This is a more informative link: http://www.matthessler.com/

It's a no-revoke deck but what I'm curious about are the cards. There's the standard 52, a rule for Hearts, the Black Maria (a second QS), the Omnibus Knave (?; a second JD) which leaves only one card for a joker which is not shown. Does one card have a different back or is it there for comparison?

I just came back from the Fournier museum. They didn't have the original Ambras cards but a reproduction. They are enormous, basically the size of those jumbo cards. I can't see anyone playing with them in any time period. It must have been an art deck.

Quote from: Worst Bower on October 24, 2015, 03:54:07 PM

How many jokers are there? My double pinochle deck also has a hole in the box. It originally exposed the ace of clubs.

Out of curiosity, did the Ace of Clubs have any additional markings?

Plain aces (1s) here.

Just came back from a trip. I know that the French mark their ace of clubs but my deck had no special marks. All aces are plain small pips.

Having only one joker (assuming the other hasn't gone missing) may date it to before 1950s.

I think it's for export to Belgium, the Balkans, North Africa, or the Middle East.

Don is right that they are Parisian faces, but there are two slight differences. In France, they use blue instead of green and put names of who they are suppose to represent in the corners.

The Ottoman Empire used to strictly ban playing cards for religious reasons. As their empire was crumbling in the late 1800s, the rules were relaxed. The French were the first to jump in and introduce cards to the region. To differentiate domestic cards (which were subject to taxes) from export, they changed to the blue to green and dropped the names.

Belgian manufacturers (including the predecessors of Cartamundi) and Hungarians were also exporters to those regions. I came across a similar deck in Budapest. It is used to play double pinochle which is popular among Turks and Kurds.

Examples:
http://www.wopc.co.uk/hungary/artex/artex-for-turkey
http://www.wopc.co.uk/hungary/artex/artex-quadrilato-for-tunisia

I'm curious about how you use 500s to play poker. Don't all the odds change for each poker hand? If you did the math, can you share?

Nintendo still makes cards, including karuta like hanafuda decks. They also produce traditional board games and mahjong sets. There's the story that the head of Nintendo visiting USPC's headquarters in the 1950s. He was shocked that the world's largest card maker had such a small office that he realized he won't expand with just cards. Nintendo then diversified into toys and eventually video games. Their biggest competitor in the card market is Angel Playing Cards.

Current decks: http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n09/index.html

Decks that they've produced: http://a.trionfi.eu/WWPCM/WWPCM/japan/nintendo.htm

For types of cards used around the world, I suggest Sylvia Mann's All Cards on the Table from 1990. It's in English and German and is her magnum opus in playing card research.

Hochman's is the best guide for North American cards but guides to British cards are also available. Mann wrote Collecting English Playing Cards, Ken Lodge has the "Standard English Pattern" (hard to find), and Mike Goodall, a descendant of Charles Goodall, has written several books.

Michael Dummett's The Game of Tarot (1980) is often considered the most important book ever written in regards to the history of playing cards and card games (with a focus on tarot and its games). It contains 600 pages of research, much of it groundbreaking. Despite being 35 years old, only a few parts have become outdated due to new research. He published a semi-sequel with John McLeod called "A History of Games Played with the Tarot Pack" a decade ago but its focus is on recording as many tarot games as they can find (around a thousand pages of them).

For a more broader history, look to David Parlett's The Oxford Guide to Card Games which details the evolution of most card games up to 1990. This is the hard cover version and is better than the paperback one which lacks illustrations. The only thing lacking is information about older Asian card games which wasn't easily available back then.

Parlett also released The Penguin Book of Card Games (2009 ed.) which contains rules for hundreds of games, some not found on McLeod's pagat.com. Get the paperback version, the kindle version has OCR flaws.

This bibliography from the IPCS website is also handy. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated since 2009 and a few books may have new editions (like Hochman's). Many of the books are not in English.

Weird. Only issue 8 is causing trouble for me. Most of the text comes out as squares. I'm guessing it might be an OCR problem. Anyone else having this problem?

I thought you added security ink because the new box says "Casino Grade" while the old one didn't. By having a perfectly symmetrical back pattern with faded borders as well as security ink, the new deck would definitely be considered casino blackjack quality. That's something you might tell your client.

Quote from: Don Boyer on July 03, 2015, 11:58:53 AM

In fact, a notable poker player is was recently sued by two casinos over "edge sorting" - the casinos were (foolishly) using a deck at the table that had an edge design that gave the card an overall one-way pattern because of the cards being cut slightly off-center.

Sued? Not arrested for cheating?

He "cheated" using the casino's own equipment! The casino basically bought marked cards. There used to be players that went from casino to casino looking for roulette tables that showed a bias to certain numbers and exploit it. One could also accuse casinos of cheating because they have the house edge. Casinos won't survive if they don't have some statistical advantage against their customers.

Do card boxes act like humidors? I recently bought a Hungarian secret box but I'm not sure if it will regulate humidity and temperature as well as an ice box.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLOlipj64J8

Very good illustrations. Golden Court looks beautiful but the index is somewhat hard to see and is too far from the corner for easy playing. The black border may cause some trouble due to bleeding at the edge. It could still sell if you marketed it purely for its appearance alone.

Is Master Graven based on the Tarot de Marseille? I think the red suits should be white but have a thick outline.