Cutthroat Spades - Free Cutthroat Spades: No Partners, Every Hand for Themselves

Cutthroat Spades Online

Cutthroat spades is spades with the partnerships taken out: 2 to 6 players each bid, play, and score entirely for themselves, and Foony runs it free in your browser with invite-link rooms and 4 bot difficulty tiers. If the base game is new to you, spades is a trick-taking card game. A trick is one quick round where every player puts a single card on the table and the best card takes the pile. Before any cards hit the table, each player bids, which is a promise of how many tricks they will win that hand (a hand is one full deal of the cards).

Cutthroat is not a modern house rule. Wikipedia's history of spades records the game being played two ways since it spread through 1930s America: as a partnership game and as a solo game, which players nicknamed cutthroat because at this table, nobody is on your side.

Cutthroat vs Partnership Spades

Two ideas carry over unchanged from the classic game, so here they are up front. A nil is a bid of exactly zero tricks, worth 100 points if you manage to win none. A bag is any extra trick you win beyond your bid, worth 1 point each until you collect 10 of them and lose 100. What changes is who owns them:

Everything else plays exactly like classic spades. Spades are always trump, meaning any spade beats any card of another suit. You must play the same suit as the trick's opening card whenever you can, and nobody may lead a spade until a spade has already been played earlier in the hand. Making your bid scores 10 points per trick bid, and the game ends when a player reaches the target score while ahead of everyone else. Here is how a trick is decided:

3 Handed Spades and Other Table Sizes

The most famous cutthroat table is 3 handed spades, and Foony deals it the traditional way, which the three-player rules on Pagat describe like this: 17 cards to each of the 3 players, with the one leftover card set aside for that game. Every seat count gets its own deal:

The deal size changes how the game feels. Your maximum bid equals the cards in your hand, so 3 player spades runs on huge 17-card hands where a long spade suit can be worth double-digit tricks. A 6-player deal hands you just 8 cards, and suddenly a single ace is a bid worth making. The right to bid first is not fixed either, it moves one seat around the table every hand.

How to Play Cutthroat Spades on Foony

This page opens straight into the real game, already set to the Cutthroat preset: no partners, a 20 second turn timer, and first to 300 points. Create a room, hand out the invite link, and friends can jump in from a phone or a desktop browser. When the game starts, every player in the room gets a seat, anywhere from 2 to 6, and a room can hold up to 100 people beyond that, with extra people waiting in line behind a seat and taking turns playing its cards.

The host controls the room settings. The Mode picker switches between Cutthroat (solo) and Partnership (2v2), Play to sets the target at 100, 200, 300, or 500 points, and the turn timer runs from 5 to 60 seconds per decision or switches off entirely for a relaxed table. Short on humans? Bots fill any seat at one of four difficulty tiers, Easy, Casual, Skilled, or Expert, with the host picking a single tier for the whole room.

A hand itself takes about a minute to learn. Everyone bids in turn, and a bid of 0 is a nil. Then tricks play out one by one: the first card sets the suit, you follow that suit if you can, the highest card of that suit wins unless someone plays a spade, and the winner of each trick starts the next. After the last trick, the hand is scored and the next hand is dealt.

Cutthroat Spades Scoring

Make your bid and you score 10 points for every trick you bid, plus 1 point for each extra trick, and each of those extras is a bag. Fall even one trick short and the whole bid fails, costing you 10 points per trick bid. Collect 10 bags over the course of the game and you lose 100 points on the spot, then the bag count restarts. A successful nil pays 100 points, a failed one costs 100, and the tricks a failed nil wins count toward your bag total too. Here is one full 3-handed hand, all 17 tricks accounted for:

Winning takes one more thing: you must reach the target score while ahead of everyone else. If the top players are tied at or past the target, another hand is dealt until one of them is ahead.

Cutthroat Strategy

Bid only what your own hand can win, because nobody else's tricks count toward your bid. Count your sure winners honestly: each ace is one trick, a king is most of one when you also hold a smaller card of its suit, and in a 17-card hand each spade past your third tends to win on its own. When the count sits between two numbers, take the lower one. Missing your bid wipes out all 10 points per trick, while an extra trick still pays 1 point and only hurts once the bags add up.

Treat nil as a genuine gamble here. In partnership spades your partner can play high cards over yours and take the dangerous tricks, but at a cutthroat table both opponents profit when your nil fails, and they will lead their smallest cards specifically to force a trick onto you. Bid it only when nearly every card you hold is low enough to lose.

Watch what your opponents cannot follow. The moment a player puts a different suit on a trick, they are out of the suit that started it, and from then on they can steal any trick in that suit with a spade. Stop starting tricks in suits your opponents have run out of, and once your own bid is safely made, play your leftover high cards on tricks an opponent has already won, so they cannot win you extra tricks and bags later.

Classic Partnership Spades

When you want a teammate across the table again, the main spades page opens on the classic partnership game, the 4-player 2v2 where you and a partner win or lose on one combined bid. The same room settings apply there, including the Classic 500 preset for the traditional marathon to 500 points. Learn the game solo against bots in cutthroat, then bring a partner and see how different the same 52 cards feel when half the table is rooting for you.