Raw Deals and Winning Hands Trivia Quiz

Answer:

Many popular card games can trace their ancestry back hundreds of years. Of those in this quiz, Baccarat, whose origins can be traced back to the 1400s, is the oldest. It originated from a game known as "baccara" (derived from the Italian word for "zero", referring to the value of face cards and tens).

Hearts is a deceptively simple game whose roots stretch back hundreds of years to the European game Reversis, where players also tried to avoid winning certain cards and tricks. Unlike many trick-taking games where the aim is to win tricks, Hearts rewards players for avoiding them. Its most famous strategy is "shooting the moon", where a player attempts to collect every penalty card in a single hand. When it works, it's great! When it doesn't...well, there's always the next hand.

Whist became enormously popular in eighteenth-century England and inspired Edmond Hoyle to write a guide explaining its rules. His books were so successful that the phrase "according to Hoyle" entered the language, meaning to do something correctly and according to the rules.

In turn, Whist evolved into Bridge, whose scoring system was refined in 1925 by Harold Vanderbilt while travelling aboard an ocean liner. Cribbage was invented in England during the early 1600s by the poet, playwright and gambler Sir John Suckling and remains one of the most recognisable and popular card games ever devised. In it, the first player to reach the winning hole pegs out and wins the game; this gave us the expression "to peg out" - a surprisingly cheerful origin for a phrase that means quite the opposite!

Poker emerged first in America during the early nineteenth century and became closely associated with the riverboats; Euchre became immensely popular during the nineteenth century and most likely originated with German migrants in the 1800s. Similarly, Conquian was being played in Mexico by the mid-1800s.

Canasta was devised in Uruguay in 1939 by mates Segundo Santos and Alberto Serrato, who were looking for a game that combined features they liked from several other games. Apparently, there were a lot of people who aslo thought it was fun!

Whether your favourite is a careful game of Bridge, a competitive hand of Poker or a lively round of Canasta after dinner, card games have been bringing people together for generations. Long before mobile phones, streaming services and video games, a deck of cards could provide an entire evening's entertainment. Mind you, they could also prompt lively debate about the rules, the scoring, or whose turn it was to deal. Some things never change!