I have a long fascination with the card deck as a method of play that stretches back to a long time before I learned how to bid in bridge or why it mattered.

Before I shared a bridge game with anyone, I learned my way through the basics of the tarot deck.

It was the elaborate and picturesque depictions of the Major Arcana cards that attracted me to the beauty of tarot decks when I saw them for the first time. Ever since then, I’ve spent a long time cultivating a love for card decks and their art. 

While tarot has been long associated with mysticism, movie plots and fortune telling, it has also been associated with gameplay. Tarot could easily be seen as an early emergence of the trading card game. 

I’ve learned a lot from tarot that helps my bridge game today. Here are some lessons that have carried over from the use of one card deck to the next.

#1: A Crash Course in Taking Tricks

Trick-taking is a new concept to many card players who decide to take up bridge for the first time.

But bridge isn’t the world’s only trick-taking game. Tarot as a card game is actually trick-taking in nature, too. Many games that reference packs or heaps of cards being made classify as trick-takers, even if the game in question doesn’t call the collection of successful cards a trick for the player.

Other trick-taking games can improve bridge play for many players. 

For others, it can even be the first introduction to the concept of tricks and taking them.

#2: How to Handle the Cards

The first thing a bridge player might notice about a tarot deck as opposed to a regular deck of cards? The size.

Traditionally, tarot decks are bigger (and a little bulkier) than your average card deck. And as it turns out, tarot decks are great for learning dexterity and card handling techniques for this reason.

I’ve spent a lot of time twirling playing cards: a simple hand exercise, but an immensely useful one for working out general tension before and after typing large batches of words.

With tarot cards as a start, I just found it to be easier.

Tarot cards had weight, size, and by the time I tried the same with a smaller deck of cards, it felt easier, too.

#3: How to Shuffle… Properly

I like doing tarot readings for fun.

Randomly, extract a few cards from a deck and see what comes up.

At the beginnings of learning how to shuffle a deck by hand, I noticed that too many tarot readings were coming up with the same cards. I shuffled again, and it happened repeatedly.

After a while of this, I noticed that the problem was likely due to improper shuffling.

I got better at it. As I got better, the appearance of the tarot cards became increasingly random. Cards stopped coming up twice.