You asked
How do I set up the game?
Answered counted as answeredAsked with: Spadesbg-592-en-1e
To set up the game, follow these steps: 1. Teams are composed of 2 players who sit directly across from each other [1][2]. 2. Only two teams (4 players) are allowed at each table [2]. 3. All players are assigned to a table and a seat by Event staff before the start of play [3]. 4. The Dealer shuffles the standard fifty-two (52) card deck with Jokers removed [1][3]. 5. The Dealer must offer the player to their right the opportunity to cut the cards after they are shuffled [1]. 6. The Dealer deals all cards, 13 to each player in order, starting with the player directly to the left of the dealer [1].
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ANSWERED — Answered
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 261 ms · ask 6977 ms · total 1869032 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 1861785 ms · generation 7247 ms
- retrieval refs (raw)
- [{"page": 3, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Participants must register for the Event online, through the secure and encrypted website, https://www.worldspadeschampionship.org. There will be no registration at the Host Property or Event. Participants are responsible for payment of all taxes, licenses, registrations, and other fees associated w", "headingPath": "Registration:", "sharpsignalDocId": 168}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Certain rounds of play allow the top two (2) players to advance and other rounds of play allow one (1) player to advance. Please see Schedule for additional details. Ties and Tie Breakers: Rounds 1 and 2 (the top two players at each table will advance): There will be no tie breaker for 3rd Place as ", "headingPath": "Spades Play:", "sharpsignalDocId": 168}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "If multiple spades are played in a round, the winner of the round is the player with the highest-ranking spade. (See Rule 57(b) for additional information about card rankings.) The contents of each completed book cannot be viewed once the dealer has picked them up, except to determine if a player re", "headingPath": "Spades Play:", "sharpsignalDocId": 168}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "iii) Rounds 5 and 6 ( all players will advance from Round 5 to Round 6): If there is a tie between any players at the table during Round 5 (Semifinal Round) or Round 6 (Championship Round), the determining factor to break the tie between the players involved will be (in order): (a) The player with t", "headingPath": "Rankings and Prizes:", "sharpsignalDocId": 168}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Participants will be assigned to a table and seat through random selection in Round 1. Table assignments in subsequent rounds will be based on the Participant's scores from the previous round(s), in that a Participant with the highest score will play the Participant with the lowest score from the pr", "headingPath": "Tournament Play:", "sharpsignalDocId": 168}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030077, "snippet": "deducted from the bidding player's score. There is no difference between bidding zero (0) and bidding nil. Blind nil is not allowed at the Event. Once a bid is made it cannot be changed. Any book(s) collected over the bid amount will be scored as +1 point. Sandbags Sandbags will be in effect at the ", "headingPath": "Spades Play:", "sharpsignalDocId": 168}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.029631, "snippet": "Players The World Spades Championship® will be a single-player Spades tournament. There will be four (4) players per table. All players will be assigned to a table and a seat by Event staff before the start of play. Players are required to sit in their assigned seat at their assigned table. Dealers ", "headingPath": "Spades Play:", "sharpsignalDocId": 168}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029199, "snippet": "Participants are responsible for verifying that information on Badge is accurate and valid. Any changes to Badge information must take place during onsite check-in. The Player's Court is defined as the area where Participants will play spades at the Host Property during the Event. Only Participants,", "headingPath": "Official Tournament Rules", "sharpsignalDocId": 168}]
- citations (raw)
- [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Rules of Play", "sharpsignalDocId": 169}, {"page": 1, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Tournament Format: · Entry and Participation: · Registration: · Team Size: · Tournament Schedule: · Code of Conduct: · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 169}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Spades Play:", "sharpsignalDocId": 168}]
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 168 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 168 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
- debug row retained until
- Nov 6, 2026 14:41
retrieval — what the search arm returned
score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.
per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.
token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.
| fused rank | document | heading | page | fused RRF score | snippet chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Spades — Rulebook (corpus doc 168) | Registration: | p.3 | 0.032787 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #2 | RULEBOOK Spades — Rulebook (corpus doc 168) | Spades Play: | p.10 | 0.032258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Spades — Rulebook (corpus doc 168) | Spades Play: | p.9 | 0.031746 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #4 | RULEBOOK Spades — Rulebook (corpus doc 168) | Rankings and Prizes: | p.11 | 0.03125 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #5 | RULEBOOK Spades — Rulebook (corpus doc 168) | Tournament Play: | p.4 | 0.030769 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #6 | RULEBOOK Spades — Rulebook (corpus doc 168) | Spades Play: | p.9 | 0.030077 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Spades — Rulebook (corpus doc 168) | Spades Play: | p.8 | 0.029631 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Spades — Rulebook (corpus doc 168) | Official Tournament Rules | p.2 | 0.029199 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) | 300 |
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | RULEBOOK Spades — Rulebook (corpus doc 169) | Rules of Play | p.2 | no quote on the wire |
| [2] | RULEBOOK Spades — Rulebook (corpus doc 169) | Tournament Format: · Entry and Participation: · Registration: · Team Size: · Tournament Schedule: · Code of Conduct: · … | p.1 | no quote on the wire |
| [3] | RULEBOOK Spades — Rulebook (corpus doc 168) | Spades Play: | p.8 | no quote on the wire |
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 261 ms · first delta 6086 ms · total 1869032 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 1861785 ms · retrieval 261 ms · ask 6977 ms · gateway work 7247 ms · total 1869032 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 3440
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 161
- tok/sec
- 147.0 tok/sec — 161 output tokens in 1.095 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 29s ago)
- stream path
- streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
- watchdog
- first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
- num_ctx · think posture
- both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.
disposition
- outcome
- ANSWERED — Answered
- abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
- answered — no abstain rationale applies
setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render
- decision
- NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
- pattern that matched
- SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
- matched words (in the normalized question)
-
set up
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 91), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one
Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.