When you’ve got exactly three players, the partnership game won’t work, so Spades has a solo version for it: Cutthroat Spades. There are no teams here. It’s every player for themselves, all the way to the finish, and the name fits, because two of you will usually be teaming up in spirit to stop whoever’s in front. The rules are close to the standard game with a couple of changes to make it work for three, and this page covers all of them.
If you don’t know the base game yet, learn that first on the Spades rules page. Everything below assumes you can already bid, play a trick, and keep score.
Setting Up for Three Players
You’ll use a standard 52-card deck, but 52 doesn’t split evenly among three players. The fix is simple: take one card out of the deck before you start, most commonly the two of clubs, which leaves 51 cards. Those deal out evenly at 17 cards each, so every hand has 17 tricks in it rather than the usual 13.
Everything else about the setup is the same. The cards rank ace high down to the two, spades are trump, and you cut or pick to decide who deals first. Deal all 51 cards out one at a time, clockwise, 17 to each player.
Bidding on Your Own
With no partners, bidding is purely a solo affair. Each player looks at their 17 cards and bids the number of tricks they expect to win, starting with the player to the dealer’s left and going clockwise. The bids don’t need to add up to any particular number, and you’re only ever responsible for your own.
Nil is usually allowed, and the same warning from the other no-partner formats applies here, only stronger. There’s nobody to cover you, and now there are two opponents who’d be glad to hand you a trick and bust your Nil. Bid it only on a genuinely safe hand.
Playing the Hand
The play itself is exactly the standard game. The player to the dealer’s left leads first with any card except a spade, because spades still need to be broken before anyone can lead them. You follow suit when you can, and the highest spade wins the trick, or the highest card of the led suit if no spade was played. The winner leads the next trick, and you grind through all 17. The breaking rule and the finer points of trick play are covered on the Spades rules page.
The one thing that feels different is simply that there are three of you in each trick instead of four, which changes the math of what’s likely to win and makes tracking the cards a little easier.
Scoring and Winning
Scoring works the same way it does in the four-player game, just applied to each player individually. Make your bid and you score 10 points per trick you bid, plus a point for each overtrick, which still counts as a bag. Miss your bid and you’re set, losing 10 points for every trick you bid. Bags accumulate on each player’s own tally, and ten of them still trigger the 100-point penalty. A successful Nil is worth 100, a failed one costs 100. Most groups play to 500 points, though since there are no partners pooling scores, some play to a higher target to make for a longer game.
Strategy for Cutthroat Spades
Cutthroat has a flavor all its own, and it comes down to one thing: there’s a natural alliance against the leader. You can’t formally team up or talk across the table, but the two players who are behind will both, on their own, try to set or sandbag whoever’s ahead. That means the moment you take the lead in points, expect both opponents to start playing against you. It’s worth keeping a low profile until late in the game when you can make your move.
A few pointers for solo play. Your high spades are even more precious than usual, since you’re defending against two opponents with no help, so guard your aces and kings of spades and use them to win the tricks that matter. Bid carefully, because nobody is going to bail you out of an overbid. And watch both opponents, not just the player to your left, because either of them can set you. Read who’s getting close to making their bid and decide whether it’s worth taking a trick to spoil it.
That’s three-handed Spades. If your group shrinks to two, the game shifts again and uses a draw method to build hands, all covered on the 2-player Spades page. And for the wider world of optional rules and twists people add, the house rules and variations page gathers them together.