Back when I didn’t believe in tarot, when I still thought it was evil, I would say that it was unlikely a tarot reader would be able to do anything more than give generalized advice that could apply to anyone at any time; advice that would feel special if you believed in tarot and came looking for answers but fall flat on wiser ears. While I still think it is possible that belief plays a role in how meaningful the message feels when received and that the advice is sometimes quite general and seemingly applicable to many situations… once I thought about things from a new perspective, I couldn’t help but think that these same facts prove something entirely different from what I first thought.

It happened when I first examined a No Limit Texas Hold’em poker hand from a tarot perspective. Thanks to the hole card cameras now used on professional poker broadcasts from Las Vegas and beyond, it is possible to test (loosely speaking) if the hole cards each player is dealt accurately predict something (or everything) about the hand. Each hand gives the opportunity to think about what the cards are saying to each player (their hole cards plus the community cards) as well as what the entire group of cards says to us as an outside observer looking in.

I have now taken detailed notes on hundreds of hands and created spreadsheets to tally up statistics about how often the luckiest and least lucky cards appear… and whether or not they show up when the underdog wins the hand… and more. I am paying special attention to moments when the players say something that accurately reflects the tarot meaning of the card(s). I even investigated how often the tarot meanings and GTO agree on the optimal poker strategy.

Many have said that poker is a great metaphor for life and looking at each hand as a tarot reading gives us a quick and easy way to judge whether the advice and predictions were accurate. Furthermore, it should lead you to wonder, if the tarot meanings of the playing cards simply give the players hints which confirm thoughts that arrived via intuition and help them win the pot, does it matter if they had to believe that such things are possible in order for it to work? Does it matter if the advice was generalized if the message was helpful?