Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Additional design

Some decks include additional design elements. Casino blackjack decks may include markings intended for a machine to check the ranks of cards, or shifts in rank location to allow a manual check via inlaid mirror. Many casino decks and solitaire decks have four indices instead of the usual two. Many decks have large indices, largely for use in stud poker games, where being able to read cards from a distance is a benefit and hand sizes are small. Some decks use four colors for the suits in order to make it easier to tell them apart: the most common set of colors is black (spades ♠), red (hearts ♥), blue (diamonds ♦) and green (clubs ♣). Another common color set is borrowed from the German suits and uses green Spades and yellow Diamonds (as the comparable German suits are Leaves and Bells respectively; see below) with red Hearts and black Clubs.

When giving the full written name of a specific card, the rank is given first followed by the suit, e.g., "Ace of Spades". Shorthand notation may list the rank first "A♠" (as is typical when discussing poker) or list the suit first (as is typical in listing several cards in bridge) "♠AKQ". Tens may be either abbreviated to T or written as 10.Piquet

The piquet deck is a subset of the French-suited 52-card deck, with all values from 2 through 6 in each suit removed. The resulting 32-card deck is notable for its use in a variety of games; a trick-taking game from the 1300s, Piquet, gave the deck its most common name, and the game of Belote, currently the most popular card game in France, also uses this deck. West German players adopted the deck for the game of Skat (the traditional Skat deck uses German suits; see below).

The game of Pinochle, which evolved from the French game Bezique, uses a deck composed of two copies of each Anglo-American card with values from 9 through King and Ace. A deck with the same composition, but different card art, is available in Europe for the very popular German game of Doppelkopf, which derived from the game Sheepshead and is related to Skat.

No comments:

Post a Comment