- Here are fie hidden facts
you may not know about playing cards.
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♫ Time to wake up
Number one, playing cards date back hundreds of years,
and there's been some speculation about why a deck of cards
has 52 cards, four suits, two colors, et cetera, et cetera.
Some believe that the two colors, red and back,
represent night and day.
The four suits represent the four seasons of the year.
Now in a deck you have 12 court cards,
which could represent the 12 months of the year.
There are also 12 animals in the cycle
of the Chinese calendar, or 12 zodiac symbols.
There are 13 cars in each suit.
13 could represent the lunar cycle.
The moon travels around the Earth 13 times a year.
And there are also 13 weeks per season.
52 cards in a deck, 52 weeks in a year.
Coincidence?
Now there's a myth that says that if you add up
all the single values of the cards together,
they will give you 365.
Now this myth is false, but if you do the math,
take the average value of a playing card, which is seven,
multiply that by the number of suits, which is four,
and multiply that by the number of card in every suit,
which is 13, that should give you 364, add a Joker, 365.
Another little hidden Easter egg
within the deck of cards is the 8 of diamonds.
How many eights do you see here?
Now you probably see the two indices on each corner,
but if you take a look at the negative space,
you can actually see another eight.
- Whoa!
- Which brings me to fact number three,
if you perfectly shuffle a deck of cards,
one card per one card, this is known as a fair shuffle,
if you do this eight times in a row,
the deck will return to its original order.
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Fact number four, in World War II,
the US Playing Card Company teamed up
with the British intelligence
to send troops playing card maps.
These maps were hidden on the inside of a playing card.
When wet, you could split these cards open.
Adding all the cards together would create a full-sized map.
They created a special line of playing cards cheap enough
so that they could send troop at least one deck of cards
and these would not arouse suspicions from enemy troops.
Decks of cards are said to have helped
at least 32 people escape from Colditz Castle
and prompted some 316 escaped attempts.
No one knows how many decks were produced,
but the only known two surviving decks
are held in the Washington D.C. Spy Museum.
But that's not all.
They were also later used in the Vietnam War
because the ace of spades was said
to represent death in certain cultures,
the US soldiers had ordered thousands and thousands
of playing cards made up of just ace of spades
they would stick in their helmets
to instill fear in their enemies.
And fact number five, did you know there are more ways
to shuffle a deck of cards than there are atoms on Earth?
- Whoa!
- The total number of ways to shuffle
a deck of cards is 52 factorial.
Now what does that mean?
It means 52 times 51 times 50 times 49 and so on
and so on and so on give you a number
which is so large, eight with 65 zeros.
So to put this in practical terms,
you could shuffle a deck of cards every second
since the beginning of creation of the Big Bang,
and still to this day
not have had the same arrangement twice.
So basically if you took every planet in the universe
and had people on that planet,
give each of them a deck of cards
and let them shuffle a deck of cards once per second,
still to this day, you would not have
the same arrangement twice.
- Whoa!
- So every time you pick up a deck of cards,
just know that you're holding a completely unique order
that no one has likely ever seen.
So those are five cool hidden facts
that you may not know about playing cards.
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Peace out!