1923 Olympia Boxing Playing Cards Set and Checklist

Posted on December 2, 2016 by Pre-War Cards

It’s in the Details

Title	Olympia Boxing Playing Cards
Year	1923
Size	2 1/2″ x 3 1/2″
Images	Black and White
Type	Game Cards
Number in Set	55

1923 Olympia Boxing Playing Cards Overview

1923 Olympia Boxing Gene Tunney.jpg These playing cards were issued by Olympia Games in 1923. As Heritage Auctions points out, they were created for the Canadian marketplace.

The cards utilized a simple playing card design with black and white pictures. Unlike standard playing cards, though, suits and denominations were not present. Cards had an ornate blue ink playing card design on the back. While there were no suits, the cards did have color-coded titles.

Technically, this is a matching game and four colors were featured for the titles. Each card has one of our colors — black, green, orange, and red. The colors are seen in the titles on each card (this card shown here depicts Gene Tunney and has the Light Heavy-Weight title in black, for example).

Some of the cards are actual individual boxers while about 1/3 of the set of the cards had cartoon pictures of generic subjects for various ring terms, such as bell, arena, referee, and timekeeper.

As the cards had standard rounded playing card corners, like other pre-war playing card issues, these are often found in tremendous shape.