Playing Cards

The playing cards that come with the average chipset or that you’ve got lying around in a drawer, might be okay for a game of Snap at Christmas, but the intensive handling of a serious poker game is a different matter altogether. An ordinary pack of cards will very quickly get bent, marked and stained to the point where you can identify every card in the deck from the back alone. What you need are some proper cards that’ll stand up to hours of riffling, shuffling, bending, dropping and spillages, and still look as if they’ve just been taken out of their cellophane wrapper.

The first thing to note is that anything other than 100% plastic cards is a false economy. Paper or plastic-coated cards – even if you buy name brands like Bicycle or ex-casino decks – are hard to riffle, prone to bending up at the corners after only a few minutes of play, and if a card gets creased it’s creased forever. (Real casino dealers always shuffle the cards face down on the table, so casinos use coated cards because they’re cheaper.) However, you can get some excellent plastic cards for little or no more money, which don’t crease or tear and that can be wiped clean when some muppet knocks an entire pint over them. Here are some of the best options…

KEM ARROWS £21.50 (two decks) • www.pokershopuk.com

Kems are generally considered to be the gold standard of playing cards. Incredibly flexible and hardwearing, they handle absolutely beautifully and look pretty nice to boot. However, they do have an odd tendency to curl up at the edges if you leave them unattended for any length of time, and while it’s easily remedied by putting them back in their box it’s still slightly irritating.

COPAG 1546 £12.75 (two decks) • www.pokershopuk.com

Copag is Kem’s biggest rival and the cards match the quality at almost half the price. Less glossy and a fraction firmer than the Arrows, they’re still so flexible and glidey that they practically riffle themselves, without being so slippery that they skid out of your hands. My personal favourite are the Poker Peek Index cards, but some people dislike the mini-indices at the corners. The playing cards of champions.

DAL NEGRO TORCELLO £4.26 • www.essexpokershop.com

One friend who runs a monthly multi-table event swears by these, and they’re a lovely, extremely durable pack of cards – a little stiffer than the previous two but still a pleasure to work with. An added bonus is that they’re sold in single packs with proper cardboard boxes, unlike the Copags and Kems, and they’re also quad-indexed in case you have any left-handers at the table. Avoid Dal Negro Excelsiors, which are horrible.

TOURNAMENT SUPER INDEX POKER CARDS £2.99 • www.gamble.co.uk

Proof that you don’t have to break the bank to get a decent deck of 100% plastic cards, although these aren’t as tactile as any of the more expensive offerings. If you’re serious about your game we’d still recommend spending a bit more but these do the job admirably and they’re infinitely better than any non-plastic cards. They’re durable and suitably slippy, but they are a bit stiff and only come with a super index, which makes it harder to identify your cards. 

DRINKSTUFF ECONOMY £1.99 or £17.96 for 10 • www.drinkstuff.com

These are probably the best all-rounders for occasional use. They shuffle and deal almost as well as cards three or five times the price, look good, and come in proper individual cardboard boxes so you can put them in your chipset case.

Some other words of advice to heed when buying playing cards…

DON’T GET FANCY

Once you dip your toe into the world of premium playing cards it’s easy to get carried away, to the point where you’re buying ridiculous decks made of ultra-thin stainless steel that cost £100 a pop. But even below that level you might find yourself tempted by other ‘special’ cards in an attempt to make your game a touch more stylish. Don’t do it – poker players really hate them. Whether it’s freaky-looking commemorative designs modelled on the first ever Copag decks from 100 years ago, reverse colour black-and-silver packs intended for goth magicians, or even transparent plastic cards that you can make faces at the other players through, everyone will just moan that they’re ‘too weird’ or that they can’t tell the spades from the clubs. So save yourself the earache and stick to normal designs.

DOUBLE DOWN

One thing that a lot of people don’t like about live poker is the relatively slow pace, particularly the long delay between hands while people obsessively shuffle the deck until half the pips rub off. One solution is to just slap anyone who shuffles for more than 10 seconds hard across the face, but a friendlier way is to use two decks (sometimes called double-decking). It often confuses people who haven’t done it before, but it’s actually a simple process and it helps to speed up live poker dramatically.

You need two decks of cards, obviously in different colours. While a hand is being played with one deck (e.g. red), the person to the right of the dealer shuffles the previous deck (e.g. blue). When the hand is over, the current dealer takes the shuffled blue cards and cuts them to the new dealer, and then gathers up the red cards from the table and shuffles the red deck while the new hand is being dealt with the blue one. Next hand, the process repeats with the colours reversed. And that’s all there is to it. It means there’s no delay between hands, since there’s always a freshly-shuffled deck ready to go the second the previous hand ends, and the obsessive shufflers have all the time they need to ensure that the deck’s been randomised to within an inch of its life.

BOXING STUPID

An odd quirk of paying out top dollar for fancy playing cards is that you don’t get any practical packaging for your money. If you’re at the point where you’re splashing out 20 quid for two decks of cards, it’s probably a fair bet that you’re also carrying your chips in a nice case, which usually comes with slots for two individual packs. So why do nearly all the expensive cards come in twin-pack plastic boxes or strange commemorative tins in which the cards just flap around loose, leaving you separating the red cards from the blue cards before you start?

The main problem is that you can’t put the plastic box in your chip case, and you can’t put the individual decks in there either because they don’t have their own cardboard boxes and will fly around all over the place getting scratched and bent.

If you search around you can find single decks of Kems but some places will try to charge you more for the privilege. The cheapest we’ve found is £10.75 from www.pokershopuk.com.

Stuart Campbell is assistant organiser of the Bristol & South West Poker Meetup Group, which runs tournaments and cash games at numerous venues across the region