Playing Cards
In playing cards, pips are small symbols on the frontside of the cards that determine the suit of the card. A standard 52-card poker deck consists of four suits of thirteen cards each: spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds. Each suit contains three face cards – the jack, queen, and king. The remaining ten cards are called pip cards and are numbered from one to ten. (The first card is almost always changed from "one" to "ace" and often is the highest card in the game, followed by the face cards.) Each pip card consists of an encoding in the top left-hand corner (and, because the card is also inverted upon itself, the lower right-hand corner) which tells the card-holder the value of the card. The center of the card contains pips representing the suit. The number of pips corresponds with the number of the card, and the arrangement of the pips is generally the same from deck to deck.
Many of these 52-card poker decks contain a variation on the pip style for the Ace of Spades, often consisting of an especially large pip or even a representative image, along with information about the deck's manufacturer.
Read more about this topic: Pip (counting)
Famous quotes containing the words playing and/or cards:
“I am now quite lame, from scuffling, all my fingers stiffened by playing ball. Pretty business for a law student. Yes, pretty enough; why not? Good exercise and great sport.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)