Tired of playing the same old card games with the same old cards? One option is to expand the deck to include five suits instead of just four.
Normally, a standard deck’s 52 cards are divided equally among four suits: spades, clubs, diamonds, and hearts. These suits come into play in a host of card games. In poker, for example, a player holds five cards and seeks a combination that has a higher value than those of his or her opponents. At the top of the heap is the straight flush, which consists of any sequence of five consecutive cards of the same suit. There are 40 ways of getting such a hand with a standard deck, so the probability of being dealt a straight flush is 40/2,598,960, or .000015. The next most valuable hand is four of a kind, then full house, flush, straight, three of a kind, two pair, and one pair. Whatever your hand, you can still bet and bluff your way into winning the pot, but the ranking (and value) of the hands reflects the probabilities of obtaining various combinations by random selection of five cards from a deck.