CrazyEddie
Full House
I learned the suits order playing the sacred game of Bridge in college and now cannot fathom it any other way. It was years later I realized that, conveniently, Bridge suit order just so happens to also be alphabetic order (clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades) making it easy to teach to non-Bridge-playing heathens, but when I learned it I was just taught by rote. Happily poker uses the same order when necessary.
I recently learned that the spades, clubs, diamonds, hearts as @dickzapper mentions above was the original suit order. Suit ordering arose in the game Preference in the early 1800s; similar games prior to that had a single suit as the "preferred" suit, one that took priority over the other three. Preference introduced a hierarchy in which all four suits were ranked, each with a different rank. The black suits were low and the red suits were high, which maintains a distinction going back to the sixteenth-century Spanish game Hombre, the first game with an auction. In Hombre the red and black suits each had an entirely different card ranking - the black aces were always trump, so black suits ranked 2-7 low to high while red suits ranked A-7 high to low, backwards from the black suits.
It wasn't until the development of Auction Bridge around 1910 that spades for some reason were promoted from the lowest rank to the top of the hierarchy.
This has been your trivia for today.
