50 Fun Facts About Playing Cards

Which playing card earns a 'suicide' nickname because its figure seems to drive a sword into his own head?

The King of hearts looks doomed only by accident: centuries of sloppy copying by English card makers wiped out the head of the axe he once carried.

Which video game giant began in Kyoto in 1889 as a maker of handmade hanafuda playing cards?

Nintendo was founded by the craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi, whose flower-patterned decks caught on after Japan banned most gambling in 1882 but tolerated hanafuda.

Microsoft's Solitaire, bundled with Windows from 1990, helped nervous new users practise which skill?

Using a mouse was unfamiliar to many people in 1990, and dragging cards between piles taught drag-and-drop without feeling like a lesson. An intern, Wes Cherry, wrote the game.

In World War II, playing cards sent to Allied prisoners of war peeled apart when wet to reveal what?

Escape maps were hidden between the layers of decks that the United States Playing Card Company made in secret with the government for captured servicemen.

Poker's 'dead man's hand' of aces and eights is linked to which gunfighter, shot in Deadwood in 1876?

Wild Bill Hickok was shot from behind by Jack McCall during a game in a saloon, yet nobody linked the hand to him in print until the 1920s.

Which playing card has an ornate, oversized symbol because English makers once had to show tax paid on it?

The Ace of spades carried the official duty stamp from 1712, and the tax on English decks was not scrapped until 1960.

Which country most likely invented playing cards in the 9th century, thanks to its early woodblock printing?

China has the oldest hints of card play, including an 868 account of a Tang princess playing a 'leaf game' that may have used printed cards.

The joker joined American packs of playing cards in the mid-1800s as an extra top trump for which game?

Euchre players wanted a card to outrank both bowers, so makers added a 'best bower' that became the joker. Samuel Hart printed the first illustrated one in 1863.

Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's cigar-advert paintings show which animals gathered around a poker table?

Dogs star in the whole series, including sixteen paintings ordered in 1903 by the firm Brown & Bigelow. The first, from 1894, sold for $658,000 in 2015.

Which leader was the highest ace in the US military's 2003 deck of most-wanted Iraqi playing cards?

Saddam Hussein topped the deck, with his sons Qusay and Uday on two more aces. Troops carried the cards to help them recognise wanted officials.

In the American version of the card game Hearts, which single card costs its taker 13 penalty points?

The Queen of spades is nicknamed the Black Lady, and she only became a penalty card in 1909, decades after the game was first recorded.

In which children's card game do players ask a rival for cards of one rank and draw when refused?

Go Fish takes its name from the refusal itself: a player without the requested rank says 'Go fish!' and the asker has to draw a card instead.

Which unbeatable poker hand is made up of the ace, king, queen, jack and ten of a single suit?

A Royal flush is simply the highest possible straight flush, and it only loses its crown in games with wild cards, where five of a kind outranks it.

In the prank '52 pickup', what does the dealer do with the whole deck?

The prankster throws it into the air so the cards land strewn across the floor, then tells the victim to pick up all 52. It works best on eager younger children.

Which country star took the poker ballad The Gambler to number one after earlier recordings had flopped?

Kenny Rogers won a Grammy for the song, which its writer Don Schlitz had hawked around Nashville for two years before anyone would record it.

Which Cajun X-Men mutant charges playing cards with kinetic energy and hurls them as explosives?

Gambit, born Remy LeBeau, can charge almost any object he touches, and his backstory ties him to the Thieves' Guild of New Orleans.

Edward Thorp's book Beat the Dealer showed that card counting could beat the house at which casino game?

Blackjack fell to an IBM 704 computer: Thorp used it to work out the odds, then tested his counting system at tables in Reno and Lake Tahoe.

Which older name, still common in Britain, covers the one-player card games Americans call solitaire?

Patience is the earliest recorded name in both British and American sources, and it stuck because the games were seen as an exercise in exactly that.

Which brand of playing cards, launched in 1885, is best known for the 'Rider Back' design on its reverse?

Bicycle took its name from the cycling craze of the late 19th century, and the Rider Back is by far its most popular design.

Which shedding card game, a cousin of Uno, has a wild rank that lets its player name a new suit?

Crazy Eights began as plain Eights in the 1930s; the 'crazy' arrived in the 1940s, borrowed from Section 8, the US military discharge for mental instability.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, playing-card gardeners are caught painting white roses which colour?

Red was the colour the rose tree should have been: the gardeners had planted a white one by mistake and were covering it up before the Queen of Hearts noticed.

Tarot cards appeared in 15th-century Italy for which purpose, centuries before occultists took them up?

Trick-taking games such as Tarocchini were the whole point of tarot until the late 18th century, when French occultists made grand, unsupported claims about the cards' history.

What is the name for telling fortunes with playing cards, often done in France with a 32-card piquet pack?

Cartomancy with a standard deck was the most popular form of fortune-telling card reading throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

The Japanese word for playing cards, 'karuta', comes from the language of which European nation?

Portugal's traders brought cards to Japan in the mid-16th century, and their word 'carta' stuck as the name for every kind of deck made there since.

A Mamluk pack of playing cards found in Istanbul's Topkapı Palace has a suit of sticks from which sport?

Polo was an obscure sport to Europeans, so when they copied the Egyptian cards they redrew the unfamiliar sticks as batons or clubs.

German-suited playing cards use hearts, bells, leaves and which fourth symbol in place of the French clubs?

Acorns are the German counterpart of clubs: around 1480 French card makers simplified the German symbols, probably to make mass production easier.

Spanish and Italian playing cards use swords, coins, batons and which fourth suit, also found in tarot?

Cups survive in fortune-telling tarot beside swords, wands and pentacles, the last two being the old batons and coins under new names.

French card makers traditionally labelled the king of diamonds with the name of which ancient Roman leader?

Julius Caesar shares the Paris pattern's thrones with David, Charlemagne and Alexander the Great; English cards, copied from a different French pattern, carry no names.

On French playing cards of the Paris pattern, the jack of clubs is named after which Arthurian hero?

Lancelot stands alongside Hector, the French soldier La Hire and Ogier the Dane, the names printed on the other three jacks.

What were jacks called in English playing cards before 'Kn' proved too easy to confuse with 'K'?

Knaves, a word that once just meant boys or young men, lost out after the American maker Samuel Hart printed a J on his cards in 1864; 'jack' had been thought a low-class name.

French colonial officials short of cash once paid soldiers with playing cards in what is now which country?

Canada, then New France, got its card money from the intendant Jacques de Meulles, and the makeshift notes soon spread from army pay into everyday trade.

The United States Playing Card Company began in 1867 as a printer of circus posters in which Ohio city?

Cincinnati was where Russell, Morgan & Co. printed posters for travelling circuses before turning to cards; the firm later moved to the suburb of Erlanger, Kentucky.

Which star of Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago once ranked among the world's top bridge players?

Omar Sharif captained Egypt at the 1968 World Bridge Olympiad and toured Europe with the Omar Sharif Bridge Circus, a troupe of professionals playing exhibition matches.

Which 18th-century author of card game rulebooks became a byword for doing things strictly by the rules?

Edmond Hoyle began by tutoring high society at whist and selling his notes, then printed them in 1742 at a guinea a copy. 'According to Hoyle' has meant correct ever since.

Which solitaire game, dealt as seven piles, is so familiar that Americans just call it 'Solitaire'?

Klondike has a name nobody can trace: a few writers have guessed at the 1890s gold rush, but no evidence backs the link.

Which card game, credited to the 17th-century poet Sir John Suckling, is scored with pegs on a board?

Cribbage grew out of an older English game called noddy, adding the crib and a new way of scoring. The credit to Suckling comes from the biographer John Aubrey.

The card-table word 'trump' began in the 1520s as a corruption of which other English word?

Triumph was already the name of a card game, la triomphe in French, and long before that of a Roman general's victory procession.

Ganjifa, the hand-painted playing cards of India's Mughal court, come as rectangles or in which other shape?

Circles and rectangles alike were painted by hand, and the grandest court sets were made of ivory or tortoise shell inlaid with precious stones.

What are the suit symbols printed on a numbered playing card called, a name shared with the dots on dice?

Pips also give the numbered cards their other name, pip cards, which sets them apart from the court cards with their pictures.

Which French painter's Card Players series includes a canvas Qatar's ruling family bought for a record sum?

Paul Cézanne took the rowdy tavern gamblers of 17th-century painting and replaced them with stone-faced tradesmen. The 2011 sale was estimated at $250 million.

Which playing card has been called the 'Curse of Scotland' since the early 1700s, though nobody agrees why?

The Nine of diamonds has gathered rival legends, from a general's battle orders scrawled on one to the coat of arms of the earl blamed for the Glencoe massacre.

The English pattern of playing cards used worldwide descends from designs exported by which French city?

Rouen makers began shipping cards to England around 1480, and rougher English copies gradually lost the detail of the originals.

Which mathematician and former magician worked out how many riffle shuffles it takes to mix a deck?

Persi Diaconis left home at 14 to tour with a sleight-of-hand master, and is now cited for the rule of thumb that seven shuffles will do it.

Which Canadian magician, nicknamed 'The Professor', billed himself as the man who fooled Houdini?

Dai Vernon kept bringing the same card back to the top of the deck, and Houdini, who boasted he could crack any trick on a third viewing, watched it again and again without success.

Parker Brothers launched which 1906 card game for families who objected to standard playing cards?

Rook dropped the face cards that some Puritan and Mennonite families linked with gambling, and became known as Christian cards or missionary cards.

Which card game, nicknamed 'bucking the tiger', was played in almost every gambling hall of the Old West?

Faro got the nickname from early card backs showing a Bengal tiger, and some gambling houses simply hung a tiger picture in the window to advertise a game.

Which designer of the original Macintosh icons also drew the card faces for Microsoft's Windows Solitaire?

Susan Kare, creator of the smiling Happy Mac, went independent after leaving NeXT and drew the deck for Windows 3.0 as one of her projects for Microsoft.

Which three-player card game, devised around 1810 in Altenburg, is regarded as Germany's national game?

Skat was invented by members of a local Tarock club in Altenburg, who blended the older game Schafkopf with features of Tarock.

Which British banknote printer won a royal warrant to make playing cards in 1831, before it printed money?

De La Rue was founded by Thomas de la Rue, a Guernsey-born maker of straw hats turned stationer, and added postage stamps in 1855 and banknotes in 1860.

Which rummy-family card game was devised in Montevideo in 1939 by two bridge partners?

Canasta is Spanish for basket, probably after the tray that held the undealt cards and discards in the middle of the table.