Origin Of Modern Poker - Tracing The History Of An Addiction

The rule of poker is very ancient. One of its ancestral games-primero (Spain), primiera (Italy), la prime (France)-appears in literature at least as early as 1526. In this game each player had three cards, and the counting combinations were three of a kind, a pair, and a flux (flush; three cards of the same suit). In later developments certain cards had special value, equivalent to wild cards in modern poker. By about 1700 the betting and bluffing aspects had produced the games of brag in England (one of four card games about which Edmond Hoyle wrote) and pochen (its name meaning "to bluff") in Germany. From the latter the French developed a similar game called poque, first played in French America in 1803, when the Louisiana Purchase made New Orleans and its environs territories of the United States. During the next 20 years, English-speaking settlers in the Louisiana Territory adopted the game, Anglicized its name to poker, and established the essential features of the modern game.

The earliest known reference to poker in American literature occurs in the memoirs (1829) of Joe Cowell, a touring English actor. From his description it is clear that the original American game was played with a pack of cards that included five cards for each player; all the cards were dealt, and the players bet on who had the best five-card combination. So played, poker is virtually indistinguishable from an older Persian game called as nas, a four-hand game played with a 20-card pack, five cards dealt to each player. This coincidence led some students of games to call poker a derivative of as nas, but this theory has been discredited.

By 1834, the date of the second known reference to poker, the game had been adapted to the modern 52-card deck. No description of poker is given in any book of the rules of games before 1858, but, in such books published in the 1860s, it is not characterized as a new game. The history of the game since then consists entirely of new features introduced to encourage freer betting: the straight, introduced as an additional valuable hand; the draw, so that players might stay in even when not originally dealt good hands; stud poker, to increase the number of opportunities for betting; and the jackpots, originally applying only to a pot to which each player antes, creating an unusually large pot at the start. Most of the innovations came in the decade 1861-70 and probably were engendered in the great amount of poker played by soldiers on both sides in the Civil War. Poker was a favorite in saloons throughout the American "Wild West" during the 1870s and '80s, and, contrary to Hollywood movies, the games rarely led to shoot-outs over accusations of cheating.

The spread of poker to other countries probably began in 1871, when Colonel Jacob Schenck, the U.S. minister to Great Britain, explained the game to a group of gentlemen that included members of the British court. Queen Victoria heard about the game and expressed interest, whereupon Schenck wrote and had privately printed (1872) a set of rules to send to her. This is the earliest known work devoted exclusively to poker, although the game had previously been treated in compendiums. Poker was already sufficiently identified with the United States so that Schenck described it as "our national game." However, this may have been only because all other card games played in the United States were undeniably of Although poker had a brief vogue in British court circles in the 1870s, its widespread acceptance in Great Britain and on the Continent came chiefly in the decade 1911-20 and was undoubtedly much influenced by the American Expeditionary Force in World War I.

For nearly 100 years in the United States, poker was considered a gambling game of men-unsuited to polite or mixed gatherings-but after the 1920s its popularity extended to both sexes and all levels of society. Surveys conducted in the middle of the 20th century showed poker to be the favorite card game of American men and the third most-favored (after rummy and bridge) of American women, and in Great Britain it ranked next after contract bridge with both sexes.

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.