My Newfound Obsession With Cards

My Newfound Obsession With Cards

Recently, I’ve been really into playing cards. Just a typical deck with 52 cards: 2-10, Jack-Ace, and 4 suits. I don’t know exactly how it started, but I do know a few things made me want to start using them more. Over the summer, I went to a church camp where, during the day, my friends and I did a whole lot of nothing, and in the evenings we had services and events and things like that. So to fill our time, we played a lot of card games. To my great embarrassment, up until this summer I haven’t been able to shuffle a deck of cards, and for a good reason: I’ve never had to. My ideology made perfect sense. For most of my life, as long as there was one friend who knew how to shuffle, we were fine. Just let them shuffle; it was as easy as that. After all, we hardly played with cards. Now, imagine this. It’s 90 degrees outside in the middle of Indiana on a sleepy Wednesday afternoon. Nothing is really going on during that specific afternoon at the annual Wabash family camp, so a bunch of friends and I decide to kill time by playing cards in the dining hall until service at 7; after all, it was one of the only air-conditioned buildings that we were allowed in during the day. And technology isn’t really something that you use a lot during camp. We all sat down and started playing a game of golf or something, and after a little while, I noticed that everyone knew how to do a bridge shuffle (the stereotypical fancy shuffle where the cards sort of fall on top of each other), and I didn’t. It was slightly embarrassing, but my friend Madeline began teaching me the art of a perfect shuffle that week, which I’ll always appreciate. So I guess you could say that week sparked my curiosity about cards. 

When I got home, I had a few more weeks until school started, so I filled my time with running, guitar, college applications, and of course my newfound hobby of cards. I didn’t think of them too much right away, since I had other things to worry about, but during an excursion to Walgreens with my friends, I stumbled across a hidden treasure at the end of an aisle. The Bicycle card shelf. It was beautiful. I didn’t really want a boring deck of cards, so I made a rare impulse purchase of Mickey Mouse cards, and when I got home, I began practicing right away. I finally got down the bridge shuffle and discovered the wonders of sleight of hand, which is basically the techniques of manual dexterity that magicians use to create illusions of doing one thing but actually doing another. There are all sorts of sleight of hand techniques, and many of them are simple concepts that are extremely hard to master. As I continued practicing, I’ve also expanded my “collection” of cards, all from Bicycle. If you don’t know, Bicycle is probably one of the most well-known card companies in the world that create some great decks of cards. 

My first deck of cards

My most recent development was another kind of random purchase of poker chips. I’d never played poker. I have two friends who have played with their dad before, so I decided to get some chips to try it out with them and a few other friends. That entire night was kind of a social experiment. It was a pretty regular game night with pizza and music, but instead of learning a more contemporary game like Dixit or Codenames, we were learning how to play Texas hold ‘em. It was very exciting; I think that people who play poker are stereotypically associated with gambling and alcohol and the bad parts of society (which may or may not be true; I’ve never played with an experienced poker player), so the fact that we were playing in and of itself was kind of funny. But regardless, I learned quite a lot about the game itself. First of all, we weren’t doing it right. Since we weren’t actually betting money (these were my friends from church, for crying out loud), we didn’t have anything at stake, which automatically made it, as one of my friends said, “like a game of Monopoly”. I divided the chips evenly between 10 people, with each person getting around 400 chips in value, but there wasn’t anything barring someone from just going all in. So I had to look up a guide on how to fix this problem, but the solution was simple: play a game of “limit” poker instead of “no-limit” poker, which is exactly what it sounds like: there’s a limit on how much you can bet. I think that the other big thing that I learned was that the kind of skill that you need in poker is knowing what hands to play and which ones not to play. I’m not going to give a full rundown on how Texas hold ‘em works, but basically, you get two cards and try to form the best hand possible with the community cards in the center of the table, betting in between the dealing of cards. It was like a statistics test; you have to calculate the probability of having the best hand while also not knowing what everyone else has. While it was fun to learn the game (and to show off my card handling and shuffling skills), I don’t know how much I’m going to be playing it in the future, because I lost every single chip that I had. So please, don’t go into a casino if you care at all about your finances and well-being.