Spades glossary
What Does Getting Set Mean in Spades?
A team is set when it takes fewer tricks than its contract. It loses 10 points for every trick it bid, and gets nothing for the tricks it did take. Bid 7, take 6: you lose 70. Setting the other team is half of good spades.
Getting set means your team won fewer tricks than it bid. It's the price of overbidding, and the reason the other team spends all hand trying to steal one book off you. How it fits into the rest of the scoring is on the spades rules page.
How it works
Your team contract is the sum of both partners' number bids. At the end of the hand:
- Made it (took at least that many tricks): +10 per trick bid, +1 per extra trick.
- Set (took fewer): −10 per trick bid. The tricks you did take score nothing and are not bags.
It doesn't matter if you miss by one or by five: the penalty is the same. That's why a team that knows it's going down sometimes gives up on its own contract and switches to bagging or setting the other side.
"Setting" is also a verb for the defence: "we need two more books to set them."
Example
You bid 4, your partner bids 3. Contract: 7. You win 6 books.
- You're set by one.
- Hand score: −70.
The other team bid 5 and took the other 7 books. They make 50 plus 2 bags. The difference between making and missing your seventh book was 140 points.
How Spades Night handles it
- Set = −10 × team contract. No bags on a set hand.
- A partner's nil is scored separately: your team can be set while the nil succeeds, or the other way round.
- Board raises a small team contract to 4, so a board team can be set even if both players bid 1.
- With 10 for 200 switched on at a private table, a set contract of 10 or more costs 200.
- The announcer calls it when a team goes down.
Variations at other tables
Some tables play a double set: miss by a large margin and you lose double. Others end the game when a team falls to −200 or below, so two bad sets early can finish you. Spades Night uses neither: a set is always 10 per trick bid, and you can climb back from any score.
Related terms
- Book: the tricks you needed.
- Bags: tricks over the contract, which a set hand never gets.
- Board: the team minimum of 4.
- 10 for 200: the big-contract bonus and its bigger set.
- Boston: the rare hand where the other team wins every book.
Questions people ask
What happens when you get set in spades?
Your team loses 10 points for each trick in its contract. The tricks you did win score nothing and don't count as bags. A 6-trick contract that falls short costs 60 points.
How many points do you lose for getting set?
Ten times your team's bid. Bid 4, lose 40; bid 9, lose 90. With the 10-for-200 option on, a set contract of 10 or more loses 200.
What is a double set in spades?
Some tables double the penalty when a team misses its bid by a lot, often by half or more. Spades Night does not use a double set: a set always costs 10 per trick bid.