At Jackpot.io we are all about online and mobile casino games, but we do realise that there are times when our players want to take a breather and occupy themselves with something else.
And the perfect vehicle for those times when they don't want to hit the table, slots, or Live Casino?
A deck of cards.
There's something about the feeling of holding cards - the possibilities, the permutations, the not quite knowing what will fall but definitely knowing what you want to fall - that makes games like blackjack and poker and baccarat so thrilling, so … real.
Playing cards have been around in various forms since the Chinese invented paper and printing. Our modern deck is just a version of different decks that go back through history. And every single one of these decks has held the power of skill and fortune over players.
Slots may be for fun, but cards are for the serious players. Even in the international online casino world, and even if you're playing a video form of your favourite tables game, cards just seem to have that extra aura of playing for the ultimate prize. Any kitchen table poker player knows that, once you've anted up and the dealer starts pulling those cards, you may as well be sitting at the final table of the World Series of Poker.
But what happens if you've got a deck of cards and you're alone at home and you don't really feel like putting real money down on an online casino game Or, you're sitting in the office between meetings needing to take your mind off the job? Or you just want to idle away some time?
If you've got a deck of cards, you've got a world of entertainment just waiting for you!
You all knew this was going to top the list. Solitaire is possibly the most famous card game ever, thanks in no small part to its inclusion on every single early PC's operating system software. What first rose to the public's awareness as a parlour game used to occupy the time of bored aristocrat ladies quickly became a workplace staple used to occupy the time of bored office drones everywhere.
The point of card solitaire (or patience) is to shuffle a deck of cards (using the standard 52-card deck), arrange them in a pattern - usually 7 piles of cards staring with 1 card on the far left, then 2, then 3, then 4, then 5, then 6, then 7. The topmost card of each pile is turned face up while all others are face down. Players then use their skills to try and sort all the cards into four piles, one for each suite and going from ace to King.
The origins of solitaire are lost in the mists of time, but the earliest provable mention of the game comes from a 1788 German book called Das Neue Konigliche L'Hombrespiel where it is called Patiencespiel.
Solitaire as a concept can be played in various forms. The most popular way nowadays is to use cards, but it can also be played using dominoes, mah-jong tiles, pegs, or stones.
The version we all know is called card solitaire or patience, and it can be broken down into different types as well: Klondike (the version found on the Windows Operating System), Spider, Yukon, and FreeCell.
Solitaire is one of the most fun card games you can play by yourself (although there is a two-person version called Double solitaire) and the sense of accomplishment when you do manage to get all those cards sorted back into their respective piles of suits is almost better than hitting blackjack.
This is only for the truly bored and the steadiest of hand but building a house of cards using all 52 cards in a deck is quite an accomplishment.
Patience, steadiness, and a solid engineering mind will all help to accomplish this task - and a room with no breezes, cats, or kids!
The most basic form of building a house of cards is creating a stack of cards. The current world record - held by Bryan Berg of the USA - is 75 stories! Mr Berg also holds the Guinness World Record for the tallest house of cards (7.86 metres), and the largest house of cards, a replica of the Venetian Macao casino built over 44 days and using 218,792 individual playing cards (that's over 4,000 decks of cards!). The final structure measured 10.5 by 3 metres and weighed over 270kgs.
Who would have thought something as seemingly mindless as building a house of cards could be so incredible?
Still, us normal mortals would probably do better if we started small by trying to get just a few cards to balance and worked our way up to using a full deck. Maybe add in a drinking game with friends and turn it into a party!
Fitness - of mind and body - is essential in the online or real-life gambling world. When you feel your best, when your mind is at its best, you will have your best gambling days.
Cycling is a huge pastime in our modern world. It gives you exercise, it takes you outdoors, it can be quite fun unless you're trying to get into the Tour de France. That level of commitment leaves no time to enjoy the finer things in life, like online casino. Unless you're betting on the race, but that's another story for another day.
Cycling. And not professional competitive cycling. Just getting out there, getting the heart pounding, breathing in the fresh air. Feeling the muscles burn as you pump the pedals. Listening to the fast clackclackclackclack as the wheels spin.
Wait, what? Are we talking about the roulette wheel?
No. We're talking about that childhood pastime of attaching a playing card to the bicycle frame with a clothes peg so that it flaps against the spokes as the wheel turns and roaring off down the road. The sound of that card frantically slapping the spokes as we raced around the neighbourhood gave us our lifelong love of the sound of Harley Davidsons and big block engines. A roaring accompaniment to days of leisure and carefree afternoons with our mates.
And an absolute hoot when we do it in our older years as we don our streamlined Spandex cycling outfits, put on our helmets, settle our cycling glasses, and wheel our fancy mountain bikes out into the street to annoy and amuse our neighbours.
Cards have always had an association with the art of seeing and fortune telling. There are even decks dedicated to the arts of divination, the most famous of which are the Tarot cards.
Tarots cards also have a long association with the playing cards we know and use today. The suits of cups, wands (batons), swords, and coins; the pip cards (one to ten), and the trump or fae cards - but there are hundreds of different localised variations on theme and artwork.
Some Tarot decks have the usual 52 cards, others have as many as 78 (22 Major Arcana cards - without suits) and 58 Minor Arcana cards (4 suits of 14 cards each). These larger decks are the ones most commonly associated with fortune telling and include all those figures of popular lore like Death, the Hanged Man, the Fool, the Tower, and the Lovers.
Is there any truth to the stories behind Tarot readings? That is up to you to decide but if we accept gamblers' superstitions as harbingers of luck, who are we to comment on the favours of fortune imbued in a Tarot deck?
Not into a rubbish bin, just throw them. Card throwing is a peculiar pastime but if Gambit of the X-Men is any indication, it can be quite a lethal hobby.
Card throwing is one of those weird things that some people do when they're bored, and other people take to extremes. A brief browse through YouTube will pop up all sorts of videos of people doing extraordinary things with card throwing like putting out candles, and even slicing and impaling fruit.
Rick Smith Jr holds the world record for card throwing. He has thrown a playing card 65.9m and with a top speed of 148km/hr (92 miles per hour). Impressive, but not quite as cool as those players who can throw a card with such force and accuracy that they can slice a banana in two or cut right into a watermelon from across a room!
And trust us, throwing a card with any sort of reliable accuracy is way harder than you think. Don't believe us? Go get your cards, pick an object to target, and give it a try. We'll wait.
Pro tip: it works better with new a new deck of cards rather than the dog-eared, tea-stained, soft as three-ply toilet paper deck you inherited from your granny.
Aren't we all absolutely amazed - nay, mind-boggled - when we see those David Blaine's and Dynamo's and Cyril Takayama's and Penn & Teller's when they whip out a legendary feat of legerdemain? But it's not the suspened-in-an-icecube-above-a-raging-volcano-filled-with-fireproof-piranhas than really get us excited - because we all know that there must be trick to the stunt somewhere.
It's the close-up magic that truly astounds us. The coin-and-card illusions. The breaking of all our preconceived notions using just an ordinary deck of cards right in front of our own eyes.
That's the one that really blows our mind.
And a lot of them are quite simple and easy to learn. Most magic trick boxes come with cards and instruction to get you started and then, like a poker fiend learning the winning ways to play, with practice comes perfection and the move to even more astounding feats.
All with a simple deck of cards.
Cardistry is an amazing talent that any card afficionado can learn. It's a portmanteau of the words card and artistry (obviously) and is an amazing bewitching skill.
While it looks like it deserves to be a part of the magic scene - and many magicians do use cardistry for the 'flair' - cardistry is a performance art using cards. It takes the simple act of shuffling and cutting a deck of cards and turns it into an awesome spectacle of impressive skill. Just learning how to shuffle a deck so that we had every card perfectly slip into the next with no bunching gave us a feeling of conquering Everest so getting to put 'cardist' on our resumé was a real thrill.
It's a visually impressive art that wows people everywhere with its one-handed cuts, two-handed cuts, fans and spreads, aerials, and isolations there are stacks of videos on the 'Tube that can help you get started with that little added twist to your card game.
Imagine how your opponents will feel at the next poker game when you can pull some of these tricks out on your deal!
What should be an addendum to our opening topic (solitaire) is actually deserving of a separate entry - card games.
Not the usual tables games like poker, blackjack, baccarat, and craps if you're playing at a Canadian casino (weird but true, Canadian gamblers are banned from using dice so games like craps have adapted to being played with cards!), we're talking about friend-and-family games.
UNO, snap, war, bridge, rummy, cribbage - the choices are as limitless as the number of unique ways you can shuffle a deck of cards. Actually, that's not true. Every time you shuffle a deck of cards, the chances are you're holding a unique combination that has never been seen in history and may never be seen again.
As passionate gamblers we all know about probability, chance, and random order. A deck of 52 cards has factorial 52 ways to be shuffled - that's an 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 to 1 chance of being shuffled exactly the same way EVER!
Is that more than grains of sand on the world's beaches or stars in the sky (or the UNIVERSE!)? We have no idea, but we do know that those are some pretty high odds to bet against if you're going for two in a row!
Here's Reddit “factoid”: Say that there exists 10 billion people on every planet, 1 billion planets in every solar system, 200 billion solar systems in every galaxy, and 500 billion galaxies in the universe. If every single person on every planet has been shuffling decks of cards completely at random at 1 million shuffles per second since the BEGINNING OF TIME, every possible deck combination would still yet to have been “shuffled”.
Mind. Blown.
But we digress.
There are a LOT of card games that can be played solo, with family, or with friends without the added pressure of having real money on the line - just for the joy of playing cards.
And how can we use cards when we're reading you ask?
It's super simple.
Take some time to enjoy a good book. Fiction, non-fiction, biographies, autobiographies, sci-fi, romance, poetry, thrillers, popular, obscure, modern, classics, even a great graphic novel or comic book. Reading is a simple, cheap, and fulfilling activity that helps us to expand our minds, work our imagination, and escape the real world for a while.
How do cards fit in?
Well, when you feel your eyelids growing heavy and your bed starts calling while you're in the middle of a chapter, simply pick up one of the cards from your deck and insert it into the pages of your book. Instant bookmark.
You're welcome.