Card games offer the most fascinating challenges that you may ever encounter. In most games, you can manipulate the 52 pieces of pasteboard into infinite permutations and combinations. Working out those combinations is the fun part of cards — in almost every game, you don’t know what the other players have in their hands. During the course of play, you use strategy, memory, cunning, and a whole host of other qualities to put together the best hand possible (or to bluff with the worst hand out there).
All in all, figuring out the fundamentals of a new card game can bring untold satisfaction. At the same time, you don’t have to play cards all that well to enjoy yourself. Card games allow you to make friends with the people you play with and against.
If you’ve never played a card game before, you may wonder why you need to buy a book about the subject. All your friends say the games are easy to pick up, so can’t you just sit down and start playing, picking up a few rules here and there? Well, no.
Many card games have been in circulation for hundreds of years, generating scores of variations. A reference book not only explains the core rules of a game but also lists the main variations to let you choose the rules you and your friends want to play by.
Regardless of how much experience you’ve had with card games, you’ll find something here for you. Absolute beginners will appreciate that we discuss each game in this book starting at the very beginning, before a card hits the table. If you’ve played a few card games before, you can try out a new game or pick up a variation on one of your favorites.
Throughout this book, we talk about specific cards. Instead of constantly saying “the king of hearts” or “the 7 of spades” every time we refer to those cards, we abbreviate the cards and suits by using the following symbols:
- The suits: We represent each of the four suits in a standard deck of cards with spade ♠, heart ♥, diamond ♦, and club ♣ symbols. (However, these symbols are also used when bidding for tricks in Bridge. More on that in Book 5.)
- The card values: We use the following abbreviations to refer to specific card values: ace (A), king (K), queen (Q), jack (J), 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2.
This icon points out the wrong way to play a game. Pay special attention to these icons so you avoid finding things out the hard way.
This reinforces a point that may be less obvious (or intuitively right) than meets the eye. You should keep these points in mind as you play the game.
These icons emphasize some insights born of our experience that will help make you a sharper player.