August offered up a puzzle on the sillier side inspired by the kitsch classic painting Dogs Playing Poker. We are told there are clues about what the middle pooch is holding, in the cards and emotions of the other dogs (and one cat) at the table. But what’s the pattern?

Some of the animal faces might look familiar… in fact every face is a version of a standard emoji. Being hinted that we want to spell out what their feeling suggests that the names of these emojis could be indexed into, perhaps by the card holdings, which are all numbers 1-10 (interpreting aces as 1). The emojis represented have fairly standardized names, and the successful ordering is reading the letters for each card from the viewer’s left to right. For example, the leftmost pooch, clearly quite FLUSHED, has a 4 of clubs and a 5 of hearts, which correspond to the fourth and fifth letters of FLUSHED, ‘S’ and ‘H’. Reading these 16 letters off left to right and adding spaces where appropriate gives SHIFT BY CHIP COUNT.

Now we can take these same letters and shift them forward in the alphabet by the number of chips piled nearest to the card they correspond to. For example, the apparently down-on-his-luck flushed pooch on the left has one chip next to the card that indexed to ‘S’ and zero next to the ‘H’ card, so this pair of letters shifts to ‘TH’. Filling all of this into a table, we get:

And the shifted letters (again with spaces inserted) spell out THE CANINE OF CLUBS. “Canine of clubs” is a name for the Texas Hold’em hand Kc,9c, since saying “K-9” out loud sounds like the word “canine”. And that’s the appropriate solution to the puzzle!

Congrats to all the solvers able to suss out the code of these emotional pets!