CasinoGaming.com


	Sundays: Inside Gaming Tuesdays: Video Poker Wednesdays: Off the Shelf Fridays: Richard Eng, Player's Edge Saturdays: Pocket Aces

POCKET ACES

Columns

• Back to Maryann's index

• Back to columnists' index

Maryann Guberman has been a writer and editor with many gaming publications, including Sports Form, Card Player, Poker World, Player's Panorama and Systems and Methods. She also has written and edited numerous books on gambling.

May 06, 2006

Bring Back the Four-Color Deck

Well, maybe the title is misleading. It's tough to bring something back when its existence never caught on. Back in the early 1990s, Mike Caro, poker's mad genius, designed and promoted the use of a four-color deck of cards for cardrooms. As the name behind a tournament hosted at Foxwoods Casino, Caro introduced the cards into the games. At least one Las Vegas casino gave players the option of playing with four colors but the response was largely negative.

Old habits change about as easily as history.

And speaking of history, if you've every done any research into playing cards, you already know that the pips have always been black and red but the designs often were done in beautiful processed color so they had the texture of fine art rather than functional design. Today's cards, while printed in four colors, are so standard that they don't even have variations of color. Red is red; there's no screened effect to make it appear pink. Green is green; there's no dilution of the cyan to soften it. Yellow is yellow, not light yellow. Well, you get the point. (If you are interested in the evolution of playing cards, pick up a copy of Catherine Perry Hargrave's History of Playing Cards.)

When Caro tried to convince the card-playing public that the time for change had arrived, he and his cards were greeted with something less than a lukewarm reception and despite all efforts, the concept and the cards fell out of sight.

Now I was a proponent of the four-color deck for poker, for no other reasons except I like color and I like Caro and I like change.

Little did I know that a decade later I'd be liking the four-color deck for a totally different reason.

Last year at a Christmas party hosted by poker champ Susie Isaacs, I was discussing cardroom poker versus online poker. We all agreed that we truly liked playing in a casino but most of us hadn't done so in a long time. The reason? Between the poor lighting and aging eyes, we had trouble distinguishing the difference between clubs and spades! Those of us who needed them were wearing corrective lenses, some with bifocals, and some just the drugstore type needed for presbyopia. Not everyone in the required glasses, but some still had a problem because of the distance from the center of the table. One man will not play live-action unless he can sit in any of the two seats to the right or left of the dealer because that's where he can see the cards best.

Well now, you're probably thinking, "Who cares about these old fogies who can't see?" except that you'd be totally wrong. Not everyone involved in this discussion was over the hill.

Even so, old fogies play in cardrooms so now would be the ideal time to dust off the plastic, break the seals, and bring the four-color decks back into action.

There's a new generation of poker players now and they know all about the four-color deck. The hard-lined die hard, lets-keep-things-as-they-are crowd aren't so reluctant to see a green club or a blue diamond anymore because their eyesight has deteriorated. And the young crowd knows all about the four colors because many online poker rooms use them, especially since they have to fit so many things on the screen and cards aren't life-sized.

Yes, there will probably be some backlash, some protest, some indignation about change, but I bet those of us who happen to need all kinds of vision correction will rejoice. Even online we look for the largest card graphics (We never, never reduce the size of the table to what amounts to miniscule.)

It took a little adjustment time but using the four-color deck online can and does have a good affect. If nothing else, it makes you think twice about dumping checks off while hoping for a flush!