How do I do this love fortune?

February 20, 2005 5:15 AM

How do I do this love fortune thing? When I was in junior high, I learned how to tell love fortunes using playing cards, where...

...you dealt the cards out into four piles, had the person choose one pile, then flipped through it until you came across the Ace of Spades, the Ace of Hearts, the King of Spades, or the Queen of Hearts. And when you came across one of them, you put the rest of the pile aside and asked the person to choose another pile. You kept on with the process of elimination until you had four or five cards.

You laid out the four (or five) cards, and the order they were in would tell your love fortune, with the Queen of Hearts being the fortune's receipient, the Ace of Hearts being her heart, the King of Spades being the person the receipient was thinking of, and the Ace of Spades being their heart. And if there was a fifth card, then it was another person who was in the way.

I remember a lot about this, but I just tried to teach a ten-year-old girl about it, and I couldn't remember all the explanations for how the cards turned out at the end. When I look on Google, I get a lot more complicated fortune telling rules, and I really just want to know how this works.

Did anyone else do this? Does anyone remember how it's supposed to go?

posted by Katemonkey to sports, hobbies, & recreation (5 answers total)

Wow, can't help on this, sorry. But if you adding up the "loves"counts in the letters in your names and adding up to a percentage is far better anyway.
posted by bonaldi at 7:56 AM on February 20, 2005

Good god what has happened to me today? Sorry for the grammar horror. Take two: If you want a love fortune thing in general, I can tell you a method of adding up the letters in your names to get a percentage -- which is so reliable.
posted by bonaldi at 10:08 AM on February 20, 2005

I loved doing these fortunes when I was in junior high - thanks for reminding me! This is what my friends and I used to do:

1. There are 4 "key" cards - the queen and ace of hearts, and the king and ace of spades. If the fortune's recipient is a girl, she is represented by the queen of hearts and her love interest is represented by the king of spades. The ace of hearts and ace of spades represent their hearts. If the recipient is a man, he's the king of spades and his love interest is the queen of hearts. This of course assumes hetero love interests.
2. The fortune's recipient shuffles the cards as many times as there are letters in the love interest's first name. Then you (the teller) deal them out into 4 equal piles.
3. The recipient picks a pile and you start flipping through the cards until you see one of the key cards. You save the key card and any unviewed cards from that pile. The cards you have dealt from that pile are discarded, you won't use them again.
4. The recipient continues picking piles and you continue flipping through the cards in each pile. The "key" cards and any unviewed cards form each pile are put together into one pile. At the end of this process, you'll have a somewhat reduced deck.
5. Now deal your reduced deck into 3 piles and repeat steps 3 and 4. You'll end up with a much reduced deck.
6. Deal your much reduced deck into 2 piles and repeat steps 3 and 4. Now you'll have a handful of cards - the 4 key cards and perhaps a few others.

To read the fortune, you deal the remaining cards out in a horizontal row. The fortune is read from the standpoint of the recipient, not the teller. There are many ways to interpret the fortune and it's fun to add a few of your own to give it a personal touch, but here are some of the common ones I remember.

• If the queen of hearts and king of hearts are facing each other, it means there is mutual attraction or they are moving towards one another. If the queen and king are facing away from one another, it means that the recipient and her love interest are not becoming closer to one another - this is generally a bad sign for the romance.
• If the king and queen are next to each other, it means the love interest is physically close. But if the hearts are next to one another, that's even better - it means the recipient and her love interest love each other.
• The best possible love fortune contains only the 4 key cards, with the king & queen on the outside looking at each other and their hearts in the middle.
• If there are other cards in the fortune, it means there are other factors complicating the relationship. A face card indicates another person (perhaps a love triangle situation) and the gender of the face card implies the gender of the interloper. When telling fortunes for boys, we interpreted jacks as being of unspecified gender, because otherwise there were far too many other men running around in the fortunes.
• If there are non-face cards in the fortune, the suit of the card indicates the nature of a factor complicating the relationship. I don't remember all of these off the top of my head - but I do recall that diamonds indicate money issues and clubs indicate friendship (in the "just a friend" kind of way).

Phew, that was a bit long winded but hopefully that will provide enough detail for you to pass on to the 10-year old so that she can become an indespensible resource to all of her friends who are dying to know whether their crushes like them back.
posted by rhiannon at 11:58 AM on February 20, 2005 [2 favorites]

rhiannon, you have just made me the coolest person in the world.

Way cooler than when I taught her how to play blackjack.
posted by Katemonkey at 1:16 PM on February 20, 2005

Wicked cool.
posted by Miko at 7:28 PM on February 20, 2005