What Are Bags in Spades?

A bag is a trick your team takes over its bid. Bags are also called overtricks or sandbags. They score a point each in the moment and cost you later, which is why every experienced player keeps one eye on the bag count. The full scoring rules live on the spades rules page; this is the short version for bags.

How it works

Your team contract is the sum of both partners' bids. Make it and you score 10 points per trick bid. Every trick beyond that is a bag:

• Each bag is worth +1 point right away.
• Bags carry over from hand to hand on a running count.
• When the count reaches 10 bags, your team loses 100 points and the count drops by 10.

So a team that makes its bid with three to spare gains 3 points now and moves three bags closer to a 100-point hit. That trade is terrible if it happens every hand.

Example

You bid 4, your partner bids 3. Team contract: 7. Between you, you take 9 tricks.

• Contract: 7 × 10 = 70
• Bags: 2 → +2 points
• Hand score: 72, and the bag count goes up by 2.

Now say your team already had 8 bags. Those 2 new bags bring the count to 10. You lose 100 on the spot and the count resets to 0. Your 72-point hand just became −28.

Overtricks and sandbagging

An overtrick is just another name for a bag: any book past your contract. Sandbagging is the tactic of collecting them on purpose by bidding under your hand. If you hold five sure tricks and bid three, you almost never get set, and the spare tricks trickle in as bags. It is a fine move in a single close hand, for example on the last hand of a quick match, where bags can't come back to bite you (as long as the count isn't about to hit 10).

Over a long game to 500 it backfires. Two bags a hand for five hands is a 100-point penalty. The fix is simple: bid what your hand is worth, and when you have already made your contract late in a hand, dump winners you don't need so the other team eats the bags instead.

"Bagging" the other team works the other way: when they have already made their bid, you can duck tricks and let them take the rest, pushing them toward their own penalty.

How Spades Night handles it

• 10 bags = −100, and the counter keeps the remainder (12 bags → penalty, 2 carried).
• Tricks taken by a partner whose nil failed count as bags, not toward the other partner's bid.
• In a double nil, any trick the pair takes is a bag.
• A set team gets no bags for that hand: the whole contract is lost instead.
• At a private table you can switch the bags penalty off.

Variations at other tables

Some tables reset the bag count to zero at the penalty instead of keeping the remainder. Some track bags in the last digit of the score itself (a team on 347 has 7 bags). A few play 5 bags for −50, or score bags at zero value. Agree before the deal if you play at home. For more on handling bags over a whole game, see spades scoring.

Related terms

• Book: another word for a trick.
• Set: missing your contract.
• Nil: bidding zero, and why a failed nil feeds your bag count.
• Double nil: both partners bid nil.
• Board: the minimum team contract of 4.