The ordinary deck of playing cards has been used for gaming and fortune telling for centuries. Fortunes have been won and lost, empires have risen and fallen, and gentlemen have "done the decent thing" and committed suicide (or emigrated) when they could not pay their gambling debts. The turn of a card has been seen as the workings of fate itself, and so profoundly has card-play entered our collective consciousness that many phrases associated with it have entered the language. Everyone who shuffles the deck fervently hopes that: * Luck will be a lady tonight. * What we want is in the cards. * We will play them close to our chests. * We must play the hand that we were dealt. * It's up to us to play our cards right.

* We may have an ace up our sleeve. * And we hope that no one else can trump us. In recent years fortune telling with cards has become almost the exclusive province of the Tarot. Not too far back into the past Tarot cards were hard to come by and the ordinary, everyday deck of cards, with which we are all familiar, was a far more accessible tool for foretelling the future.