Poker Playing Card History

Ancient Origins
Poker Playing cards originated around the year 850 in China and were created using woodblock printing methods, and evolved throughout Persia and Egypt in the 1200s to the 1300s.

Early versions of playing card decks consisted of varying quantities of cards, from 32 to as many as 150.

First Documentation
In the late 1300s, a German monk named Johannes von Rheinfelden, also known as John of Rheinfelden or Brother John, is believed to be the first person to document a 52-card deck of playing cards with a description of different games that could be played.

Evolution of Suits
Between the years 900 and 1500, early playing cards across the world used a variety of images in place of modern suits -such as coins, cups, swords, acorns, leaves, flowers, hearts, and polo sticks – with hearts remaining today as one of those legacy icons.

The French Innovation
In the late 1400s, in France, the sword and cup suits were simplified into the suits we know today: spades and hearts, as well as the inclusion of clubs and diamonds, with decks using color-coded suits of black and red.

The transformation into simpler designs with fewer colors was done mainly to reduce the cost of mass production of playing card decks by the “card makers” in France.

The Four Kings
Interestingly, each of the Kings in the deck has historical origins. The King of Hearts represented Charlemagne, known as Charles the Great (Christian King and founder of the Holy Roman Empire). The King of Spades represented King David, from the Old Testament. The King of Diamonds was Julius Caesar of the ancient empires, and the King of Clubs was the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great.

American Poker Evolution
The original French deck was a hybrid of its predecessors, and these playing cards eventually made their way to the United States in the early 1800s, with early decks consisting of 20 playing cards.

In the mid-1800s, the deck transitioned into the 52 cards, mainly to accommodate more players and to allow more ways in which poker ranks to be created, such as more possibilities to create a flush or a straight, and to allow enough cards to be used for players to discard and draw new ones to improve the rankings of their hands.

This 52-card deck transition took place between 1830 and 1850 and became the standard for the poker cards we use today.