"To turn the tables" is a figure of speech meaning "to put
someone else in the predicament that we have been occupying, or
a into a similar one." The term arose during the early 1600s,
and seems to have been a reference to a card or board game in
which a player, when at a disadvantage, might reverse the
position of the board and thereby shift the disadvantage fo his
opponent. A similar possibility holds that the original sense of
the expression might be the same as we now mean by "duplicate",
as in the game duplicate bridge, wherein after a series of hands
of cards had been played, the table was turned and the same
series of hands was replayed, each player holding the hand
previously held by an opponent. There's another interesting
theory that proposes that the expression is derived from an
ancient fad in Roman men of purchasing costly tables. When a
wife was chided for an expensive purchase of her own, then, she
would "turn the tables" by reminding him of his extravagance.