Which is higher clubs or spades?
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I will assume for the moment that we are talking about French suits (hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades). Show
The short answer is: "it depends what game you are playing". The longer answer would be a list of the different ways that the suits are ranked in different games. Here are a few off the top of my head (rank from high to low in each case): hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades: Preference, 500, Tysiacha People sometimes ask this question about ranking of suits because they want to decide which of two royal flushes is higher in poker. In that case, the correct answer (for the official casino / tournament game) is that in poker all the suits are equal, and that when such a tie occurs you split the pot. But some people do play with suits ranked as a house rule and several different rankings are used. See http://www.pagat.com/vying/pokerrank.html for a discussion of this. In a way, a more interesting question would be to ask how many of the 24 possible different suit ranking orders occur in some card game. The answer to the question "How are the cards within a suit ranked?" is similar. It could be K-Q-J-A-2-3-4-5-6-7 or K-Q-J-A-10-9-8-7-... or A-10-K-Q-J-9-8-7 or K-Q-J-10-9-8-7-... or even A-K-Q-J-10-9-8-... depending on the game and the suit. The question is a bit easier for other suit systems. For example, in Chinese money cards the ranking order from high to low is definitely: tens, myriads, strings, cash. When it comes to the standard poker hand rankings, suits of cards generally rank equal to each other. The ace of hearts is just as strong as the ace of spades, for example. There are some situations where the suit of a card determines which hand wins. The hierarchy of suits differs depending on where you play, but in the US all poker rooms use the same suit rankings. Let’s take a look at what the highest suit is in poker, and what situations call for a card suit tiebreaker: An easy way to remember the suit rankings is by thinking of them in reverse alphabetical order. In US poker games, the suits are ranked from highest to lowest as follows:
In other countries, the order of suits might be different. Some games in Russia, Italy, China, and Germany use different suit rankings, for example. When Does the Highest Suit Matter?Suits are never used to determine who wins a poker pot. A heart royal flush and a spade royal flush would split a pot in the rare event that the two hands went against each other, such as in a game of Seven Card Stud. Suit rankings are used to break ties in the following situations: The Bring-In – In games like Stud, the player with the lowest upcard starts the action with a minimum bet (the bring-in). In the event of a tie, the player with the lower-ranking suit is the bring-in player. For example, with one player showing the 2♠ and another the 2♥, the 2♥ has to post the bring-in. In Razz, the player with the highest card has to post the bring-in, and the higher suit has to post in case of a tie. Assigning the dealer button – At the beginning of a new game, the dealer will give each player one card to determine who gets to start the game on the button. The highest card gets the button, with ties broken by the suit rankings. This process can also be used to choose which player gets the first choice of game in a mixed-game format, or who gets an available seat at another table when a game breaks. Splitting an odd pot – When a split pot has an odd number of chips, suits can be used to determine which player gets the odd chip. In playing cards, a suit is one of the categories into which the cards of a deck are divided. Most often, each card bears one of several pips (symbols) showing to which suit it belongs; the suit may alternatively or additionally be indicated by the color printed on the card. The rank for each card is determined by the number of pips on it, except on face cards. Ranking indicates which cards within a suit are better, higher or more valuable than others, whereas there is no order between the suits unless defined in the rules of a specific card game. In a single deck, there is exactly one card of any given rank in any given suit. A deck may include special cards that belong to no suit, often called jokers. History[edit]Modern Western playing cards are generally divided into two or three general suit-systems. The older Latin suits are subdivided into the Italian and Spanish suit-systems. The younger Germanic suits are subdivided into the German and Swiss suit-systems. The French suits are a derivative of the German suits but are generally considered a separate system.[1][2] Origin and development of the Latin suits[edit]Latin card suitsItalian[a]Cups(Coppe) Coins (Denari)  (Bastoni) Swords (Spade) Spanish[b]Cups (Copas) Coins (Oros) (Bastos) Swords (Espadas) The earliest card games were trick-taking games and the invention of suits increased the level of strategy and depth in these games. A card of one suit cannot beat a card from another regardless of its rank. The concept of suits predate playing cards and can be found in Chinese dice and domino games such as Tien Gow. Chinese money-suited cards are believed to be the oldest ancestor to the Latin suit-system. The money-suit system is based on denominations of currency: Coins, Strings of Coins, Myriads of Strings (or of coins), and Tens of Myriads. Old Chinese coins had holes in the middle to allow them to be strung together. A string of coins could easily be misinterpreted as a stick to those unfamiliar with them. By then the Islamic world had spread into Central Asia and had contacted China, and had adopted playing cards. The Muslims renamed the suit of myriads as cups; this may have been due to seeing a Chinese character for "myriad" (万) upside-down. The Chinese numeral character for Ten (十) on the Tens of Myriads suit may have inspired the Muslim suit of swords.[3] Another clue linking these Chinese, Muslim, and European cards are the ranking of certain suits. In many early Chinese games like Madiao, the suit of coins was in reverse order so that the lower ones beat the higher ones. In the Indo-Persian game of Ganjifa, half the suits were also inverted, including a suit of coins. This was also true for the European games of Tarot and Ombre. The inverting of suits had no purpose in terms of play but was an artifact from the earliest games. These Turko-Arabic cards, called Kanjifa, used the suits coins, clubs, cups, and swords, but the clubs represented polo sticks; Europeans changed that suit, as polo was an obscure sport to them. The Latin suits are coins, clubs, cups, and swords. They are the earliest suit-system in Europe, and were adopted from the cards imported from Mamluk Egypt and Moorish Granada in the 1370s. There are four types of Latin suits: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,[c] and an extinct archaic type.[4][5] The systems can be distinguished by the pips of their long suits: swords and clubs.
Despite a long history of trade with China, Japan was not introduced to playing cards until the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1540s. Early locally made cards, Karuta, were very similar to Portuguese decks. Increasing restrictions by the Tokugawa shogunate on gambling, card playing, and general foreign influence, resulted in the Hanafuda card deck that today is used most often for fishing-type games. The role of rank and suit in organizing cards became switched, so the hanafuda deck has 12 suits, each representing a month of the year, and each suit has 4 cards, most often two normal, one Ribbon and one Special (though August, November and December each differ uniquely from this convention). Invention of German and French suits[edit]During the 15th-century, manufacturers in German speaking lands experimented with various new suit systems to replace the Latin suits. One early deck had five suits, the Latin ones with an extra suit of shields.[9] The Swiss-Germans developed their own suits of shields, roses, acorns, and bells around 1450.[10] Instead of roses and shields, the Germans settled with hearts and leaves around 1460. The French derived their suits of trèfles (clovers or clubs ♣), carreaux (tiles or diamonds ♦), cœurs (hearts ♥), and piques (pikes or spades ♠) from the German suits around 1480. French suits correspond closely with German suits with the exception of the tiles with the bells but there is one early French deck that had crescents instead of tiles. The English names for the French suits of clubs and spades may simply have been carried over from the older Latin suits.[11] Tarot cards[edit]Beginning around 1440 in northern Italy, some decks started to include an extra suit of (usually) 21 numbered cards known as trionfi or trumps, to play tarot card games.[12] Always included in tarot decks is one card, the Fool or Excuse, which may be part of the trump suit depending on the game or region. These cards do not have pips or face cards like the other suits. Most tarot decks used for games come with French suits but Italian suits are still used in Piedmont, Bologna, and pockets of Switzerland. A few Sicilian towns use the Portuguese-suited Tarocco Siciliano, the only deck of its kind left in Europe. The esoteric use of Tarot packs emerged in France in the late 18th century, since when special packs intended for divination have been produced. These typically have the suits cups, pentacles (based on the suit of coins), wands (based on the suit of batons), and swords. The trump cards and Fool of traditional card playing packs were named the Major Arcana; the remaining cards, often embellished with occult images, were the Minor Arcana. Neither term is recognised by card players.[13][14] Suits in games with traditional decks[edit]In a large and popular category of trick-taking games, one suit may be designated in each deal to be trump and all cards of the trump suit rank above all non-trump cards, and automatically prevail over them, losing only to a higher trump if one is played to the same trick.[15] Non-trump suits are called plain suits.[16] Special suits[edit]Some games treat one or more suits as being special or different from the others. A simple example is Spades, which uses spades as a permanent trump suit. A less simple example is Hearts, which is a kind of point trick game in which the object is to avoid taking tricks containing hearts. With typical rules for Hearts (rules vary slightly) the queen of spades and the two of clubs (sometimes also the jack of diamonds) have special effects, with the result that all four suits have different strategic value. Tarot decks have a dedicated trump suit. Chosen suits[edit]Games of the Karnöffel Group have between one and four chosen suits, sometimes called selected suits or, misleadingly, trump suits. The chosen suits are typified by having a disrupted ranking and cards with varying privileges which may range from full to none and which may depend on the order they are played to the trick. For example, chosen Sevens may be unbeatable when led, but otherwise worthless. In Swedish Bräus some cards are even unplayable. In games where the number of chosen suits is less than four, the others are called unchosen suits and usually rank in their natural order. Ranking of suits[edit]Whist-style rules generally preclude the necessity of determining which of two cards of different suits has higher rank, because a card played on a card of a different suit either automatically wins or automatically loses depending on whether the new card is a trump. However, some card games also need to define relative suit rank. An example of this is in auction games such as bridge, where if one player wishes to bid to make some number of heart tricks and another to make the same number of diamond tricks, there must be a mechanism to determine which takes precedence in the bidding order. There is no standard order for the four suits and so there are differing conventions among games that need a suit hierarchy. Examples of suit order are (from highest to lowest):
Pairing or ignoring suits[edit]The pairing of suits is a vestigial remnant of Ganjifa, a game where half the suits were in reverse order, the lower cards beating the higher. In Ganjifa, progressive suits were called "strong" while inverted suits were called "weak". In Latin decks, the traditional division is between the long suits of swords and clubs and the round suits of cups and coins. This pairing can be seen in Ombre and Tarot card games. German and Swiss suits lack pairing but French suits maintained them and this can be seen in the game of Spoil Five.[17] In some games, such as blackjack, suits are ignored. In other games, such as Canasta, only the color (red or black) is relevant. In yet others, such as bridge, each of the suit pairings are distinguished. In contract bridge, there are three ways to divide four suits into pairs: by color, by rank and by shape resulting in six possible suit combinations.
Four-color suits[edit]Some decks, while using the French suits, give each suit a different color to make the suits more distinct from each other. In bridge, such decks are known as no-revoke decks, and the most common colors are black spades, red hearts, blue diamonds and green clubs, although in the past the diamond suit usually appeared in a golden yellow-orange. A pack occasionally used in Germany uses green spades (comparable to leaves), red hearts, yellow diamonds (comparable to bells) and black clubs (comparable to acorns). This is a compromise deck devised to allow players from East Germany (who used German suits) and West Germany (who adopted the French suits) to be comfortable with the same deck when playing tournament Skat after the German reunification.[18] Other suited decks[edit]Suited-and-ranked decks[edit]A large number of games are based around a deck in which each card has a rank and a suit (usually represented by a color), and for each suit there is exactly one card having each rank, though in many cases the deck has various special cards as well. Examples include Mü und Mehr, Lost Cities, DUO, Sticheln, Rage, Schotten Totten, UNO, Phase 10, Oh-No!, Skip-Bo, Roodles, and Rook. Other modern decks[edit]Decks for some games are divided into suits, but otherwise bear little relation to traditional games. An example would be the board game Taj Mahal, in which each card has one of four background colors, the rule being that all the cards played by a single player in a single round must be the same color. The selection of cards in the deck of each color is approximately the same and the player's choice of which color to use is guided by the contents of their particular hand. In the trick-taking card game Flaschenteufel ("The Bottle Imp"), all cards are part of a single sequence ranked from 1 to 37 but split into three suits depending on its rank. players must follow the suit led, but if they are void in that suit they may play a card of another suit and this can still win the trick if its rank is high enough. For this reason every card in the deck has a different number to prevent ties. A further strategic element is introduced since one suit contains mostly low-ranking cards and another, mostly high-ranking cards. Whereas cards in a traditional deck have two classifications—suit and rank—and each combination is represented by one card, giving for example 4 suits × 13 ranks = 52 cards, each card in a Set deck has four classifications each into one of three categories, giving a total of 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 81 cards. Any one of these four classifications could be considered a suit, but this is not really enlightening in terms of the structure of the game. Uses of playing card suit symbols[edit]Card suit symbols occur in places outside card playing:
Character encodings[edit]In computer and other digital media, suit symbols can be represented with character encoding, notably in the ISO and Unicode standards, or with Web standard (SGML's named entity syntax): Playing card characters in UnicodeUTF code:U+2660 (9824dec)U+2665 (9829dec)U+2666 (9830dec)U+2663 (9827dec)Symbol:♠♥♦♣Name:Black Spade SuitBlack Heart SuitRed Diamond SuitBlack Club SuitEntity:♠♥♦♣UTF code:U+2664 (9828dec)U+2661 (9825dec)U+2662 (9826dec)U+2667 (9831dec)Symbol:♤♡♢♧Name:White Spade SuitWhite Heart SuitWhite Diamond SuitWhite Club SuitUTF codes are expressed by the Unicode code point "U+hexadecimal number" syntax, and as subscript the respective decimal number.Symbols are expressed here as they are in the web browser's HTML renderization. Name is the formal name adopted in the standard specifications. Unicode is the most frequently used encoding standard, and suits are in the Miscellaneous Symbols Block (2600–26FF) of the Unicode. In some card games the card suits have a dominance order, for example: club (lowest) - diamond - heart - spade (highest). That led to in spades being used to mean more than expected, in abundance, very much.[20] In European games, the order is often different: diamond or bell (lowest) - heart - spade or leaf - club or acorn (highest). See, for example, the game of Bruus. Other expressions drawn from bridge and similar games include strong suit (any area of personal strength) and to follow suit (to imitate another's actions). What is the difference between Clubs and spades?Rank is used to indicate the major (spades and hearts) versus minor (diamonds and clubs) suits. Shape is used to denote the pointed (diamonds and spades, which visually have a sharp point uppermost) versus rounded (hearts and clubs) suits. This is used in bridge as a mnemonic.
Is spades higher than Clubs in 13?In Thirteen, 2s are high and 3s are low. The suits are ranked with Hearts being the highest, then Diamonds, Clubs, and Spades. The objective of Thirteen is to be the first player to get rid of their cards.
Is spades the highest suit in poker?In US poker games, the suits are ranked from highest to lowest as follows: Spades. Hearts. Diamonds.
Which playing card is the highest?In games based on the superiority of one rank over another, such as most trick-taking games, the ace counts highest, outranking even the king.
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