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On the origins of the poker card game
The birth of Poker has been convincingly dated to the first or second decade of the 19th century. It appeared in former French territory centred on New Orleans which was ceded to the infant United States by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Its cradle was the gambling saloon in general and, in particular, those famous or notorious floating saloons, the Mississippi steamers, which began to ply their trade from about 1811.
The earliest contemporary reference to Poker occurs in J. Hildreth's Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains, published in 1836; but two slightly later publications independently show it to have been well in use by 1829. Both are found in the published reminiscences of two unconnected witnesses: Jonathan H. Green, in Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling (1843), and Joe Cowell, an English comedian, in Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America (1844).
Green and Cowell describe the earliest known form of Poker, played with a 20-card pack (A-K-Q-J-10) evenly dealt amongst four players. There is no draw, and bets are made on a narrow range of combinations: one pair, two pair, triplets, 'full' - so called because it is the only combination in which all five cards are active - and four of a kind. Unlike classic Poker, in which the top hand (royal flush) can be tied in another suit, the original top hand consisting of four Aces, or four Kings and an Ace, was absolutely unbeatable.
Twenty-card Poker is well attested. In 1847, Jonathan Green mentions a game of 20-card Poker played on a Mississippi steamboat bound for New Orleans in February 1833, and in The Reformed Gambler (1858), a new edition of his earlier book, another session played at a Louisville house in 1834. A vivid account of a Poker game played on a Mississippi river boat in 1835 appears in Sol Smith's Theatrical Management in the West and South for Thirty Years (New York, 1868), with an anecdote hinging on the two players' switching from 'low' cards to 'large cards', i.e. Tens and over.
This provides evidence that the 20-card game was being challenged by the 52-card game in the mid-1830s. The gradual adoption of a 52-card pack was made partly to accommodate more players, perhaps partly to give more scope to the recently introduced flush (the straight was as yet unknown), but chiefly to ensure there were enough cards for the draw - another relative novelty, and one that was to turn Poker from a gamble to a game of skill. These novelties were regular features of Poker's English relative Brag as played in its early 19th-century American form. (Brag is no longer played in America, and modern British Brag differs substantially from 19th century American Brag.
It was in this form, but as yet without the draw, that Poker first reached the pages of American 'Hoyles'. The earliest mention occurs in the 1845 edition of Hoyle's Games by Henry F. Anners, who refers to Poker or Bluff, 20-deck Poker, and 20-deck Poke. In a Boston Hoyle of 1857 Thomas Frere describes 'The Game of "Bluff", or "Poker"', with a reference to the 20-card game so brief as to suggest it was becoming obsolete. Dowling, however, points out that it was apparently still played as late as 1857 in New York, for "In that year the author of a guidebook to the metropolis issued a warning against playing 20-card poker, which was described as one of the most dangerous pitfalls to be found in the city".
Between about 1830 and 1845 Poker was increasingly played with all 52 cards, enabling more than four to participate and giving rise to the flush as an additional combination. The end of this phase saw the introduction of the draw, already familiar from contemporary Brag. This increased the excitement of the game by adding a second betting interval and enabling poor hands to be significantly improved, especially the worthless but potentially promising fourflush. The first printed mention of Draw Poker occurs in the 1850 American edition of Bohn's New Handbook of Games, p.384.
The introduction of Poker into English society is often credited, if only on his own claim, to General Schenck, the American ambassador to Britain. Blackridge quotes a letter from Schenck to General Young of Cincinnati describing a weekend retreat to the Somerset country home of a certain 'Lady W.' in the summer of 1872, when he was prevailed upon by the other guests to teach them this peculiarly American game. As part of the exercise he drew up a written guide for them. Some of his pupils subsequently had these rules printed in booklet form, much to Schenck's surprise when he received a copy upon his return home. Schenck notwithstanding, a probable earlier reference to the game in England dates from 1855 when George Eliot is reported (in her second husband's 1885 biography) as writing 'One night we attempted "Brag" or "Pocher"'[sic].
Coming of age
From the middle of the 19th century Poker experienced rapid changes and innovations as it became more widespread through the upheavals of the Civil War. Stud, or 'stud-horse' Poker, a cowboy invention said to have been introduced around Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, first appears in The American Hoyle of 1864. More contentious was the introduction of Jack Pots, which originally meant that you were not allowed to open unless you held a pair of Jacks or better, and were obliged to open if you did, though the second half of this rule was subsequently abandoned. (At a table of five, at least one player will normally be dealt Jacks or better). This device was intended to impose discipline on the game by driving out wild players who would bet on anything, while encouraging cautious players who did have something not to be frightened out of the pot by openers who didn't. Blackridge opposed Jack Pots, pithily declaring it 'equivalent to a lottery except that all players must buy tickets'. He added that the rule reportedly originated at Toledo and was common in the west, rarer in the east, and absent form the more conservative south. In 1897 Foster complained that 'The jack-pot, with its accompanying small-limit game, has completely killed bluffing - that pride and joy of the old-timer...' Nevertheless, he adds, self-contradictorily, 'The two great steps in the history and progress of Poker have undoubtedly been the introduction of the draw to improve the hand, and the invention of the jack-pot as a cure for cautiousness... It has come to stay'.
Draw, Stud, and Jack Pots, all appear in the 1875 edition of The American Hoyle, together with Whiskey Poker, a form of Commerce based on Poker combinations, and Mistigris, which was Poker with a 53rd card 'wild', namely 'the blank card accompanying every pack'. (This borrowed from a variety of Bouillotte in which the Jack of clubs appears under that name as a wild card). By this time, too, the full range of Poker combinations was widely recognized, though not universally so. The 1875 edition notes that four of a kind is the best hand 'when straights are not played', and repeats it as late as the 1887 edition.
It is curious how unstraightforward was the introduction of the straight. The 1864 edition gives the hands as: one pair, two pairs, straight sequence or rotation, triplets, flush, full house, fours. It adds 'When a straight and a flush come together in one hand, it outranks a full' - not fours, be it noted, in defiance of the mathematics, and probably for the following reason. Without straights and straight flushes, the highest possible hand is four Aces (or four Kings and an Ace kicker), which is not just unbeatable but cannot even be tied. Traditionalists clinging to the unbeatable four Aces of Old Poker were opposed by innovationists, who found the game more interesting with straights. In this light, the acceptance of straights ranked in the wrong order may be seen as a temporary compromise. As late as 1892, John Keller defended his view that the straight 'should be allowed. My authority for this is the best usage of today, and my justification is the undeniable merit of the straight as a Poker hand'. He clinches this with the moral argument that has prevailed ever since - namely, that it is unethical and ungentleman like to bet on such a sure thing as four Aces. If the best hand is a royal flush, there is always the outside chance that it may be tied. However minute that measure of doubt, it has to be morally superior to betting on a certainty.
Under the aegis of the United States Printing Company and, subsequently, the New York Sun, a great deal of research was conducted into the origins and varieties of Poker with a view to drawing up a set of definitive rules, which first appeared in 1904. In 1905 R. F. Foster published his book Practical Poker, summarizing the fruits of all this research plus additional material gleaned from the Frederick Jessel collection of card-game literature housed in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Amongst other things, it would appear from this that Dealer's Choice began attaining popularity about 1900, according to Dowling. Subsequent developments can be traced through successive editions of Hoyles published by the United States Playing Card Company.
Following Draw and Stud, a third major structural division of the Poker game, represented today by Texas Hold 'em, is that of varieties involving one or more communal cards. The earliest of these appears in the 1919 edition under the name Wild Widow, whereby a card was dealt face up to the table immediately before each player received his fifth card, and the winner was the player making the best five-card combination from his own hand plus the turn-up. In the 1926 edition this is replaced by Spit in the Ocean. Here only four cards each are dealt, but the turn-up and the three other cards of the same rank are all wild. Deuces wild first appears in the 1919 edition.
High-Low Poker, in which the pot is divided equally between the highest and the lowest hands, is attested as early as 1903 (according to Morehead and Mott-Smith). It first appears in the 1926 edition and achieved its greatest popularity during the 'thirties and 'forties, subsequently giving rise to Lowball, in which only the lowest hand wins.
The rise of modern tournament play dates from the World Series of Poker started in 1970.
Ultimate origin
So many ridiculous assertions are made about the antiquity of Poker that it is necessary to point out that, by definition, Poker cannot be older than playing-cards themselves, which are only first positively attested in 13th century China, though some arguable evidence exists for their invention a few centuries earlier. Playing-cards first reached Europe in about 1360, not directly from China, but from the Islamic Mamluk Empire of Egypt through the trading port of Venice. Mamluk cards themselves also do not derive directly from Chinese cards but bear obscure relationships to the geographically intervening cards of India and (even more obscurely) Persia (Iran). Surviving specimens of Mamluk cards come from an original 52-card pack consisting of four suits (swords, polo sticks, goblets, coins) of 13 ranks each (numerals one to ten, junior viceroy, senior viceroy, and king). The only known Chinese card games of that period were of the trick-taking variety; and, while we have no contemporary account of games played with the Mamluk pack, it too was clearly designed for trick-taking.
Fourteenth century Europe saw an explosion in the variety of designs, suit-systems and structures of playing-cards, culminating before 1500 in the establishment of the principal European suit systems (Italian, Spanish, Swiss, German, French) and a correspondingly wide variety of accompanying games. A major European contribution to the realm of card play was the concept of a trump suit, first embodied in the Italian invention of tarot cards (at first called triumphi or triumph cards) in the 1420s, though also prefigured in the German game of Karnöffel. Also developed during the same period were a number of gambling games based on acquiring or betting on card combinations such as flushes (Flusso, Flüsslen, etc), sequences (Quentzlen, etc), matches (pairs, triplets, quartets), and numeration (as in Thirty-One, the ancestor of Twenty-One and perhaps Cribbage). Melding and numerical games were probably derived from, or modelled on, dice games of the period, though we lack sufficient information to be able to reconstruct the actual forms of dice play.
It is hard to imagine a process of Poker-style vying operating in dice games of the time, as vying originally depended entirely on being able to hide the identity of the cards you hold or draw by exposing only their plain sides to the other players, whereas the outcome of dice throws is necessarily open and visible to all. (As Cardano famously noted in 1564, 'There is a difference form play with dice, because the latter is open, whereas play with cards takes place from ambush, because they are concealed'). Nevertheless, whether originating in Europe or imported from elsewhere, there can be no doubt that vying card games were in use by 1500. This should not be taken to imply Poker-style vying, however, which may be a very late development. The earliest style of vying may more closely have resembled that traditionally followed in the English game of Brag.
It is possible that vying developed in trick-taking games as an extension of the process of 'doubling' now seen in modern Backgammon. In ancient card games such as Put and Truc, two players each received three cards and played them to tricks, but either player at any point could offer to double the stakes before playing a card. The other could then either accept the double and play on, or decline it and concede defeat for the existing (undoubled) amount.
A problem endemic in card-game history is that contemporary descriptions of vying are never unambiguous, partly because they find it easier to give an example of a round of vying without detailing the principles on which it is based, thus giving rise to irresolvable ambiguities, and partly because it never occurred to them that there could be more than one possible way of doing it. Two fundamentally different types of vying may be categorized as the Equalization method (Poker style) and the Matching method (English Brag style).
Source: BonusGambler.com Editors' Choice
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