I call BS on Dirty Poker

[AKQJ10]

Small point: the means described in the excerpt would render the aces indistinguishable from jacks, and kings indistinguishable from queens. That does seem stupid, and makes you wonder why they'd bother marking Qs and Js in the first place. The reason not all four look alike is because you never reflect a card image (top-to-bottom or left-to-right) in the real world. You could take a photo of a card and reverse the image, but you wouldn't just swap the card. You could certainly turn it left to right.

I do wonder, though, if the author got caught simplifying things in a sloppy way. Maybe he meant:

-------
A K
Q J
J Q
K A
------

wherein you divide each HALF card into four corners. That would make more sense -- but that doesn't appear to be what he wrote, so who knows? Maybe your hypothesis is right and he's full of [censored].

Re: schwerd2: casino card backs, as well as standard poker decks such as Kem, Copag, or something cheap like Bicycle or Aviator, are always symmetrical. Elegant bridge decks often aren't, although I'd have to guess that bridge tournaments use symmetrical backs. Otherwise a cheater could turn the deck facing one way, turn all the aces upside down, and easily tell who had aces.

Interestingly, at a home game I saw a supposedly high-quality Kem (I think) deck that had some poker site's only once, hence asymmetrically. I think it was PokerStars, and must have been some freebie signup bonus. I don't think the host was cheating, but I was stunned that PS (?) wouldn't demand the same quality standards as a $3 deck of Bicycle. Maybe they've spent too much time in the online world. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]