[Spades] Nils and team contract

Example:
Your partner bids 5 and you bid 0.
Your partner only gets 3 tricks but you earn 2.

What happens?
-50 points + 2 bags

Or

+50 points + 2 bags

BTW, it seems yahoo's rules are different:
"If a player who bid nil takes no tricks, his or her side earns a bonus of 100 points. If a nil bidder takes at least one trick, his or her side loses 100 points. In either case, the hand is also scored normally, with each side winning or losing points according to their bids and number of tricks taken"

But Microsoft's Spades agrees with the point that each trick by a nil bidder is 1 bag. According to Yahoo, it appears that a nil bidder only gets bags if their partnership's sum is greater than their contract.

However, both Yahoo and MSN don't clarify the question I posted at the beginning.

Thanks for letting me play this game. I probably won't have time to write an AI for it though. (Must have judge script! Ahh.. where is the sample script?)

-150 points and two bags, I think.

assuming you bid 0 and not nil this would be +50 and no bags. If you bid NIL and 5 this would be -150 and 2 bags.

B

You can bid 0 and not nil?

Yes, I meant nil in the question so the result then is -150 and 2 bags.
Thanks.

From the contest description..


I think the question was answered in another thread saying you get:

-100 points for missing the nil
+50 points for making the team contract
+2 bags for going over the nil
----
-50 points / +2 bags

If your partner had bid 4, then you would get:

-100 points for missing the nil
+40 points for making the team contract
+2 bags for going over the nil
+1 bags for going over the team contract
----
-60 points / +3 bags

This is not how yahoo plays it AFAIK, but the contest rules are also a common way to play it seems.

in most games of spades you can infact bid 0, I didn't check the rules and didn't remember that 0=nil in the contest.

In any event the last post was incorrect in the context of this game if you bid nil and your partner bids 5 but you make 2 and he makes 3, you do not get +50 for the team contract you get -100 for the missed nil, -50 for the partner's missed 5 bid (the nil players tricks do not count towards the partners contract under these rules) and 2 bags for the nil player taking two tricks.

-150 + 2bags or -148

Okay, I read Xs0's rules in the partners bidding thread.

Thanks all!

I guess these are a version of the standard rules, but I like this version because it punishes nil-bidders who screw up.

This is incorrect. A bag is not a point, and the tricks taken by the nil bidder do not count towards the contract, nor do they provide a point. The correct answer is actually the one posted by tkarkkainen: -150 pts and 2 bags.

actually a bag is a point because of the way spades are scored. When you reach 10 bags you receive -100 points but not -110 and the 10 points you have accumulated as bags wind up countering 10 points of the penalty. If you play any of the online spades games (msn, pogo etc. if you have a close game you'll find that 535 beats 532 which effectively means the bags are points. Call it what you will, that's how spades are scored and that is inline with the rules of this contest.

But what about bags that you get for failing a nil or dnil bid? Those do not count as points, but if you get ten of them they will certainly decrease your score. Of course, in playing versions of Spades that don't award bags for missing nils bids, the $bags = $points % 10 conversion is more useful.

I see how conceptually, it might be useful to equate bag with point. But in terms of scoring and how the judge script will behave, it's absolutely incorrect to say that -150 points and 2 bags is equivalent to -148 points. If you want further proof, consider the obvious case that 490 points with 10 bags is clearly not the same as 500 points with 0 bags .

I don't know how I can explain it any better than I did. If your score is 300 and you bid 5 and nil (as a team) and you make 3 and 2 respectively your team will score -150 (-100 for the failed nil and -50 for the failed 5 trick bid) and +2 for the 2 bags by the nil bidder and your score will be 152. Can you tell me how that's not -148? I fully agree that 490 and 10 bags is not the same as 500, but 490 and 10 bags is the same as 400 and not 390 as you might think because the 10 bags do count as ten points. I have been playing spades for about 30 years, I didn't just make this up. There are alot of different house rules but scoring bags as the left most digit of the score is very very common, almost universal.

The spades rules used here are the ones microsoft uses, and not yahoo.

Yahoo rules differences:
failed nil bids count toward team contract
failed nil bids don't get bags, only going over team contract does
For each trick over the contract, you get 1 point and 1 bag.
Units digit == number of bags

Microsoft rules:
failed nil bids don't count toward team contract
failed nil bids get 1 bag, and 0 points for each trick over the nil.
For each trick over the contract, you get 1 point and 1 bag.
Units digit will be the number of bags _only_ if you have no unsuccessful nil bids.

IMO the yahoo rules make it more strategic since breaking your nil actually has a point (if you can set the opp and save your partner)

actually most of the sites let you customize your game MSN does as does Pogo (which is a shared game site served up by 5-6 different portals). Nil bags is often a customizable piece. Helping your partner make his contract at the expense of your nil is frequently the rule online but infrequently the rule when playing f2f.

In any event, we need to keep to the rules of the contest because people keep posting erronius data. The scoring for the contest is pretty standard bags=1's column=points. Even though they count as points, you want to avoid them in almost every circumstance.

I agree that we need to stick to the rules for this contest, even though other rules may exist. Thus, let me quote from the contest description page:



This is actually pretty ambiguous, and does not resolve the question of whether or not tricks taken on a nil bid count for a point. However, the contest definition page also includes this example:



Note that if bakertrg were correct, the score above would be -27, because the trick taken by player 3 would count as a point. Also, in the forum thread called "Partners Bidding", xs0 (the contest administrator) gave this example:



Both of which agree with what I said above. I'm a bit baffled about how you missed this, bakertg, since the post after the one I quoted above is from you.

I guess it's a case of rtfm or rtfr in this instance. I just assumed I had understood the rules and didn't go back to verfiy the examples. It appears you are correct that nil bags are counted differently than "regular" bags but I have never seen any game of spades online or f2f where there were two kinds of bags. We need xs0's input on how nil bid bags are being scored. I'm used to playing there are no bags on a nil bid and the nil bidder's tricks are counted towards the team bid (even though obviously the nil bid is lost).