 5y ago

Really surprised to read this history, I had no idea that there was any ethnic background to this. I'm really a bridge player, but have played spades, hearts and euchre at times as well. All great games.

prepend 5y ago

I find it funny when people assume that something that is common within their subgroup is unique to their subgroup. I liked that this article called out spades’ role in African American culture. But the game isn’t unique to US African American culture. So it’s interesting how it’s presented as unique or special to a particular culture or subgroup. It would be like if I grew up in Iowa and everyone played spades, and I didn’t read the Wikipedia article or research the history of spades and thought it was a unique Iowan cultural experience. Instead of a common game places across many cultures and locations.

WesternStar 5y ago
Do you feel the same way about when Americans claim baseball is the national pastime or say "As American as apple pie".
- mpalmer 5y ago
  Do you feel differently? Why be oblique if you have a constructive point to make?
- retsibsi 5y ago
  Non-American here, but I'd say yes on the apple pie, no on the baseball. I'm used to multiple countries sharing a 'national sport' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_sport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_sport) so it doesn't seem like a claim about baseball being uniquely American, so much as Americans being really into baseball. Also the sport really was developed in the US and then exported, so I think they have the right to claim some kind of spiritual ownership if they want to. edit: looks like that last point applies in the case of African-Americans and spades, too
blahedo 5y ago
It doesn't have to be unique to the group to be special to the group.
- prepend 5y ago

thr0wawayaway 5y ago

This might sound really inflammatory, but it's a genuine question that I just haven't ever heard anyone give an answer to. Can someone explain this? > "African-Americans were dealt a hell of a hand when we were forcibly brought to the American colonies as enslaved laborers." When I look at the median (and bottom-quartile) African-American vs. African, the former seem to live vastly better lives in almost every conceivable dimension, and I don't know a single one of the former who wishes that they were still living in Africa now. So, why is this a "hell of a hand"?

aaronbeekay 5y ago
Firstly, regardless of where a person ends up, if they get there by having several generations of their family kidnapped, enslaved, and systematically mistreated, I think it counts as “a hell of a hand”. Secondly, it sounds like your thinking isn’t too far away from “well, aren’t they better off now?”, but you’re assuming that the development of African nations and societies progressed completely independently from the colonization and enslavement of their populations by Europeans. If you’re going to construct an alternate timeline where nobody was kidnapped, why does it follow that African nations would have developed in the exact same ways as if they were? Didn’t the United States reap massive economic benefit from the labor of those enslaved people, benefit which certainly didn’t make it back to Africa? And isn’t a lot of the quality of life that we in the United States currently enjoy built on the back of that economic benefit? I’m engaging here because I do think you’re being earnest, but you should probably be aware that many people would find your question quite offensive, and I can see why. I think you’ve anticipated this, but I hope you don’t dismiss that offense as being “overly sensitive”, and instead ask yourself what you might be missing that would cause you to overlook the causes of such a strong emotional reaction.
- sertsa 5y ago
  They weren't kidnapped. 90% were purchased from black Africans in Africa and then brought here. The slave trade had been going on internally in Africa and into the middle east for centuries before the Europeans wanted cheap labor after finding the Americas. African nations profited immensely from the slave trade. The colonization of Africa did not occur until after the new world mostly abolished slavery. This does not change the hand dealt to the people bought and brought to the New World however.

eplanit 5y ago

Geezus, now card games are being ruined by racial narrative, too. I and many other people grew up playing Spades, and this is the first whiff of any such historical rewriting that I've encountered (though I shouldn't be surprised). I have no doubt that blacks as a group developed an affinity for the game -- but this piece tries to claim what is otherwise a unifying game is really all about black history. This is right up there with last year's "Police were invented to hunt escaped slaves". Wikipedia is no ultimate source, but even there the history relates it to other, similar games, and reinforces that it was made very popular by GIs during WWII. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spades_(card_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spades_(card_game)

arein3 5y ago
typical behavior
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
But US policing does have roots in slave patrols. Unless it is your belief that the American Bar Association is rewriting history. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/how-you-start-is-how-you-finish/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
- staysafeanon 5y ago
  That is an opinion piece written by a professor of justice studies at a sociology department (shocked I tell you, shocked). She's never been an attorney, has never been a member of the American Bar Association, and her opinions are her own. That piece was included in the ABA's quarterly magazine as an op-ed, and does not reflect upon the opinions of the ABA. Your line "unless it is your belief that the American Bar Association is rewriting history" is categorically wrong as I just laid out above. Your core claim isn't entirely true either: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-origins-of-policing-in-the-united-states/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-origins-of-policing-in... The US Democratic party similarly has roots in slavery. By your logic it should similarly be defunded/disbanded.

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bargle0 5y ago

I learned spades from black students in college. My friends came up with a variation called “Nil Watch”, where one player in each partnership had to bid nil unless logically impossible (holding the big joker, holding the little joker and the 2, etc.). Then there was the drinking game version of that, called Death Watch. We used the jokers and the two of spades as trumps, but not the two of diamonds. We pulled out the two of hearts and the two of diamonds.

me_me_me 5y ago

The slide about learning the game is a bit shocking. 25% of players would not teach you the rules unless you convince them. only 55% would if you ask. Can somebody comment on the reasons? I have been asked few times in my life to teach chess and that was always a great boon. 'Someone wants to get into my hobby and I can be the one to show them the ropes' was always my though.