Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from Hosts dot com where smart Happens.
Speaker 1: Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, why do they
Speaker 1: include jokers and a deck of playing cards? Jokers are
Speaker 1: one of those funny things. Many decks don't have jokers
Speaker 1: and in most cases you can lose the jokers and
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. So why include them? And while we're
Speaker 1: on the topic, where did any of the cards in
Speaker 1: the deck come from? Why are there fifty two cards
Speaker 1: with four suits and thirteen cards to a suit? According
Speaker 1: to Britannica dot com, the fifty two card deck that
Speaker 1: we used today is a modification of part of the
Speaker 1: standard to row deck, made up of the major arcana
Speaker 1: and the minor arcana minus the night cards. Probably around
Speaker 1: the fifteenth century, the deck started settling into the modern
Speaker 1: form that we know today. The joker, however, did not
Speaker 1: here until sometime around the eighteen sixties. At that time,
Speaker 1: the game of Yuker was extremely popular. It was later
Speaker 1: unseated by bridge. In Yuker. Under the British rules, there
Speaker 1: is a card known as the Imperial Bower or best Bower,
Speaker 1: that trumps all the other cards. Decks of cards began
Speaker 1: to include a special Imperial Bower card, and it later
Speaker 1: morphed into the Joker card that we know today. Be
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