The Yes/No spread is a tarot layout of 1 card, used for a quick binary answer to a direct question. It is the briefest form of reading, used when a plain yes or no is wanted.
How it is laid out
In this arrangement the reader deals a single card, read as affirmative when upright and favourable, negative when reversed or difficult, and conditional when ambiguous.
Tarot spreads are conventions of interpretation rather than fixed rules: each fixes a set of positions, and the card that falls in a position is read in the light of what that position is held to mean. Some layouts, such as the Celtic Cross, are long established in the twentieth-century reading tradition; others, including several themed modern spreads, are more recent inventions. The Yes/No spread is described here as one such interpretive framework within that tradition.
Binary yes-or-no tarot spreads sit somewhat uneasily against tarot's own more common self-description as a tool for reflection and nuanced insight rather than for definite prediction, and different guidebooks resolve the tension differently: some assign a fixed upright-versus-reversed rule to a single drawn card, echoing the binary logic of older coin-based and lot-casting divination methods generally, while others draw a small odd-numbered spread and read the majority orientation. Because tarot's seventy-eight cards were not designed with a built-in binary structure the way, for instance, a two-sided coin or a set of black-and-white lots are, any yes-or-no method applied to the deck is a modern interpretive overlay rather than a technique inherent to the cards themselves.