According to Hoyle

[00:00] And now it's time for another Undegoogable.
[00:03] Oh, we do an Undegoogables.
[00:12] That was the play of Super Excited.
[00:14] I told us we had to, sir.
[00:16] He said we signed up for it.
[00:22] In the end, it's going to be better and more true than Google
[00:24] can give you.
[00:27] Jason, I know you got a burning question for us this week.
[00:30] How can we help you?
[00:32] So this one actually comes from my lovely wife, Jill.
[00:36] She was asking the other day, why playing cards
[00:42] are the way that they are?
[00:44] Like, why do we have, why are the suits, hearts,
[00:50] why is it royalty?
[00:52] We got hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds, right?
[00:57] Why are they those things?
[00:59] Are those representative of some sectors of society
[01:05] or something like that?
[01:07] Why the royalty?
[01:08] Are those supposed to be different?
[01:11] Are spades supposed to be like, I don't know,
[01:14] Scotland and clubs or England and, I don't know,
[01:19] something like that?
[01:21] And how far back do playing cards go?
[01:24] When did this version of playing cards
[01:30] come about, the deck of 52 cards, as we know it?
[01:36] That's a good question.
[01:37] That's a very good question.
[01:39] The history of the playing card.
[01:43] So we've all read Hoyle's book, right?
[01:44] So what would Hoyle say?
[01:46] Well, according to Hoyle, he would say, no.
[01:52] That's the phrase people say when they're
[01:53] about to make a mistake.
[01:59] So Jill's thought on this was that maybe the different suits
[02:06] were like different sectors of society.
[02:10] Spades were like mobility, and then the clubs
[02:17] were like the common folk or something like that.
[02:19] I don't know.
[02:20] And that's how you got trumps and stuff like that.
[02:23] I don't know.
[02:24] So if you had a spade, sort of the working folk,
[02:29] like your digging stuff, and the club is maybe
[02:32] the fighters, and the hearts is the artists.
[02:38] Lovers.
[02:39] The lovers, and the diamonds is the wealthy.
[02:43] It's like the rich people.
[02:44] Yeah.
[02:46] I like that.
[02:47] I mean, whoever came up with the deck of 52, right,
[02:52] is absolutely genius, because it had so many different,
[02:56] it can create so many different variants
[02:59] based on the amount of numbers with the suits,
[03:03] with the different, yeah, all that stuff.
[03:04] There's so many different games.
[03:06] Exactly.
[03:07] And that's what's genius about the deck itself.
[03:12] It's not an Uno deck.
[03:13] It's not a one-deck game, right?
[03:19] And I wonder what the, just a side question,
[03:21] what was the original card game that was built on this?
[03:25] Yeah.
[03:25] Interesting.
[03:27] I mean, I imagine it must have evolved, right?
[03:29] Like, it started with very simple games.
[03:33] I don't know, like, higher card wins or something.
[03:36] Like, War had to be the original card game, right?
[03:40] Or Go Fish, you know?
[03:42] Yeah, yeah, or like, matching.
[03:44] Sure, yeah, yeah.
[03:46] What card do you have in your hand?
[03:48] Game, yeah.
[03:53] Yeah, Asshole is probably the first game, right?
[03:58] It went quickly to drinking it.
[04:00] We can assume that, for sure.
[04:04] OK, so the numbers themselves make a lot of sense, right?
[04:09] You're just 1 through 10.
[04:12] At one point, maybe it was 1 through 15.
[04:15] Potentially.
[04:16] And then we changed those to the suits.
[04:20] When you wanted to introduce a new game.
[04:23] Somebody created a suited game.
[04:25] Like, King's on the Corner or something.
[04:31] Or Euchre.
[04:32] So when do you guys think that the playing card deck sort
[04:40] of came out in its current form?
[04:44] Because I mean, I'm thinking like, you know,
[04:47] just off the top of my head, there's like Old West,
[04:49] all those guys playing the saloons.
[04:52] They all hang out and play poker.
[04:53] And then you shoot up the place.
[04:55] But you're playing poker before that.
[04:59] And so that's the 1800s.
[05:03] So sometime before then.
[05:06] You know, I often think of more complex games evolving
[05:13] around leisure, right?
[05:15] Like, if you don't have a work week,
[05:20] you just work all the time.
[05:22] Because there's no time off.
[05:23] There's not a lot of time for games.
[05:26] You know, I think we do know that people have always
[05:29] found ways to entertain themselves when they're not
[05:33] digging ditches, right?
[05:34] I mean, they do find ways to entertain themselves.
[05:38] I think the more complex games probably
[05:41] come when there's leisure time.
[05:42] But I feel like cards could be something you'd do, you know,
[05:45] as a peasant.
[05:46] You know, like, at the end of a shift,
[05:49] you guys go and drink and gamble
[05:52] and have a good time to relax.
[05:55] So I mean, I'm not saying that it needs to be the 1800s.
[05:57] I'm saying maybe it could be like the 1600s.
[06:03] Well, I think it's going to be complicated.
[06:05] I think what we're going to find out is that it goes,
[06:08] like, cards probably go back.
[06:10] Or card games probably go back to like ancient Egypt
[06:14] or something like that.
[06:15] But like, in the version that we are familiar with,
[06:20] I think probably, yeah, 1600s, 1700s.
[06:27] Are we talking England, though?
[06:28] Is that what we think?
[06:29] That's what I assume because of, like, the royalty.
[06:31] The monarchy, yeah.
[06:32] Aspect of it, yeah.
[06:37] But I don't actually know.
[06:39] And the fact that according to Hoyle is like,
[06:42] he had to be like a British dude, right?
[06:45] Actually don't know anything about Hoyle.
[06:49] I mean, yeah.
[06:50] And part of it's also like, it certainly could be different,
[06:54] but you need the right technology to create these cards that
[07:00] are somewhat uniform.
[07:04] OK, see, now you're talking, Joey.
[07:06] I think you're getting us somewhere, right?
[07:09] You need some sort of level of printing.
[07:12] I mean, people could make them themselves, but you're right.
[07:17] Uniformity comes with some sort of printing press, right?
[07:20] Yeah, there needs to be some sort of mechanical.
[07:24] I would think some sort of mechanical process.
[07:28] Because if they're not the same, then it's easy to cheat.
[07:34] And it's not a fun game when you win.
[07:38] That's a really good call.
[07:39] And also, they need to be shellacked.
[07:42] So when you spill stuff on them,
[07:43] they just don't fall apart.
[07:47] It's possible.
[07:48] Yeah.
[07:50] I mean, for durability purposes, for sure.
[07:53] Yeah.
[07:54] I mean, it's not like dice, right?
[07:57] Like, dice are easy to travel.
[07:58] You make them.
[08:00] Whatever, they don't get ruined easily.
[08:06] You can't lose a card, right?
[08:07] Or the whole game falls apart, right?
[08:09] So it has to be.
[08:10] Or even one gets ruined.
[08:12] Right, exactly.
[08:13] Exactly.
[08:14] So on some level, so maybe cards have existed for a long time.
[08:18] But cards, as we know it, has to be mass production.
[08:22] It has to be mass printing press.
[08:24] Yeah, and some sort of standardization.
[08:27] The Nintendo company started off making playing cards
[08:30] in the early 1900s.
[08:33] But I would assume that that were not the first to make.
[08:37] They were just a local, or doing that in their country.
[08:44] So do you think they were playing cards on the ship
[08:47] over from Europe to the Americas?
[08:52] I mean, do you think they were playing cards then?
[08:55] OK.
[08:56] I don't think the, not the.
[08:59] You mean the Mayflower?
[09:00] Not the Mayflower.
[09:01] Not the Mayflower.
[09:02] No, they were praying the whole time.
[09:05] I was imagining, I was just envisioning people
[09:08] on steamships.
[09:09] Sorry.
[09:09] Yeah.
[09:10] Steamships.
[09:11] You were saying like the Mayflower,
[09:13] not the first ones, but like, yeah,
[09:15] I mean like just a little bit later.
[09:16] Like when the Puritans came over.
[09:18] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[09:19] Were they playing cards?
[09:20] I doubt it.
[09:21] Or at least, well, maybe not the Puritans,
[09:23] but like maybe the people that were working the ship
[09:25] is what I'm saying.
[09:26] Like the guys that were below deck.
[09:28] You think they're after they, yeah, exactly.
[09:31] You think they were doing that then?
[09:33] Because that puts us at 1700s.
[09:37] I'd say yes.
[09:39] What do you think, Joey?
[09:40] Yeah, 1700s, 16 1700s seems good.
[09:45] You mentioned this Nintendo thing,
[09:47] and now it gets me thinking that probably
[09:49] Asians figured this out.
[09:51] Like embedding the Chinese like head.
[09:53] OK.
[09:54] I would say China would be a good bet.
[09:57] And the Chinese basically gave it to,
[10:02] I mean, we stole it from them, right?
[10:04] The white Europe stole it from them.
[10:07] It doesn't have to be theft.
[10:09] No, no, I think it was definitely.
[10:11] Sometimes it is.
[10:12] But sometimes it's like, oh, that's cool.
[10:14] I'm going to do that too.
[10:16] Sure, OK.
[10:17] But there certainly were a lot of tile games,
[10:20] which could be very similar.
[10:23] You make this out of clay.
[10:24] Yeah.
[10:25] You could have the same game, basically.
[10:27] You just flip over the, you know, like Maja.
[10:30] Oh, you definitely could, sure.
[10:31] Yeah.
[10:33] But I know it's not the same as, you know,
[10:37] it's not the same game as the playing card games.
[10:40] Right, right, right.
[10:40] No, but the concept.
[10:41] But the concept is very similar.
[10:45] Yeah, I mean, you think about it like game like spades and stuff.
[10:49] Like you could definitely like, or maybe,
[10:52] no, I'm thinking of like Rummy, right?
[10:55] Jim Rummy is like a lot about displaying the cards
[10:58] that you have and like if it was a tile game
[11:01] and you just had a little tile with a spade symbol on it
[11:04] or a diamond symbol on it with a number
[11:06] written in the middle of it.
[11:08] You know, you could see how that would translate on some level.
[11:12] I don't know.
[11:13] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
[11:15] OK, but so to get back to our, so I
[11:17] think Jill's specific question was why the suits?
[11:20] Why do we have the different suits that we have?
[11:22] I'm going to go with the Dutch.
[11:25] You're going with the Dutch?
[11:26] The Dutch.
[11:27] Yeah, I've decided that it's a good thing with that.
[11:29] Well, no, I've just decided that for some reason
[11:32] that this royal lineage thing feels very Dutch.
[11:39] OK, OK, OK.
[11:42] Do you think that, I mean, I like the sort of four sort
[11:47] of groups, you know, like the artists and sort of classes
[11:54] or groups of society.
[11:56] Yeah, I like that.
[11:59] And then practically having the farmers.
[12:02] Yeah, and then practically having two of them
[12:05] be the same color makes it easier for games.
[12:09] All that stuff is, you know.
[12:12] I mean, because some of that stuff is cosmetic, right?
[12:15] But the fact that the two of the suits are the same color,
[12:19] you know, what the symbol is, it doesn't matter.
[12:21] But that part is like open for interpretation or flavor.
[12:28] All right, so we're going Asian tiles co-opted by or shared
[12:33] with the West.
[12:36] And then we didn't have actual cards until the 1700s.
[12:44] And maybe we put the royalty on there because of the Dutch.
[12:53] OK, I don't think we know anything.
[12:57] OK, so I found a really thorough Atlantic article.
[13:02] Today's 52 card deck preserves the four original French suits
[13:10] centuries ago, clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades.
[13:13] These geographic symbols bear little resemblance
[13:20] to the items they represent, but were much easier to copy.
[13:25] Blah, blah, blah.
[13:27] The earliest reference to playing cards or dominoes
[13:31] is in China in the 10th century.
[13:34] But there's no specifics about what games they were.
[13:39] And then first, playing cards in Europe
[13:42] were in the 1370s, probably Italy or Spain.
[13:46] But these are not necessarily the same.
[13:51] Yeah, so these are just playing cards.
[13:54] I'm reading playingcarddecks.com.
[13:59] And some scholars believe that it was invented in China
[14:03] during the 9th century AD, and that it
[14:07] moved to Europe through the Arabs in the 12th century
[14:12] and was established in Europe by the 13 or 1400s.
[14:19] But that's, again, they said that the precise origin
[14:23] of playing cards continues to be a subject of debate
[14:25] among scholars.
[14:28] Yeah, I'm seeing that some historians have suggested
[14:30] that the suits were meant to represent
[14:33] the four classes of medieval society.
[14:35] Oh, nice.
[14:37] What were those classes?
[14:38] Helps and chalices might have stood for the clergy.
[14:42] So that would be hearts, swords,
[14:45] which became spades for the nobility or the military,
[14:49] coins or diamonds for the merchants,
[14:53] and batons or clubs for the peasants.
[14:56] But the disparity in these markers from deck to deck
[15:01] sort of resists that type of categorization.
[15:05] And they give an example that bells
[15:07] were found in early German hunting cards,
[15:12] where that would have been more a fitting
[15:15] symbol for the nobility than spades.
[15:18] Because bells were often attached
[15:20] to the jesses of a hawk in falconry.
[15:22] Yeah.
[15:22] Yay.
[15:23] Nailed a court loser for the Rhineland's wealthiest.
[15:26] It's always right here.
[15:27] It all comes back to falconry.
[15:29] Why are they called the French?
[15:32] So the court cards from the late 14th century decks in Italy
[15:39] included a mounted king, a seated and crowned queen,
[15:42] plus a nave.
[15:44] So this suggests that this might have been the earliest
[15:49] royalty on cards.
[15:50] It was the 14th century Italy, potentially.
[15:53] Although the Spanish cards had a king knight and nave,
[15:59] but no queen at a similar period in time.
[16:04] Hmm.
[16:05] Interesting.
[16:07] It does look like card playing might come loosely
[16:13] from tarot cards.
[16:19] Let's see.
[16:24] Let's see.
[16:24] So scrolls from the China's Tang dynasty
[16:27] mentioned a game of paper tiles.
[16:33] There's some references in the late 14th century
[16:36] to the arrival of Saracen's game to Europe.
[16:43] That suggests that they came from Arabia and not China.
[16:50] And then fortune telling cards might have come.
[16:53] It does seem that the French basically
[16:58] had kind of the basis of what we now
[17:03] understand as playing cards.
[17:06] So there was all these different influences,
[17:09] but the kind of what we know it to be with two red symbols
[17:13] and two black with queens, kings.
[17:18] And the process was improved greatly
[17:25] by the manufacturing of paper and the development of better
[17:28] printing processes, including Gutenberg's printing press
[17:31] in 1440, and that the French decks and their suits
[17:37] spread all over Europe looks like spread to the English
[17:43] during war, because they were always at war.
[17:47] And that the deck was standardized in the 1700s.
[17:55] I like this here on clubpoker.net.
[17:58] It says, during the French Revolution,
[18:00] the ace went from being the lowest card
[18:02] to becoming the highest card as the peasants successfully
[18:05] pulled off an uprising and trumped the royalty.
[18:11] The worker, number one.
[18:14] Cool.
[18:15] So it is a murky past, but it's looking like somewhere
[18:24] around the 9th or 10th century, similar games
[18:27] were being played in China.
[18:30] And then the Egyptians were the ones
[18:31] who co-opted the culture, Coalson.
[18:34] The leading name among American manufacturers
[18:39] was Louis Cohen, who began publishing playing
[18:44] cards in 1832, and seems to be sort
[18:50] of the beginning of the explosion of cards
[18:52] in the United States.
[18:54] He spent time in England.
[18:59] So it didn't sound like we, I mean,
[19:01] we didn't have it in the way we have it now until, clearly,
[19:05] we were bringing it over on the Mayflower
[19:07] like we talked about if it was going on back then, but.
[19:11] Yeah, right.
[19:13] Well, I'll try to summarize this for you, Jill.
[19:17] It's going to be complicated.
[19:18] Might buy her a book.
[19:23] I know for a while there, I guess
[19:27] I probably don't do it anymore.
[19:28] But for a long time, I just kept a deck of cards in my car
[19:32] because we would be out at a bar, restaurant with friends
[19:37] or something.
[19:38] And in Indiana, eventually, someone wants to play ukur.
[19:42] I just, well, there's four Hoosiers in the same room.
[19:48] It's in the law somewhere.
[19:50] And I had been disappointed enough by asking a bartender
[19:56] to borrow a deck of cards and then coming up short enough
[20:01] time.
[20:02] So I was like, you know what?
[20:03] These cost $2, $3.
[20:05] I'll just put it in my car.
[20:07] And I made a lot of people happy.
[20:11] All right, team, that was fun.
[20:13] Good work.
[20:14] Very good.
[20:14] I don't know if we were close or not,
[20:16] but it makes me want to, you know,
[20:19] can we play a little Skype Gin Ruppy, Gin Rummy after this?
[20:23] Or a little Skype Asshole?
[20:26] Ooh.
[20:28] I think you want to re-fit up, re-fit that, yeah.
[20:33] Turn off your Google.