Card Games

A card game is any game using playing cards, either traditional or game-specific. Countless card games exist, including families of related games (such as poker). Some games have formally standardized rules, while rules for others can vary by region, culture, and person. more...

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The deck

A card game is played with a deck of cards intended for that game that are identical in size and shape. Each card has two sides, the face and the back. The backs of the cards in a deck are indistinguishable. The faces of the cards in a deck may all be unique, or may include duplicates, depending on the game. In either case, any card is readily identifiable by its face. The set of cards that make up the deck are known to all of the players using that deck.

Although many games have special decks of cards, the standard deck contains 52 cards in four suits (clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades) and thirteen ranks running from two (deuce) to ten, jack, queen, king, and ace. In addition to games that use the standard deck, there are also games that use some modification of the standard deck, for example removing all cards of rank lower than some rank (as in a pinochle deck), adding a special card (joker) to the standard deck, or rearranging the ranks of the cards. Many European regions have their own variants of the standard deck having different names and imagery for suits, or having a different set of ranks in the cards.

There are also some card games that require multiple standard decks. In this scenario, a \"deck\" refers to a set of 52 cards or a single deck, while a \"pack\" or \"shoe\" (blackjack) refers to the collection of \"decks\" as a whole.

The deal

Dealing is done either clockwise or counterclockwise. If this is omitted from the rules, then it is assumed to be:

clockwise for games from North America, North and West Europe and Russia;; counterclockwise for South and East Europe, Asia, South America and also for Swiss games.;

A player is chosen to deal. That person takes all of the cards in the pack, arranges them so that they are in a uniform stack, and shuffles them. There are various techniques of shuffling, all intended to put the cards into a random order. During the shuffle, the dealer holds the cards so that he or she and the other players cannot see any of their faces.

After the shuffle, the dealer sometimes offers the deck to another player to cut the deck. If the deal is clockwise, this is the player to the dealer's right; if counterclockwise, it is the player to the dealer's left. The invitation to cut is made by placing the pack, face downward, on the table near the player who is to cut: who then lifts the upper portion of the pack clear of the lower portion and places it alongside. The formerly lower portion is then replaced on top of the formerly upper portion.

Read more at Wikipedia.org