What’s more interesting than the numbers here is the wording that Pushkin cushions around the numbers.
The number 3 signified that the Countess would trick Herman on his third round of faro, while the number 1 and the Ace foreshadowed the wrong card, and represented the one, lowly man, the “some one,” beat by the Queen. The other numbers are used as a broth to mix the important numbers into, to distract and add a tasty element. (I counted “some one” as a number, because I think the numbers represent characters. Numbers appear everywhere in this story and of the most common numbers, (1, 3, 7, and 12), 1 appears about 24 times and 3 appears about 16 times.
