Despite a large percentage of twerps in the pool of potential opponents, I enjoy the online spades game offered as part of the standard Windows package. Spades is deep enough to be worth the effort, yet can be played in a manageable bite.
Well, worth he effort if you don’t get a twerp in your anonymous foursome. You know the guys I mean: the ones who quit when they begin to lose, or the ones who deliberately make unachievable bids, or the ones who just stop playing without quitting and letting the computer take over, or who automatically risk a double-nil bid (worth 200 or -200 points on a 500-point game) on their first bid, hoping sheer luck will carry them to victory and spoiling any sense of achievement and competition. And, of course, there’s always the risk of getting stuck with a partner who is just plain incompetent.
In theory, the ability to select your difficulty level—beginner, intermediate, or expert—allows you to be matched with players of roughly the same caliber. Gross incompetence can be forgiven among beginners, but I’ve been playing at intermediate for a while now, and there’s plenty of duffers there, too: oafs who actively try to take extra bags after both partnerships have made their contract, trump your honors, bid nil with four trumps in hand… no mistake is so obvious that self-styled intermediate players won’t make it. Repeatedly.
As a result, I win more than I lose. Barring an incompetent partner, I win a lot more than I lose. So I’m considering shifting gears up to expert. But there’s a problem.
I’m getting by just fine at intermediate level following a list of rules of thumb: second hand low, third hand high; count on winning tricks with aces and kings and spades beyond your third; don’t place a second nil bid on a hand if that would leave partner leading blind; signal the hilo and the false hilo with queen in hand; avoid leading to partner’s possible unprotected king. Such rules are usually enough to bring the contract home. But to my mind, expert play goes beyond rules of thumb to a deeper understanding of the game. It should include genuine card counting, which I can’t quite manage. (I can count spades, or honors, but rarely both, and never the whole deck.) Expert players should be able not only to bring the contract home, but bid all the tricks they can take, for therein (setting aside gross luck) lies the margin of victory. They know when to draw trump, and understand the importance of placing the lead in the proper player’s hands and how to make it happen when it is important. And I’m not confident I can do that. Certainly not right away, maybe not ever—trial and error against tougher opponents may teach an intuitive grasp of what not to do, but without table talk, there’s no real opportunity to learn the game’s subtleties in the post-game analysis.
Moving up in to the big leagues, then, would make me the bad partner: the guy who calls himself an expert but needlessly takes or loses the wrong tricks, misses cues, and generally throws away the game. Every so often, when there aren’t enough players online, the system will match me with a table of experts, or slip an expert into an otherwise intermediate game. Almost invariably, the expert(s) will quit immediately, unwilling to subject himself to twenty minutes of mediocre play. Who could blame them? Sadly, I’m stuck with a bad choice: live with the twerps, or become someone else’s twerp.
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