Awesome Stuff: Dealer's Choice
from the grab-a-deck dept
If you haven’t yet, you owe it to yourself to read Grantland’s long, but fascinating, oral history of the 2003 World Series of Poker — which more or less made Texas Hold ‘Em poker super famous, and made it a major TV event, while bringing tremendous attention to online poker since an online-only player named Chris Moneymaker won the entire tournament in his first time ever playing poker at a casino. Oh, and to get enough money to actually attend, he had his friend named David Gamble back him. And that’s not even close to the most interesting part of the story.
Maybe it was because I’d just read that when I started thinking about this week’s awesome stuff post, but I quickly realized that there are an insane number of crowdfunding campaigns, across various platforms, of people designing their own playing cards. Rather than narrow it down to just three, I’m going to list out a bunch here (without the widgets or videos — which would just get too long), and you can explore the wonders of crowdfunded playing cards.
- Mustache Playing Cards — just what it says.
- E8 Garden Deck playing cards — eat your veggies, play cards.
- Deck of Human Disaster playing cards — why you should eat your veggies, or, conversely, why it probably doesn’t matter if you eat your veggies.
- Rabbit Rabbit — in case you want an animal to eat your veggies.
- Fairy Tale Art playing cards — tell a story.
- Storyteller Cards — tell a different story.
- Name of the Wind playing cards — tell Patrick Rothfuss’ story.
- Elves and Orcs playing cards — tell an oldish story.
- Ultimate Zombie playing cards — will eat your brains.
- Please Stay Calm: Zombie Apocalypse playing cards — in case you need two different decks of zombie cards.
- Royal Optik playing cards — beautiful designs for collecting.
- Pippoglyph playing cards — because who doesn’t like a good pippoglyph?
- Native Art playing cards — inspired by indigenous people in Alaska.
- Wealth playing cards — because to buy all of these playing cards, you’ll need to be wealthy.
- Ganjifa playing cards — because not everyone plays your western-style playing cards.
- DoubleFace 2.0 playing cars — because magicians get special decks.
Believe it or not there are still a bunch more, but this was getting long enough. Enjoy the long Memorial Day weekend, and perhaps break out a deck of cards. Real cards. Not that stuff on your phones and tablets.
Filed Under: awesome stuff, playing cards
Comments on “Awesome Stuff: Dealer's Choice”
Small correction: Moneymaker had never played a tournament in a casino before. He’d played cash games at Tunica according to the Grantland piece.
The 04-05 NHL lockout also greatly helped Poker get more attention than it ever deserved.
Am I the only one who finds it kind of annoying that Hold’Em is the only kind of poker anyone wants to play these days? I mean, it’s a fun set of rules in some ways, and I get why it’s the game of choice if you’re a serious gambler/competitor… but it used to be that when friends were just playing poker for fun, they would mix it up a bit — play some draw hands, some stud hands, throw in a house rule here and there, etc. Not to mention other card games. But now it just seems like everyone wants to pretend they are in the poker world series every time.
Re: Re:
I would settle for enough friends in one place at one time who wanted to play texas hold em. All my friends want to play are computer games lately.
My girl at least will vote for Kings in the Corner, which my friends will sometimes give in to oblige.
It is something else but I wish I could play Texas Hold em more often. This of course may be because I do not play it digitally at all. Only irl.
When do we get ours?
Techdirt cards would be fun. OOTB and Bob could be the jokers.
Re: When do we get ours?
We’ll need a poll as I vote for average copyright joke and he-who-steals-america-song-title.
See how creative they are? I wonder if longer copyright terms might give them more incentive to be original?
Moneymaker’s book is freaking excellent for “not a poker book.” Straight up story of a dude that’s just a dude who likes to bet. What’s he do right after his win? Spends 15k at a strip club. What do you do in Vegas if you only took 10k and you can’t leave until pay the tab? Call up Chip Reese to spot you.
Classic.
f your voting and your poll..oops
copyright is a dream. If you wanna get paid for the good thoughts, you should have to pay back for the bad thoughts..
thinking the government can run this system.. priceless