The Pirate Story

Because I got a new deck of cards!

Nov 10, 2022

See that deck of cards? The Ace of Spades on top, whole deck sitting next to the blue Bicycle box with gold embossing? I got a new deck of cards! I was really excited to hear about the Bicycle Cypher deck, and I'm going to have to spend some time with these cards to find out what secrets they might tell me.

You never know with me what kind of “new deck” I'll be excited about. People who know me well just wait for me to tell them. They dare not guess at whether it will be tarot or playing cards, and oracle cards have been getting heavier in that mix over the last few years. We are going to talk about playing card divination at some point here, and my brain is really busy with what I'm writing for NaNoWriMo this month, so let's take another week off from going through the charms and look at my brand new cards instead!

I've got a cool pirate story to tell you. You can even go grab your own deck of cards and follow along!

I was in middle school when I started carrying a deck of playing cards around all the time. My grandmother and I would play card games when I spent the night with her on weekends. I was obsessed with learning to do card tricks. A game of solitaire was an easy way to keep myself entertained when I found myself waiting somewhere. The cards also helped me get to know some kids at school and learn to play the game Spades. They knew I had cards, so they taught me how to play.

My favorite way to break in a new deck is to tell the story I'm about to tell you. Now, I wouldn't expect you to just trust me with this. I did just tell you I love card tricks, and we're only working with photos here. How are you supposed to know I'm not looking through the cards and picking out the ones I want for this story?

If you have a deck of cards around, you can do this with me. Take out any extra cards, like Jokers. Make sure each suit is in order Ace through King, with the Ace on top and the Jack, Queen, and King after the 10 just like the Spades in this picture. The order the suits are stacked in doesn't matter, but I like to alternate black-red-black-red just for making things look nice. Once you've got the cards in order, all you have to do is exactly what the story says.

So there's a group of seven pirates, and they decide to play poker one night after hitting the rum pretty hard. One of them is forbidden from being the dealer again. She's always the dealer. She always wins. The problem is that none of the other six can handle the cards well enough to be the dealer. After several accusations of what she might have done to alter a deck in some way, she pulls out a brand new deck of cards and reassures them, “This deck has never even been opened before. You can trust these cards.”

Everybody's happy with this…until she goes to shuffle them. That's when the accusations start again! One of the other six pirates grabs the unshuffled deck and growls, “We'll all shuffle 'em!” But, again, there's a reason they had to accept the dealer they don't trust, so the best way they could come up with to do this was that everybody got a turn to cut and restack the deck. After the deck was cut and restacked seven times, then they let the dealer do her job.

Just because she wasn't in the condition the rest of them were didn't mean she hadn't had her own share that night. As she's dealing out seven hands of cards, she forgot a few. Each pirate was to get five cards, and she dealt them in rounds. She forgot her own hand on the second and fourth rounds. So when everybody else had five cards…

… she had three. “Not a problem! I'll just deal myself two more!”

Of course, the accusations started again. “She didn't forget nothin'! We've got ya caught this time!”

The dealer agreed to just set aside the three cards she had dealt to herself, deal herself five new cards, and get on with the game.

Now that they each had five cards, they started picking up their hands and looking to see who Lady Luck would favor. And each pirate thought tonight was their night!