The History of Flipping

[frankbmd]

Flipping baseball cards on a summer day. The boys in my neighborhood did this when we were kids. The girls just watched and never actually did it. Do you remember the rules?



Then, of course, there was the attempt of turning a flipper into a fish for the movies and the tube.



Ultimately though the girls got into flipping and the boys forgot about flipping cards with the onset of what I like to call the "hormone" years following these flippers.



Flipping baseball cards has made a comeback though. In fact it's become an industry. Actually several industries:

A New Field of Lucrative Medicine : Card Doctors

A New Field of Registered Opinions : Third Party Graders

A New Field of New Age Gambling : BGF (Buy, Grade & Flip)

A New Field of Elite Marketing : The Auction House Buyer's Premium

A New Field of Casinos : The National Card Show

Enjoy your show

I still have my field of dreams.



I guess I'm just a vintage guy.

[commishbob]

We flipped every day at my elementary school in New Jersey. We had recess every day after lunch while the nuns and other teachers had their lunch and we spent most of that time with cards one way or another. The 'games' I remember:

Leaners.. Two, three or four cards (one from each players stack) were leaded up against the wall and the guy who knocked down the last card took everything.

Closest to the wall...just as it sounds, everyone took one shot, winner take all.

Tops...everyone flipped towards the wall in turn until one guy had his card land on top of another card. Even a tiny piece of one card on another card's border was a winner.

Colors or teams..everyone shuffled their stack and held them upside down. You took turns slamming (think old domino players) the top card on the sidewalk in a stack until someone's card matched the color (or team if that's what the then-current Topps set necessitated) of the previous card. That guy got 'em all. This was my least favorite way to flip as it took no 'skill'.

Our preferred spot, along the ramp on the west side of St. Mary's School is still exactly as I remember it. St. Mary's in Nutley is no longer a parochial school but the building still functions as a private, special needs/life skills school.

Lots of great memories of friends in the early 60s.

stmarys.jpg

[dlfallen]

This book has iconic status with OBC:


In the late 1950's, there were two main types of flipping in my neighborhood:
(1) Pitching cards towards a wall, closest takes all. We called this lagging. This is where a lot of dinged corners comes from.
(2) Two players flip a card and let it land on the ground. One of them calls "odd"
or "even". If correct, the caller wins both cards, otherwise the other person wins. "Even" means both cards land face up or face down. "Odd"means one card lands face up and the other face down.

(1) was for multi-player competition. (2) was the default when there were only two players.

[commishbob]

Got called away to brunch but I wanted to add that in the 90s when I taught elementary PE we did a lot of 'station days' and would alternate aerobic with recovery or hand-eye stations (putting, juggling etc.) and I had the idea to introduce flipping as a station. Had plenty of junk cards and the kids enjoyed it.

[ValKehl]

Back in the late 1950's, my 3 card-collecting buddies and I would play most of the games Bob mentioned above in an effort to win each other's cards. My favorite game, probably because it was the game I was best at, was one we called "sail touch." It was very similar to the game Bob's game called "tops," except that we sailed the cards onto a large, open area of tiled basement floor. Once anyone's sailed card covered any part of another card already out on the floor, each remaining player had one chance to sail his card and cover any part of a card on the floor. If you missed, you were out of the game, and the successful remaining players continued in turn until someone covered part of a card and the remaining player(s) failed to do so. One advantage to this game was that our cards didn't get as damaged as they did from playing the other games.

However, once we kids learned how to play poker, this became our favorite way to win one another's cards!

[commishbob]

Originally Posted by ValKehl

Back in the late 1950's, my 3 card-collecting buddies and I would play most of the games Bob mentioned above in an effort to win each other's cards. My favorite game, probably because it was the game I was best at, was one we called "sail touch." It was very similar to the game Bob's game called "tops," except that we sailed the cards onto a large, open area of tiled basement floor. Once anyone's sailed card covered any part of another card already out on the floor, each remaining player had one chance to sail his card and cover any part of a card on the floor. If you missed, you were out of the game, and the successful remaining players continued in turn until someone covered part of a card and the remaining player(s) failed to do so. One advantage to this game was that our cards didn't get as damaged as they did from playing the other games.

However, once we kids learned how to play poker, this became our favorite way to win one another's cards!

LOL @ poker for cards😊. As good Catholic yutes we would have opted for bingo instead!

[JollyElm]

(I'm going to try to ignore what a sweet piece of *ss that girl is in the OP. Yowza!!!!!!!!)

As a tyke in 1975, we used to flip the colorful new cards. IIRC, we called it 'topsies' (Toppsies?), where you stood back from the playground wall and tossed a card. The goal was to make it land front side up. Your opponent then flipped a card in the same manner (from a stack of cards held with the fronts facing downward, unseen), and if the top color (behind the team name) of the two-toned card matched the last one thrown, you won the cards. We went until someone won all of the cards thrown up to that point. Sometimes it was a mere pair, and other times it was quite a heap of cardboard.

Well, being clever little kids, we decided to beat the system by cutting up our cards to form a winning amalgam of many colors that was inserted into our stack, like so...

1975colorsamalgam.jpg

Of course, if it was thrown incorrectly and landed face down, we ran the risk of it falling into enemy hands if they won that particular round, shooting ourselves in the foot with a cardboard bullet. Those were some anxious moments. Since there weren't any specific rules against this type of deception (much like the 1919 Black Sox discussion), we had no problem employing the maneuver. However, being kids, the screams of "No fair!!!!!!!!!!!!" would come immediately, quickly followed by fisticuffs...and we'd be sent home in our dirt-stained clothes to face the wrath of our mothers

Good times.

[molenick]

Here is another one, which was pretty common among my friends. It's kind of a variation on the odd/even game already described.

One person takes a number of cards (say, 10), and one-by-one, holding the card between the thumb and three other fingers (not the pinkie), flips each card to the ground in an underhand motion, letting go of the card roughly when your arm was pointing straight down. The idea was to get as many cards as you could facing in the same direction (heads or tails). After your 10 were flipped, the other person had to match what you did (so, for example, getting nine heads and one tail was good because it was hard to match). If the person matched you, they got your cards; if not, you got the cards flipped plus enough to cover the remainder of cards not thrown (in case the "non-matching" was already determined before all the cards were flipped).

Colors was the preferred game in a situation where you had to sit down and didn't want to attract attention (like in school) and this game was preferred when you could stand up and it wasn't an issue if anyone saw you playing.