What is Spades?

You may have noticed that Jeff Shulman, who was one of the November Nine, this past year, while looking all scruffy and having an I-don't-give-a-crap atittude to his appearance or the WSOP ME, was sporting a logo for a Spades site. And you may have noticed the thousands of commercials for that site with that annoying blonde girl. Gah!

So what is Spades and how do you play Spades? Well, it's kind of like the bastard child of Bridge and War. You can play it as an individual or with a partner or some other version called Cutthroat, which is new to me. But the idea is that you deal out a full deck to 4 players and they then need to declare how many showdowns or tricks they are going to win from 0 to 13.

Sounds easy but there is a lot of strategy behind this game and if you ever want to start playing Bridge, which takes a lifetime to learn, you can start here because it gives you some of the basic principles without having to go too deep into the whole dark side of bidding.

Well, now you can play free Spades online. WHile there are several ways to go about it and there are some huge sites that offer free gaming, like Yahoo Spades and MSN Spades, you really want to go with a site that specializes in Online Spades.

Spadester is a great way to get started and they have pages that will go through the Spades rules and show you how easy it is to get started. They have all sorts of games, you can start your own games, you can play in tournament, etc. They even have a Spades Dictionary for the total newbs. They have freerolls and weekly promos and you can play for free or for real money. They also have a no-download version Java client.

Anyway, take a crack at Online Spades and if you meet my mother-in-law at one of the tables, tell her I said hi.

FTC crap disclaimer: Review. Duh!