full face, leading to the former being called the "one-eyed" jacks. When deciding which cards are to be made wild in some games, the phrase, "acey, deucey, one-eyed jack," is sometimes used, which means that aces, twos, and the one-eyed jacks are all wild. The king of hearts is shown with a broadsword behind his head, leading to the nickname "suicide king". The Ace of Spades is sometimes said to be the death card, and in some games is used as a trump card.
German and Austrian suits may have different appearances. For instance, many German decks have yellow or orange diamonds and green spades. Many southern Germans and Austrians prefer decks with hearts, bells, leaves, and acorns (for hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs), as mentioned above.
When relevant, most modern card games follow the bridge ranking of suits, i.e. spades are highest, followed by hearts, diamonds, and clubs. A common mnemonic to recall this ranking is reverse alphabetical order.
When giving the full written name of a specific card, the rank is given first followed by the suit, e.g., "Ace of Spades". However, standard shorthand notation lists the suit first, e.g., "♠A".
500, and some other games, require extended standard decks with extra spot cards (in the case of 500, 11's, 12's, and red 13's).
The standard 54-card deck is also commonly known as a poker deck or -- in Japan -- a Trump deck, to differentiate it from "dedicated" card games such as UNO or Froop!, or other dynamic card decks like Hanafuda.
Playing card symbols in Unicode
The Unicode standard defines 8 characters for card suits, from U+2660 to U+2667:
♠ ♡ ♢ ♣ ♤ ♥ ♦ ♧
COMPUTER PLAYERS
The game of poker (or at least most of the variants) is considered to be computationally unsolvable. However, methods are being developed to at least approximate perfect strategy from the game theory perspective in the heads-up (two player) game, and increasingly good systems are being created for the multi-player or ring game. Perfect strategy has multiple meanings in this context. From a game-theoretic optimal point of view, a perfect strategy is a minimax one that cannot expect to lose to any other player's strategy; however, optimal strategy can vary in the presence of sub-optimal players who have weaknesses that can be exploited. In this case, perfect strategy would be one that correctly or closely models those weaknesses and takes advantage of them to make a profit. Some of these systems are based on Bayes theorem, Nash equilibrium, Monte Carlo simulation, and Neural networks. A large amount of the research is being done at the University of Alberta by the GAMES group led by Jonathan Schaeffer who developed Poki and PsOpt.
FUNDAMENTAL THEOREM OF POKER
The fundamental theorem of poker is a principle first articulated by David Sklansky that expresses the essential nature of poker as a game of decision-making in the face of incomplete information.
The fundamental theorem is stated in common language, but its formulation is based on mathematical reasoning. Each decision that is made in poker can be analyzed in terms of the concept of expected value. The expected value expresses the average payoff of a decision if the decision is made a large number of times. The correct decision to make in a given situation is the
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