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Silesian lottery

card game

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 10, 2025
Entity authorityQ2239201 ↗
Source-derived summary

Silesian lottery (German: Schlesische Lotterie), also called card lottery (Kartenlotterie), card tombola (Kartentombola), Großes Los, Grüne Wiese or Bullermännchen, is a simple, German, game of chance and gambling card game, that is played with two packs of 32 Bavarian-pattern or French-suited playing cards.

The game may be played by children from 10 upwards if played with counters.

Rules

The following description is based on Meyer.

Lots and stakes

Each player draws one or more, usually two, cards (Lose i.e. "lots") from the 32 cards of one pack and pays the banker the agreed price (stake) per card e.g. €1.

The draw

The banker now takes the second pack, shuffles it, offers it for cutting and then draws 9 cards from it, laying initially four pairs one beneath the other, the ninth card is the "grand lot" (Großes Los), hence one of its alternative names. In Germany, the draw is designated as a 1st to 5th class lottery draw.

Payment

For each card in the first pair the banker pays a single stake, for each card in the second pair a double stake, the third pair is worth treble and the fourth, quadruple. The grand lot pays nine times the basic stake.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Silesian lottery” is card game. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Silesian, lottery and card, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current 201-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Silesian, lottery and card is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “card game” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2239201. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Silesian lottery”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Silesian lottery primary sources, Silesian lottery archive and Silesian research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Silesian lottery”?
  2. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Silesian lottery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.