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Cards


Cards are a set of n rectangular pieces of cardboard with markings on one side and a uniform pattern on the other. The collection of all cards is called a "deck," and a normal deck of cards consists of 52 cards having 13 distinct values for each of four different "suits." The suits are called clubs (club), diamonds (diamond), hearts (heart), and spades (spade). Spades and clubs are colored black, while hearts and diamonds are colored red. The cards of each suit are numbered 1 through 13, where the special terms ace (1), jack (11), queen (12), and king (13) are used instead of numbers 1 and 11-13. However, in bridge and a number of other games, the ace is considered the highest card, and so would be assigned a value of 14 instead of 1.

The randomization of the order of cards in a deck is called shuffling. Cards are used in many gambling games (such as poker), and the investigation of the probabilities of various outcomes in card games was one of the original motivations for the development of modern probability theory.


See also

Bridge, Clock Solitaire, Coin, Coin Tossing, Cribbage, Dice, Poker, Run, Shuffle

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References

Chatto, W. A. Facts and Speculations on the Origin and History of Playing Cards. Saint Clair Shores, MI: Scholarly Press, 1977.Hargrave, C. P. History of Playing Cards and a Bibliography of Cards and Gaming. New York: Dover, 1986.Horr, N. T. Bibliography of Card Games and of the History of Playing Cards. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972.Jessel, F. and Horr, N. T. Bibliographies of Works on Playing Cards and Gaming. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972.Leeming, J. Games and Fun with Playing Cards. New York: Dover, 1980.Parlett, D. S. A Dictionary of Card Games. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1992.Parlett, D. S. The Oxford Guide to Card Games: A History of Card Games. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1991.Parlett, D. S. Solitaire: Aces Up and 399 Other Card Games. New York: Pantheon, 1991.Sackson, S. Card Games Around the World. New York: Dover, 1994.University of Waterloo. "Playing Cards." http://www.ahs.uwaterloo.ca/~museum/vexhibit/plcards/plcards.html.

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Cards

Cite this as:

Weisstein, Eric W. "Cards." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Cards.html

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