When a nil bid is too risky in Spades

By Marya · Updated by Holger in September 2026

I've shown you a nil hand with Aces and a nil hand with a void in a suit. Those are good nils because they aren't likely to get set. Sometimes people bid a risky nil, though. When that nil is set, it can lead to some unhappy discussions between partners.

What is a risky nil? In some cases, it can be hard to tell. One thing that makes a nil riskier is when you're first to bid. At that point, you don't know anything about the other players' hands. It can be an unpleasant surprise to bid nil and find that your partner has bid 1, maybe with a remark that they were planning to bid nil themselves. (That would be "table talk", which can also upset some people.) Now they have to defend your nil with a very poor hand. This may not be a problem if your opponents have bid high, for example 6 and 4, which makes the total bid 11. Then your opponents clearly have so many high cards that they may be forced to cover the nil. But if the total bid at the table turns out to be 8, you may well be in for trouble.

Another thing that makes a nil risky is a high spade in your hand, especially if you don't have enough low spades to "duck" the trick when spades are led.

Riskier bids are easier to justify at the end of the game, when you may have nothing to lose. They're harder to justify when there's no need for them. Some people enjoy defending risky nils. Others hate defending anything but the most obvious nil hands. So don't be surprised if you bid a risky nil and your partner doesn't help you. Still, Spades is a team game. In my view, you should always try to help your partner win their nil bid, no matter how crazy it is. I find it fun and challenging to defend a nil bid. But sometimes it just doesn't work out.

Here's a screenshot of a hand where my partner bid a risky nil and I couldn't make it work.

This nil is risky for the reasons above. My partner bid first, without knowing whether I had a good hand. Also, they only had 2 spades, but one of them was high (the Jack). As you can see, I had 3 spades, but small ones. And I had a lot of small clubs. For this nil to work, we'd need the opponents to take most of the tricks with high cards. Luckily, my left-hand opponent had bid 6. That means they have a lot of high cards and good (high) spades. So we'd have to hope that player would help cover my partner's bid without meaning to.

The YouTube video below shows how this hand worked out.

You can learn a lot from this video. My left-hand opponent has some pretty good cards. My low bid shows that I have a weak hand. My opponents should read this to mean I probably can't take a trick if they lead low cards. I think my right-hand opponent didn't do a great job of attacking the nil. For example, they led the Ace of Clubs in the third trick, when it would probably have been better to lead any of their many lower cards.

Despite this weak attack on the nil, we still managed to get set. In this case, I don't think the nil was justified. It was risky and there was no need for it. The scores were about even, in the mid-300s for each team, so the game wasn't near the end yet. It was still fun. Some people will argue there's never any reason to bid a nil like this. But it makes for an interesting game when your partner takes some risks. And sometimes it works.