Teaching a card game is a good exercise to do in the target language, but often there is not much language involved once all of the participants know how to play. However, the addition of gambling with word cards allows such games to be regular activities. The idea is to require a language task with each word card that is used in a bet.
Blackjack is a good game to start with, betting with the verb cards. More advanced students can be taught real 5-card draw poker with two rounds of betting. The trick seems to be having them bet against the teacher, the dealer, and arranging it so that they win more. For example in Blackjack, all ties go to the players, or all hands remain secret until the dealer fills out his hand and if the dealer goes bust everyone wins, even if the other players have gone bust too. Students ante up with one card. Students must perform some language task when they bet a card (say the card in English and the target language, say the past tense, make a sentence, etc.). The teacher then deals out one card face down and one card face up to each contestant and to him or herself. Face cards are all 10, aces are either 1 or 11. The object is to get close to 21 without going over. Five cards totaling less than 21 is a 5 card trick, which betters any hand. The teacher does not look at his or her cards yet. Students look at their face down card and decide if they want one more card. If they do, they say "Hit me." if they don’t they say "No, thank you." Students can fold at any time. Once all hands are standing pat, students bet on whether they think their hand will beat the teacher’s as yet unseen hand. Again, students must perform the language task for each card bet. Once all bets are in, teacher opens his or her hand, plays it until he or she is finished. If he or she goes bust, then every other hand wins. The hands are opened and the players that have beat the teacher get a number of money cards equal to the amount they bet from the teacher. The ante pot is held separate and the best hand in the house wins it. In any tie, the teacher loses. It is usually best to show the students how to play without betting one week, then shows them how to bet the next week.
One other possibility is to add prepositions or other parts of speech to the "money" so players could have multiple cards in a sentence. For the students, the visual recognition of the words/phrases on the cards represents the main pedagogical content, but the process of learning the game and then playing it should not be overlooked. If this activity is poker, rather than blackjack, and is done in conjunction with poker-related idioms in American English, learning the game can be a very rich experience because the idioms are actually used in a meaningful context (one wonders if it might be worth teaching baseball for the same reason). If the production task is a free-form sentence, then the students have some level of control over how much the challenge themselves, and can also get feedback from the dealer (the teacher) on more adventurous constructions. The teacher thus has the opportunity to observe the accuracy of the language that is produced and use it as a formative assessment. The teacher has overall control of the production task, which should be challenging, but not a hindrance to playing the game.
As noted above, part of the motivation in this game is being able to win, and the teacher is in the position of the dealer, so we can use this to make it easier for the players. The suggestions above of having all ties go to the players, or all hands being hidden until the dealer has played his out facilitate this. If the students think that they are at an advantage, they will (usually) want to bet more to win more, but if the betting involves language production, we have just "tricked" them into producing more language.
by Ken Romeo and Will Percy