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"A major attraction of card games is that they are in general neither wholly mindless, like most dice games, nor excessively cerebral, like
Chess, but offer a reasonable balance of chance and skill. The actual balance varies from game to game, enabling well-informed players to select from the vast repertoire of card games the one or two best suited to their tastes and talents."
David Parlett, The Oxford Guide to Card Games
"If choice is essential to a game of skill, then information can hardly be less important, since an uninformed choice is no choice at all. This is where card
games differ most distinctively from most board games . . . Card games play many variations on the theme of information, for example the amount of it they make available, and the ways in which it may be ascertained. It is always gradually revealed by the play of cards . . . And
always it may be gained . . . by watching, studying and knowing the habits of partners and adversaries -- above all, of oneself, so as not to give the game away. Hence the Poker face."
David Parlett, The Oxford Guide to Card Games
Playing Cards
 Theories on the origins of playing cards abound, though few have been confirmed with an absolute degree of certainty. One anthropologist, Dr. Stewart Culin, writing in
1895, cited their lineage as being from Korean divination arrows, [Tilley] which "sometime during the sixth century were miniaturized into strips of oiled silk unattached to any shaft. [McManus] Given the proximity of the Korean peninsula to China, it is also speculated that these may
have merged with or been influenced by Chinese money [Tilley] or Chinese "dotted cards" (a less costly version of dominoes) [McManus], and aided by the invention of paper in China.
Other authors have traced playing cards of varying shapes and formats through Persia and Arabia into Egypt and then to Europe." [Francis] Spain and/or Italy are generally considered
to be the likely entry points of cards to Europe, with "priority . . . accorded to Italy, partly because cards always spread along major trade routes, and Venice was the tradesman's entrance to Medieval Europe." [Parlett] The earliest European reference to playing cards occurs in a 1377 Latin manuscript
written by a German monk, [Beal] and by the fifteenth century, card-making was already a growth industry in various European centers. [Parlett] Though legends exist as to how sailors with Columbus brought the knowledge of playing cards with them to the New World, other accounts tell of soldiers
of Spain playing with leather cards in their expeditions in the 1500s . . . Cards also "were known to the early Mexicans as amapatolli from amatl, meaning paper, and patolli, meaning game." [Francis]
Playing cards in different countries at different times have been round, long and narrow, and a variety of different sizes, but decks of playing cards as we know
them today (52 cards with faces and numbers and four suits) were derived from European decks. The four suits most familiar to card players in the U.S. came from the French coeur (hearts), trefle (clubs), pique (spades) and carreau (diamonds/squares). Several of today's best-known card games also have European roots.
One of the best known of these games is poker. Poker, as described colorfully in James McManus's book "Cowboys Full," had its most likely roots in poque, an 18th century French parlor game. McManus says of the game that it
"emerged from the womb of a French vying game inflected with Persian characteristics as the flags above New Orleans were changing from Spanish to French to the Stars and Stripes around the 19th century and in the tumultuous decade that followed." The game later came into its own in New Orleans and on
the Mississippi riverboats.
Numerous card games are enjoyed today as social games and pastimes, but long before games (like bridge) were heard of, cards were also reviled by many. Playing cards were
used extensively in gambling and fortunetelling and "acquired an unsavory reputation, being associated with all vices." [Francis]
Reference Sources:
Beal, George. Playing Cards and Their Story. New York: Arco Publishing Company, 1975.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1953 Edition.
Francis, Henry G., editor. The Official Encyclopedia of Bridge, 4th Edition, New York: Crown Publishers, 1984.
Parlett, David. The Oxford History of Board Games, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
McManus, James. Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
Tilley, Roger. Playing Cards, London: Octopus Books, 1967.
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Well, this is it! The final update of the summer for the concert pages is now complete. For those of you who have been visiting the site
for a while, you know that there are two phases to the site: the Summer site, which is here now, and the Fall/Winter/Spring site, which will return in its more
compact three-page format on October 1st. 
