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Getting all decked out

You play card games with a deck of cards intended for that game, also referred to as a pack in the United Kingdom. The cards should all be exactly the same size and shape and should have identical backs. The front of the cards should be immediately identifiable and distinguishable.

A deck of cards has subdivisions of four separate subgroups. Each one of these subgroups has 13 cards, although the standard deck in France and Germany may have only 8 cards in each subgroup. The four subgroups each have a separate identifiable marking, and in American and English decks, you see two sets of black markings (spades and clubs) and two sets of red markings (hearts and diamonds). Each of these sets is referred to as a suit.

CARD GAMES THROUGH THE AGES

Some form of playing cards existed in China, at least 80 years and maybe as much as 250 years before they surfaced in Europe. The earliest known Chinese cards had four suits, described in mid-15th-century sources, and featured 38 cards: 9 each in three suits and 11 in the fourth. Similar cards are used in parts of China and Southeast Asia to this day, though the deck composition and designs are not identical.

Although some scholars claim the Saracens or the Persians invented card games (the Persians certainly seem to have invented Poker), the Mamelukes of Egypt appear to be credible ancestors of modern card games. A Mameluke deck from around 1400 A.D. consists of 52 cards with suits of swords, polo sticks, cups, and coins.

National standard designs appeared in the late 15th century. Swiss decks (with shields, flowers, bells, and acorns) and German decks (with hearts, leaves, bells, and acorns) appeared by 1475. The French deck (with spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs) first appeared by 1480.

In Great Britain, The Worshipful Company of Playing-Card Makers was set up in 1628 to produce cards, and a tax was introduced on every deck. Laws were also enacted to ban the import of cards; from then on, you could only play with cards of domestic origin. The year 1862 was very significant for the rise in popularity of playing cards. Along with a fall in the duty charge of playing cards, printer Thomas de la Rue patented the process for mass-producing cards. From then on, well-designed playing cards were in plentiful supply.

Ranking card order

Each suit in U.S. and U.K. decks has 13 cards, and the rankings of the 13 vary from game to game. The most traditional order in card games today is ace, king, queen, jack, and then 10 down to 2.

As you find throughout this book, the ranking order changes for different games. You see numerous games where 10s or perhaps jacks get promoted in the ranking order (such as in Pinochle and Euchre, respectively), and many games have jacks gambol joyfully from one suit to another, becoming extra trumps (as in Euchre).

Also, Gin Rummy and several other games such as Cribbage treat the ace exclusively as the low card, below the two.

Preparing to Play

Before you can start any card game, you need to ration out the cards. Furthermore, in almost every game, you don’t want any other players to know what cards you have been dealt. That is where the shuffle and deal come into play.

Shuffling off

Before the dealer distributes the cards to the players, a player must randomize, or shuffle, them in such a way that no one knows what anyone else receives. (Shuffling is particularly relevant when the cards have all been played out on the previous hand.)

The shuffler, not necessarily the player who must distribute the cards, mixes up the cards by holding them face-down and interleaving them a sufficient number of times so that the order of all the cards becomes random and unpredictable. When one player completes the task, another player (frequently in European games, the player to the right of the dealer) rearranges the deck by splitting it into two halves and reassembles the two halves, putting the lower half on top of the other portion. This is called cutting the deck.

Getting a square deal

In most games, one player is responsible for distributing the cards to the players — this player is the dealer. For the first hand, you often select the dealer by having each player draw a card from the deck; the lowest card (or, perhaps, the highest) gets to deal. After the first hand is complete, the rules of most games dictate that the player to the dealer’s left deals the next hand, with the deal rotating clockwise.

Before the deal for the first hand, a process may take place to determine where the players sit. In games in which your position at the table is important, such as Poker or Hearts, you often deal out a card to each player and then seat the players clockwise in order from highest to lowest.

The player to the dealer’s left, frequently the first person to play a card after the deal, is known as the elder or eldest hand. The younger hand is the player to the dealer’s right. These players may also be known as the left hand opponent and right hand opponent (which you sometimes see abbreviated as LHO and RHO). The dealer may also refer to the player sitting opposite them — their partner in a partnership game — as the CHO, or center hand opponent.

You may have been brought up on the sober concept that the right way to distribute the cards to each player is to pass them out one at a time, face-down, in a clockwise manner. However, that style is by no means the only possible, or indeed acceptable, way to deal. Games from south and eastern Europe and Switzerland, as well as tarot games, feature counterclockwise dealing and playing. And in Euchre the cards are dealt clockwise, but in batches of two or three, rather than one at a time.

The due process of a deal involves the dealer taking the deck in one hand and passing a single card from the top of the deck to the player on their left, in such a way that nobody can see the face of the card. The dealer then does the same for the next player, and so on around the table. The process continues until everyone receives their due number of cards.

Players generally consider it bad form for any player to look at their cards until the deal has been completed.

In several games, only some of the cards are dealt out. In such games, you put a parcel of undealt cards in a pile in the middle of the table. This pile is known as the stock or talon. Frequently, the dealer turns the top card of the stock face-up for one reason or another, and this card is known as the up-card.

The cards dealt out to a player, taken as a whole, constitute a hand. It’s normal practice to pick up your hand at the conclusion of the deal and to arrange the hand in an overlapping fan shape; if you like, you can sort the cards out by suit and rank, as appropriate for the game you’re playing, to make your decision making easier. Make sure, however, to take care that no one but you can see your cards. Similarly, you shouldn’t make any undue efforts to look at any one else’s hand.

Most card games need not only a dealer (a job that changes from hand to hand) but also a scorekeeper — not normally a sought-after task. The least innumerate mathematician may be landed with the task — or the soberest player. The good news is that scientific studies have shown that the scorer generally wins the game. I wonder why!

Exposing yourself (or someone else)

In general, any irregularity in a deal that leads to a card or cards being turned over invalidates the whole deal, and the normal procedure is for the dealer to collect all the cards

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