Ponytail Canasta agreed to be best for four players playing in partnerships. However, there are playable versions for two, three, or four partnerships. These additional player partnerships call for additional decks of cards Canasta is normally played with standard 52 card decks plus two jokers. The cards A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4 are called natural cards. All of the deuces (twos) and jokers are wild cards. With some restrictions, wild cards can be used during the game as substitutes for a natural card of any rank. The threes have special functions and values: Black threes are
Zener cards the experimenter picks up a card in a shuffled pack, observes the symbol, and records the answer of the person being tested, who would guess which of the five designs is on the card. The experimenter continues until all the cards in the pack are tested. Poor shuffling methods can make the order of cards in the deck easier to predict and the cards could have been inadvertently or intentionally marked and manipulated. In his experiments, J. B. Rhine first shuffled the cards by hand but later decided to use a machine for shuffling. In his book, "The New Apocrypha",