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This is a comment from someone who don't even know how to play 'Go Fish' let alone the concept of poker:

"I'm not sure how to approach this, because it might be a touchy subject, so I'm just going to go ahead and say it. Is the Ace of Spades character supposed to be African-American? Judging from his dialogue in the first panel of the YMCA strip, I assumed he was. If so, that's... well, sort of incredibly racist. I know it's not a commonly used slur anymore, but the term "spade" used to be (and likely still is) an offensive slurring way to refer to someone of African decent."-Scott

That just kills me. OK, here is my rebuttal: (http://verbmall.blogspot.com/2006/05/mistakenly-racist-terms.html)

"Mistakenly racist terms

Q. A friend of mine became upset when I used the phrase “to call a spade a spade.” She says that it’s a vicious racist term. Is she right?

Your friend is dead wrong, and it’s a sign of our hypersensitive times that innocent words are often branded as offensive. Quite bluntly, such a reaction is the product of ignorance.
If you go back to the earliest written version of the saying, you bump up against a Greek satirist named Lucian (2nd century A.D.). To express the idea of speaking bluntly, of calling things what they are, he used the phrase (in his language), “to call a fig a fig and a boat a boat.” So where did the word spade come from?
It’s based on a mistranslation by the Dutch Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus [ca. 1466 - 1536]. In Greek, skaphis is a shovel or spade, and skaphos is a boat, a skiff. He chose the wrong word, and “to call a spade a spade” came into being. In 1539, John Tavener brought Erasmus’ Latin version into English in his Garden of Wysdome: “Whiche call . . . a mattok nothing els but a mattok, and a spade a spade.” A mattock, by the way, is a digging tool with a flat blade set at right angles to the handle. So Tavener was advancing the meaning of the proverb to show that even allied objects should be carefully distinguished. After that, the saying was off and running, and it was used by dozens of writers, eventually dooming it to cliché status.
Spade, the offensive racist term referring to a black person, probably derived from the color of the ace of spades in a deck of cards, and it didn’t attain this meaning until 1928. So only someone who believes that Nostradamus was on top of his game would believe that a phrase in use for almost 2,000 years miraculously foretold an obnoxious slang term of the early 20th century.... (continues)"

Poker players know the concept of position and card ranking so they understand the comic and the characters, however, I supposed some ignorant people might get the wrong idea if they don't understand the concept of poker. So let me say this AGAIN! Spade and Diamond does NOT represent any race, religion, or creed. They represent the EGO and the ID of human personalities and this is all in the CONTEXT of the gaming world.  The Ace of Spade is the highest card in the deck so no wonder he has that swagger. Spade doesn't represent black people, he just represents the Ace of Spade. The only reason why he's black is because the spade suit is black, DUH!

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