---
title: "Ulrich Kaltenborn"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Ulrich Kaltenborn"
aliases: ["trzes"]
first_seen: "2026-08-18T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Mamluk playing cards","Topkapi deck reconstruction","history of playing cards"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


Specialist playing-card collector, online handle "trzes," who has built his own physical
reconstruction of the 15th-century Topkapi Mamluk deck and documents the project at
spiorad.net, engaging directly with L.A. Mayer's and Michael Dummett & Kamal Abu-Deeb's
academic texts on the deck's structure. Matters to this vault as a Tier 2 specialist source
for the Mamluk deck's suit structure, independent of Simon Wintle's corroboration
([[entity-simon-wintle]]) — though his account of *why* the coin suit was reinterpreted as a
polo-stick suit turns out to be his own hedged inference, not a citation to Mayer or Dummett.

## References
- [[claim-spiorad-net-mamluk-suit-resemblance-is-uncited-inference]]
- Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-18-does-a-primary-source-confirm-the-two-hop.md