Introduction
Introduction
Poker is a five-card vying game played with standard playing-cards.
A vying game is one where, instead of playing their cards out, the
players bet as to who holds the best card combination by progressively
raising the stakes until either:
- there is a showdown, when the best hand wins all the stakes (‘the pot’),
or
- all but one player have given up betting and dropped out of play, when
the last person to raise wins the pot without a showdown.
It is therefore possible for the pot to be won by a hand that is not in
fact the best, everyone else having been bluffed out of play. One of
Poker's earliest names was, in fact, ‘Bluff’. Bluffing is as essential
to vying as finessing is to trick-play.
A five-card vying game is one where, no matter how many cards may be
dealt to each player, the only valid combinations are those of five
cards. In orthodox Poker these are, from highest to lowest:
- Straight flush (five cards in suit and sequence, Ace high or low, as AKQJ10
or 5432A)
- Four of a kind, fours (four cards of the same
rank and one idler, as K-K-K-K-x)
- Full House (three of one rank and two of
another, as Q-Q-Q-4-4)
- Flush (five cards in suit but not in
sequence, as J- 9- 8- 7- 3)
- Straight (five cards in sequence but not in
suit, as 10- 9- 8- 7- 6)
- Three of a kind, threes, triplet, trips
(three of the same rank plus two of two different ranks, as
7-7-7-x-y)
- Two pair (as Q-Q-9-9-x)
- One pair (as 3-3-x-y-z)
- High card (no combination: as between two
such hands the one with the highest card wins)
(The highest possible straight flush, consisting of A-K-Q-J-10 of a suit
and known as a royal flush, is sometimes added to the list in order to
bring the number of combinations up to the more desirable ten, but of
course it is not different in kind from a straight flush. Other
five-card combinations, known as freak hands, are recognized in
unorthodox Poker variants.)
Any vying game based on these five-card hands is a form of Poker, and
any game lacking either or both of them is not, even if it contains
Poker as part of its title. For example, so-called Whisk(e)y Poker and
Chinese Poker are gambling games played with Poker combinations, but
both lack the element of vying, the former being a commerce game and the
latter a partition game. Other games or game components are sometimes
drafted into the form of Poker known as Dealer’s Choice, but this does
not make them forms or Poker. On the other hand, it does not prevent
Dealer’s Choice from being classed as a form of Poker so long as it also
includes genuine Poker components.
Poker is of French-American origin and is the national vying game of the
United States, though it has come to have a world-wide following in many
different forms. Other vying games include Brag (British, a three-card
game), Primiera (Italian, a four-card game), and Mus (Spanish, also with
four-card hands).
Birth and growth
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"’
.
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 unstraight forward 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
ungentlemanly 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 origins
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.
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.
Relatives and ancestors
Articles on Poker history mention a wide variety of earlier vying games,
not all of them entirely relevant. For the sake of clarity, they may be
grouped according to the number of cards dealt and listed as follows.
Three-card games include Belle, Flux & Trente-un (French, 17th - 18th
centuries, known as Dreisatz in Germany), Post & Pair (English and
American, 17th - 18th centuries) and its derivative Brag (18th century
to present), Brelan (French, 17th - 18th centuries) and its derivative
Bouillotte (late 18th - 19th centuries, French and American). Of these,
Bouillotte and Brag are most relevant to the genesis of Poker.
Four-card games include Primiera (Italian, 16th century - present) and
its English equivalent Primero (16th - 17th centuries), Gilet (under
various spellings, French, 16th - 18th centuries), Mus (Spanish,
specifically Basque, current, of unknown age), Ambigu (French, 18th
century). None of these have much bearing, if any, on Poker.
Five-card games include the German Pochen or Pochspiel, which may be
equated with a 15th-century game recorded as Bocken, and was played in
France first under the name Glic and subsequently as Poque. Of all early
European gambling games this one is most obviously germane to the
genesis of Poker to the extent of having ultimately furnished its name.
Pochen is a verb meaning to primarily to hit, strike, or knock on the
table, and secondarily ‘(I) play’ or ‘bet’ or ‘raise’. Thus Pochspiel is
the game (Spiel) of poching, i.e. knocking or betting. In its earliest
form it appears as boeckels, bocken, bogel, bockspiel and suchlike.
Pochen has a long history in the German repertoire and is not entirely
extinct today. It requires a staking board of special design and
consists of three phases: payment for being dealt the best card, vying
as to who holds the best combination, and playing cards out as in a
‘stops’ game such as Newmarket or Michigan. A similar tripartite
structure applied also to Belle, Flux & Trente-un, in whose second part
the players vied as to who held the best flush, and to Post & Pair, in
whose second part they vied as to who held the best pair or three of a
kind. An early form of Brag was also played as a three-stake game, and a
similar pattern underlies Mus - where, however, the first part has been
split into two, thus turning it into a four-part game.
We may surmise that dedicated gamblers found the central section of
these games - the vying - more interesting than either the first, where
a stake was won for being dealt the best upcard (‘belle’), or the third,
where it was won for drawing cards totalling nearest to 31 (or, in some
games, for playing a variety of Stops). If so, Brelan may be
characterized as an extract of B-F-&-31, Brag as an extract of Post &
Pair, and Poker as an extract of Poque.
Given that Poker originated in culturally French territory, its
likeliest immediate ancestor is Poque, the French version of Pochen.
Poque first appears under this name in the late 16th century, but was
previously played in France under the name Glic. It remained current
until well into the 19th century, undergoing a brief mid-century revival
under the spelling ‘Bog’. The French equivalent of ‘Ich poche eins’ is
‘Je poque d’un jeton’ (‘I bet one unit’), and poque itself denotes one
of the six staking containers. The final ‘e’ is briefly pronounced as a
neutral vowel, which may explain why non-Francophone Americans perceived
and perpetuated the word as ‘poker’ rather than ‘poke’. Louis Coffin
writes "The French name was poque, pronounced poke, and Southerners
corrupted the pronunciation to two syllable to pokuh or Poker". This
sounds more plausible than a fancied derivation from ‘poke’ as related
to ‘pocket’.
Poque, however, was a tripartite game played by up to six players with a
32-card pack, whereas the earliest form of Poker was a one-part game
played with a 20-card pack equally divided among four. If Poker was
based primarily on Poque, we must assume that it developed naturally
within a community that was already acquainted with a 20-card vying game
and decided to use the same stripped pack for a new version of Poque
based only on the vying section. A possible candidate for this influence
could be its contemporary and equally French game of Bouillotte, itself
played by four with a 20-card pack, albeit with only three cards dealt
to each and the top card of stock turned up to enable four of a kind.
This, however, would have left a five-card vying game in which the only
effective combinations were four or three of a kind. To account for the
introduction of one and two pairs and the full house we must either
assume that they were obvious additions that may already have been
drafted into Poque itself, or else look for another game from which they
could have been borrowed. Which brings us to ...
The problem of As-nas
Contentious calls have been made on the possible contribution to Poker
of a Persian five-card vying game called As-nas through the medium of
‘Persian sailors, or Frenchmen who had been in the French service in
Persia’ - whatever that may mean. The problem with this theory is that
it is based on no more than a strong resemblance and suffers from a
total lack of contemporary evidence, since the earliest descriptions of
As-nas do not occur until the 1890s. The first, very brief, is by
‘Aquarius’ in 1890; the second occurs in Stewart Culin’s 1895 catalogue
for an exhibition of ‘games and implements for divination’ under the
short title Chess and Playing Cards. Culin, in connection with several
incomplete sets of Persian playing cards generally referred to as
ganjifeh, consulted a certain General A. Houtum Schindler of Tehran and
received a reply describing As-nas in terms remarkably similar to that
of Poker.
The resemblance between As-nas and 20-card Poker is very close (though
Schindler does not mention four of a kind - probably by oversight.
Original descriptions of 20-card Poker unfortunately do not specify how
combinations rank). Schindler’s description also leaves open the
possibility that raising could continue after equalization: it all
depends on the precise meaning of ‘when the stakes of all players are
equal and no one raises any more’.
The role of Brag
Research by Jeffrey Burton has thrown new light on the significance of
Brag to the development of Poker. Brag is the English national vying
game and remains popular in Britain today, though it has undergone
considerable evolutionary development in the past 100 years and is
restricted to a social stratum having no significant overlap with that
of Poker. First described by Lucas in 1721, Brag is basically from the
central section of the tripartite game of Post and Pair, or Belle Flux
et Trente-un. For much of the 18th century it was popular with the same
sort of society that played Whist, especially with its distaff side,
which accounts for the fact that Hoyle himself went so far as to write a
Treatise on it published in 1751. Brag - which means ‘vie’ or ‘bluff’
according to context - is a three-card vying game. The version described
by Lucas, which has formed the basis of most printed descriptions until
the last quarter of the 20th century, is actually of a three-stake model,
but it had shed its two outer portions by the time of Hoyle’s effusion.
The latter describes a game played by five with a short pack of 22 cards,
or by six with one of 26, four of which - the black Jacks and the red
Nines - were known as ‘braggers’ and could represent anything, including
themselves. The first round of betting was followed by a ‘draw’ to give
each player a chance to improve a pair to a pair-royal or a lone card to
a pair or pair-royal by discarding and ‘taking in’ fresh replacements
from stock. However, given that the peculiar length of pack, leaving
only seven or eight cards to draw from (implying a maximum of one each),
is unique to this notoriously unreliable and muddled source, we may
assume that Brag was mostly played with all 52 cards, and that Hoyle’s
reflected some local or temporary aberration.
Burton surmises that Brag reached America in the late colonial period at
the hands of English emigrants, British colonial officials, and perhaps
Americans returning from transatlantic visits. At first played mainly in
the plantation colonies of the South - Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas
- by about 1800 it had caught on in New England, as well as in the
southern states of the young republic. Its first description, in The New
Pocket Hoyle (Philadelphia, 1805), continued to be faithfully reproduced
in a succession of American Hoyles for much of the 19th century, though
the game itself was well on the way out by 1850, having been replaced by
- or, rather, merged into - the form of Poker to which it contributed
the draw. Until that time, however, as Burton says, a multitude of
contemporary memorabilia testifies that the rules and procedures were
more or less the same in the California goldfields at the end of the
1840s as they had been in the gaming salons of Mobile or New Orleans in
the 1820s and in the taverns of Washington or New York twenty years
before that.
Brag, he continues, "disappeared during a period of no more than five or
six years between, roughly, 1848 and 1853. What had happened is that the
‘taking in’ or draw feature of Brag was merged into the new game of
full-deck Poker. The five-card Poker hand yielded a far greater range of
distinctive combinations than the Brag hand, in which the pair-royal (three
of a kind) and pair were still the only ones recognized by American
players. Hence, when the draw was transplanted from Brag to Poker, the
three-card game lost its following in next to no time. The result of the
amalgamation could have been called Five-card Brag; instead, it became
known as Draw Poker."
Conclusion
Nobody ever knows how a classic card game really originates because at
the time it does so its originators do not know that it is going to
become a classic and so keep no record.
In any case the process of
origination rarely takes place at a single table but mostly among a
group of players within a given locality, so gaming ideas and variations
pass around without anyone being sure who thought of them first. By the
time a game description appears in a book it has by definition settled
down into some sort of fixity, and may be more than a generation old -
especially in the case of games played by a community that circulates
its cultural artefacts orally rather than in writing. The following
summary of the genesis of Poker is therefore no more than a surmise,
albeit at least consistent with the evidence outlined above.
Original Poker, a game in which four players received five cards each
from a 20-card pack and vied as to who held the best hand, evidently
originated in the New Orleans some time between 1810 and 1825. Its
gaming milieu was that of French-speaking maritime gambling saloons,
especially those of the Mississippi steamers. Its name suggests that its
first players felt they were continuing the tradition of playing a game
called Poque in which one said Je poque to open the betting. At this
time and place, and before it underwent development, Poque probably
denoted a five-card vying game consisting of the central section of a
formerly tripartite game of the same name. Its ultimate ancestor must
have been the substantially similar German game of Poch (Pochen,
Pochspiel), which can be traced back to the 15th century.
Poque itself was played with 32 or 36 cards by up to six players. Its
transition to one played with 20 cards by four players may have been
influenced by the known contemporary French vying game of Bouillotte, or
by the speculated Persian game of As-nas, or both. As-nas would be an
ideal candidate were it not for the fact that there is no evidence for
any knowledge of it at that time or place.
In the 1830s, having spread northwards along the Mississippi and
westwards with the expanding frontier, Poker had adopted its anglicized
name and become increasingly played with 52 cards to accommodate a
greater number of players, thus also giving rise to the flush as an
additionally recognized combination. Under the influence of Brag, its
three-card British equivalent, it adopted the draw. This led to its
further and more rapid expansion of popularity, as Poker-players
preferred the additional round of betting after the possibility of
improving a promising hand, while Brag-players preferred the wider range
of combinations offered by a five-card hand. Draw Poker, first recorded
about 1850, marks the coming of age of what Allen Dowling rightly calls
‘The great American pastime’ - a game which, as Burton observes, could
equally well have been dubbed ‘five-card Brag’.
