People around the world love to play cards, whether for fun or sport (i.e. gambling). This is no different in the United States.  There are many, many, card games in the United States that are popular among Americans young and old.  In fact many games that are popular with younger Americans are not popular with older Americans and visa versa* as popular card games come in and out of style.  Today, I am going to start a short serious on how to play some popular American card games that I will present over the following three posts.  Before teaching you about these different card games though it is important to go over the names of the cards in a standard American deck of cards and some basic card playing vocabulary.

Important vocabulary:
a pack or a deck = a set of 52 playing cards (plus 2 Jokers) that constitutes the standard American playing cards
a play = a person’s turn in a card game, for example: “It is your play.”
a hand = the subset of cards that a player is holding in his/her hand
the card face = the front of the card which has unique markings on it
the back of the card = the back of each card is identical so other players cannot determine what cards a player is holding in his/her hand
suit(s) = a group of cards that are all have the same symbol in them; there are four suits in a standard American set of playing cards
to shuffle = the verb used to describe the action of mixing up the card before starting to play a game with them

Playing cards:
Playing cards in the United States have four different categories (called suits).  The names of the suits are: Spades, Diamonds, Hearts and Clubs (a picture of these suits is shown below).  The cards in an American deck of cards are numbered from 2-10 and include “face” cards that have letters on them: (J) for Jack, (Q) for Queen, (K) for King and (A) Ace.  Cards are named for their number/face and suit, in the following way: Ace of Spades, two of Hearts, ten of Clubs.

So, just to review, there are four suits, and there are 13 cards in each suit, which makes a total of 52 cards per deck.  You always want to check you have all the cards in the deck before you begin a game.  These 52 cards are all you need to play all the games that I will present to you over the next few posts.

The suits pictured here are:

Clubs (upper left hand corner), Diamonds (upper right hand corner),

Hearts (lower left hand corner), Spades (lower right hand corner)

*vice versa = the reversed order or conversely