Playing without the -26 option takes a lot away from the game. If someone is very close to going over 100, and another person has a lead, generally there is (unspoken) collusion to help last place shoot the moon by the non leader so they can go -26 and everyone else has a higher EV at winning. It's definitely a strategically rich addition to the game and also gets people MAD.

edit: Another way of looking at it is if you have to add 26 for shooting, and that makes someone go out but you don't win, then you cant try to shoot which seems ridiculous, especially if by not shooting you yourself will go over 100 since your hand is bad. Shooting should not be a disadvantage.

Playing without -26 is just bad. Almost as bad as allowing double nils in spades

I kept thinking the option was to take 26 points instead.

-26 should be an option.

QoS breaks blood

Second opinion is ridiculous

Just completed 1k games at the Spades app by Karman games. I thought it was worthy of remembrance.





The AI plays terrible of course. I have seen it overtake Js of a nil-bidder and return a spade. Most of the games the bid ends in 10 trick total and you are usually able to donate most bags to the opponents.

I think winning 70% is nothing to sniff at. Give it a try. More often than you'd like, your opponents land a couple of NILs or your esteemed partner fails at one and the comeback is hard.

I never use UNDO for correcting mistakes btw. If I miscount, I take the loss. I only use it if I make a mechanical error (misclick) and sometimes when I failed to see a NIL bid (oh he did NIL, lets not lead this Kc then).

The stats are interesting. I do less NILs (variance is bad for you), I fail more bids, I bid higher, I make less tricks and I win predominantly by getting less bags than the opponents.

The "Bids saved by partner" is amusing and ought to be renamed to "Bids I saved my partner from oodles of bags"

I had a pretty large sample of online ranked games on the Euchre app for them. I was at 62%~ for my winrate and had nearly 0.5 points per hand which was 50% higher than the 2nd place person behind me (other team obv). I also bid exponentially more than my opponents as well and set more but obv massively outpointed them.

If anybody ever wants to play a game of spades (assuming there is still somewhere online to play 4-player spades) then I’d be down.

I haven’t played in many years, but a few decades ago I was one of the top players in the US and spent a few years playing it non-stop. It’s a great game that I should play again someday.

In for spades

Not in Spades online. If I go spend playing cards online I prefer bridge. Spades is amazing, but bridge is the nuts.

Would also play bridge with the understanding that it's been forever since I played and I wasnt that good back then either.

I'll play bridge if you guys accept I don't know how to play lul. If not I would of course understand.

Nice trick in Spades

Can anyone recommend a Euchre app for iPhone? I'm seeing a decent number of different apps available, primarily looking to play with real people

The problem(s) with euchre apps -

Players love to quit in the middle of the game and leave you playing with bots.
Players are just horrible at the game. There's such little strategy and people still muck it up.

I just played a game of Spades and I had QT852 of spades and made zero tricks. Had to duck all of them to avoid bags

But why?

Prob due to their partner I'd speculate or unforeseen circumstances on bidding.

Because my partner had made 2 tricks more than his bid, so I had to make two less.

bump because weird spades spot

pairs game, third or so deal so nowhere near end game

d: 24567
c: 35T
h: 47T
s: 39

partner bids first and goes nil, RHO goes 6. is there ever a spot for both players in a partnership to nil?

any good place to play euchre?

I played on yahoo back in the day and got my rating up pretty high so the games were quite competitive against other highly rated players but haven't found any place similar since

Michigan

Apparently michiganders use the fives to keep score so it's likely not even worth it.

wut...6 and 4 all day

I'll play with you on the Karmin Euchre app if you want. I was around 3k on Yahoo back when.