Chips carry no value
The chips are counters and nothing else. They cannot be bought, sold or exchanged for money, goods or credit, and no cash is handled in the room at any point.
Home / Card Room
A green cloth, and nothing staked
When the kitchen closes, the library upstairs becomes a room given over to cards as an after-dinner pastime. It is played with symbolic chips: no money is staked, no prizes are paid, and no gambling of any kind takes place.
Symbolic chips only
The card room
An old habit, given a decent room
The custom is old and very Andalusian: after dinner nobody leaves. An amontillado is ordered, the deck comes out and the night stretches. All we have done is give that custom a decent room — two tables in cloth, eight chairs each, warm light from above and a door that closes.
The game is an excuse for company. Anyone who has never played finds a beginners' table on Thursday; anyone who has played for years prefers Saturday, when the tempo turns more serious without the tone changing at all.
- Two tables of eight places — never more than sixteen people in an evening.
- Thursday — the beginners' table, with the rules explained from scratch.
- Friday and Saturday — open tables from eleven.
- Last Tuesday of the month — a two-hour workshop on strategy.
- Adults only, and always by reservation.
“What you win here is a conversation, not a prize.”
How the room works
Three things worth knowing
We describe the room plainly, because the plain description is the whole point of it.
Sixteen places, no more
Two tables, eight places each. Because the number is small, a place is put aside in advance rather than found on the night.
One room among many
The card room is a room, not the reason the house exists. Most guests spend an evening here without ever going upstairs, and that is entirely the idea.