I’ve seen a few people open a diary trick by likening the calendar to a deck of cards. The line usually goes:
A calendar is like a deck of cards.
There are 4 suits and 4 seasons.
52 cards in a deck for 52 weeks in a year.
And if you add up all the pips on the cards they add up to 365.
Do they though?
In short, no.
If that’s all you were here for, cheerio, now you know. I’m here for the math.
So how many pips are there?
Well the number cards have 1+2+…+9+10 pips per suit, which makes it half of 10×11 (thanks Gauss) or 55 per suit, so 220 in total.
The picture cards (of which there are 12) have 2 pips each, making the total 244.
If you include the index pips, 2 per card, thats another 104, to total 348.
17 pips short.
And it’s not like a redesign could add 17 pips to the deck because it’s a prime number, how would you divide it down between any number of cards? Maybe you just stick an extra pip into the middle of every court card and put the remaining 5 on the jokers, as a 2 and 3 for the two jokers.
Messy, and very non standard.
But if you really like this notion of the cards as a calendar, I have the solution for you. A standard bicycle card box has a pair of cards depicted on the back, one face up, one face down. The face up card is a ten of hearts. There’s nothing to say the face down card isn’t a seven of spades.