Is Nine of Cups a yes or a no?

This card leans yes. It carries forward movement, and in a straight yes/no draw most readers take it affirmatively.

The Nine is the wish card: contentment, satisfaction, getting what you asked for.

It is genuinely good and it is slightly self-satisfied, and both of those readings belong to it. The tradition has never chosen between them and the picture is why.

He is showing the cups rather than drinking from them, and he is sitting alone.

Yes/no readings are the most popular use of tarot and the one it is worst suited to. A seventy-eight card deck built to describe nuance is being asked for one bit of information, and most of what it knows is discarded in the process.

A more useful version of the same draw: read Nine of Cups as what shape this takes, not whether it happens. A wish granted. Emotional satisfaction, comfort, pleasure earned.

Its instruction is short and is the one people find hardest: enjoy it without immediately looking for the next thing. The card is associated with the achievement that gets absorbed in an afternoon and replaced with a new target by the weekend.

The folk reading as the wish card is later than the Golden Dawn attribution and is now near-universal in practice. It is not a promise that a specific wish will be granted, and readers who use it that way are making the deck do something it cannot.

Reversed, the lean weakens or inverts. Getting what you wanted and finding it insufficient. Smugness, complacency, or a wish that turns out to have been the wrong wish.

The last is the most interesting and the least comfortable. Wishes are formed by a person who no longer exists by the time they are granted, and the card reversed describes arriving somewhere that was chosen by an earlier version of you.

Also read for satisfaction that requires an audience, which is the display counter rather than the drinking. That is not a moral failing so much as a hollow arrangement, and it is exhausting to maintain.