Playing Card Calendar
12 Court Cards: There are 12 Court Cards and 12 months in a year.
2 Colors: The red and black colors of the suits represent day and night.
4 Suits: The four suits symbolize the four seasons: spring, summer, fall and winter.
52 Cards: There are 52 weeks in a year, there are 52 cards in a deck.
Braille Cards
The first Braille playing cards were manufactured by Kem Cards in the 1960s.
Math Properties
Multiple a deck, 52 x 51 x 50, and down to x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1. You’ll end up with an 8 followed by 67 zeroes. Every time you shuffled a deck it’s guaranteed that the exact order of the cards never existed before. If you change the arrangement of the cards every second it would take over a million years to achieve all the combinations possible.
Snitch Cards
State prisons have created decks of cards with photos, names, and details of cold case victims or missing persons. Among inmates they were called "snitch cards.”
Collecting
The Guinness World Records states the largest playing card collection is 11,087 decks owned by Liu Fuchang of China. Columbia University's Library holds the Albert Field Collection of Playing Cards, an archive of over 6,000 decks dating back to the 1550s.
Military I.D.
To help the military in World War II, playing cards featured aircraft and map designs. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US produced the Most-Wanted Iraqi playing cards. In addition, Designs depicting Russian leaders appeared during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and a similar deck of cards depicting Hamas was produced after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel. This practice dates back to the American Civil War.
Poker Origins