52 Card Deck

It Starts with a Simple Deck of Playing Cards

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If you were to shuffle a deck of 52 cards and lay them out the possible order combinations are practically endless. The total number of combinations is a factorial of 52, or 52!, which translates to 8.06e+67, a number that means absolutely nothing to me. I probably haven’t thought about Factorials in Math since college. The last class/time I. Jan 26, 2019 A standard deck of cards is a widely used sample in basic probability. The deck will have 52 cards divided into 4 suits and 13 ranks. Have you ever wondered why there are 52 cards in a deck? While you have probably played with a deck of cards hundreds of times, you may not have stopped to think about its history. A card deck contains “10 ace cards (A to 10) and 3 picture cards: Jack, Queen, and King.Two suits (hearts and diamonds) in red color and another two (spades and clubs) in black,” according to ScienceABC.com.

They seem harmless enough, 52 thin slices of laminated cardboard with colorful designs printed on their sides. Yet, as another illustration of the mantra that complexity begins from the most simple systems, the number of variations that these 52 cards can produce is virtually endless. The richness of most playing card games owes itself to this fact.

52 Card Deck Club

Permute this!

The number of possible permutations of 52 cards is 52!. I think the exclamation mark was chosen as the symbol for the factorial operator to highlight the fact that this function produces surprisingly large numbers in a very short time. If you have an old school pocket calculator, the kind that maxes out at 99,999,999, an attempt to calculate the factorial of any number greater than 11 results only in the none too helpful value of 'Error'. So if 12! will break a typical calculator, how large is 52!?

52! is the number of different ways you can arrange a single deck of cards. You can visualize this by constructing a randomly generated shuffle of the deck. Start with all the cards in one pile. Randomly select one of the 52 cards to be in position 1. Next, randomly select one of the remaining 51 cards for position 2, then one of the remaining 50 for position 3, and so on. Hence, the total number of ways you could arrange the cards is 52 * 51 * 50 * ... * 3 * 2 * 1, or 52!. Here's what that looks like:

80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000

This number is beyond astronomically large. I say beyond astronomically large because most numbers that we already consider to be astronomically large are mere infinitesmal fractions of this number. So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.

Shall we play a game?

Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters.Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe.The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water.Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean.

Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers.So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.

And you thought Sunday afternoons were boring

To pass the remaining time, start shuffling your deck of cards. Every billion years deal yourself a 5-card poker hand. Each time you get a royal flush, buy yourself a lottery ticket. A royal flush occurs in one out of every 649,740 hands.If that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand into the Grand Canyon. Keep going and when you’ve filled up the canyon with sand, remove one ounce of rock from Mt. Everest. Now empty the canyon and start all over again. When you’ve levelled Mt. Everest, look at the timer, you still have 5.364e67 seconds remaining. Mt. Everest weighs about 357 trillion pounds.You barely made a dent. If you were to repeat this 255 times, you would still be looking at 3.024e64 seconds. The timer would finally reach zero sometime during your 256th attempt. Exercise for the reader: at what point exactly would the timer reach zero?

Back here on the ranch

Of course, in reality none of this could ever happen. Sorry to break it to you. The truth is, the Pacific Ocean will boil off as the Sun becomes a red giant before you could even take your fifth step in your first trek around the world. Somewhat more of an obstacle, however, is the fact that all the stars in the universe will eventually burn out leaving space a dark, ever-expanding void inhabited by a few scattered elementary particles drifting a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero. The exact details are still a bit fuzzy, but according to some reckonings of The Reckoning, all this could happen before you would've had a chance to reduce the vast Pacific by the amount of a few backyard swimming pools.

standard deck playing card games

A 'standard' deck of playing cards consists of 52 Cards in each of the 4 suits of Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, and Clubs. Each suit contains 13 cards: Ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King. Modern decks also usually include two Jokers.

Historically, this is the French or Anglo-American deck, while other regions (e.g. Germany, Italy, Spain) have their own traditional decks which vary in suits and face values.

Spades suit:

Hearts suit:

Diamonds suit:

Clubs suit:

A multitude of games can be played with a standard deck of playing cards or a modified deck of playing cards. Some of those which have an entry on BGG are listed below. A much larger list can be found included under the Traditional Playing Cards family of games, while Traditional Card Games is a placeholder for all games not in the BGG database.

The best website with a comprehensive list of traditional card games (including rules) is John McLeod's Pagat.com. You'll also find a list of articles about playing cards on BGG.

Many solitaire card games are also playable with a standard deck.

For an overview of the more popular and common games, see this article: 40+ Great Card Games For All Occasions. Some examples are listed below.

Standard Deck

52 Card Deck Games

Baccarat - Eight standard decks shuffled together from a Card Shoe
Bezique - Two standard decks with 2's through 6's removed
Blackjack - Eight standard decks shuffled together from a Card Shoe
Bridgette - Standard deck with 3 Colons (Jokers can be used)
Canasta - Two full decks shuffled together with Four Jokers
Durak - Standard deck with the 2's through 5's removed
Écarté - use 7-A of each suit
Euchre - Standard deck with the 2's through 8's removed
500 - Standard deck composition varies depending on number of players. Special 64 Card deck with 11's, 12's and 2 13's also used.
Hand and Foot - use 4-5 full decks including jokers
Nertz(Pounce) - one full deck per player
Panguingue(Pan) - Eight standard decks with the 8's, 9's, and 10's removed
Pinochle - Two standard decks with 2's through 8's removed. Double Pack also used.
Piquet - use 7-A of each suit
Preference - Standard deck with the 2's through 6's removed
Skat - use 7-A of each suit
Watten - use 7-A of each suit

MECHANISMS

Standard Deck Playing Card games can also be categorized by the main mechanism, examples being the following:

Set Collection

Cheat(aka Bullshit)

Betting/Wagering

Panguingue(Pan)

Dueling Nobles - uses a standard deck plus some d6s and counters; plays like a CCG
Tripoley - uses a standard deck with a special board/playing mat
The Blackjack River - uses a standard deck with a unique card laying mechanic
Standard Deck Dungeon - uses a standard deck to simulate a dungeon crawler