Jack Kelly writer
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THE HISTORY OF POKER
(American Heritage, November 2006)
In 1875 a writer for the New York Times was “forced to the
conclusion that the national game is not baseball, but
poker.”
“Rich and poor, high and low, good and bad, male and
female yield to the fascinations of Poker,” another
observer wrote in 1889.
As you read this in 2006, nimble fingers are flicking aces
onto emerald baize in card rooms from eastern
Connecticut to southern California; friends are bluffing
friends across kitchen tables; television viewers are gazing
at “Celebrity Poker Showdown”; college students are
neglecting political science for Texas Hold ’Em; and the
Chicago Tribune offers readers a weekly poker column.
Americans are in love with poker, but it’s hardly a sudden
infatuation. For more than 150 years we have glorified the
game and condemned it, promoted it and banned it,
played it for fun and for profit. We have found in poker
hints of the American character and analogies to world
events. It has been the game of Presidents and
dockworkers, of immigrants, housewives, and professional
gamblers.
Why has poker so consistently inveigled the American
imagination? A perfect amalgam of skill and luck, the game
has the virtues of simplicity and versatility. You can learn it
in 10 minutes and spend a lifetime acquiring proficiency.
To the analytical, it’s about math; to the social, it’s pure
psychology; to the acquisitive, it promises gain. To
everyone, it offers the absorbing prospect of staking
something, whether a few pennies or a fortune, and waiting
giddily for the cards to decide your fate.
A Vying Game
Paternity tests attempting to pinpoint poker’s immediate
parents have come back inconclusive. Like most card
games, poker evolved, incorporating elements from other
games, modifying them according to the habits and whims
of players. Nor can the exact time of its birth be pinpointed.
The game emerged out of the French cultural milieu of
New Orleans during the decades after the Louisiana
Purchase of 1803. We know it came to prominence in the
1820s, but its roots are lost in the hazy air of long-ago
saloons.
Poker began as a simple, almost childish game in which 20
cards were distributed, 5 each to four players. Participants
bet on who held the best combination of like cards: pairs;
three or four of a kind. If two or more players backed their
cards, a “showdown” determined the winner.
The new game added an American wrinkle to card playing,
an activity that first appeared in Europe in the late
fourteenth century (one of the earliest references to
playing cards is a 1377 Florentine edict banning their use).
The cost of early, hand-painted cards made them
playthings of the aristocracy. In the fifteenth century the
printing press put cards into the hands of commoners, but
the activity long retained an association with the upper
crust. In England, ordinary folk were permitted their games
only during the 12 days of the Christmas holiday.
Poker is a vying game, one in which combinations of cards
are ranked according to their rarity. It differs from games
like bridge or rummy in that there is no actual “play” with
the cards, no trick taking or scoring of melds. The
participants simply wager on who has the best five-card
hand. This vying element had a long history in European
card games. One such game, called primero, was popular
in the Tudor court; Shakespeare has Henry VIII himself
playing it. Brag, a popular British vying game, was played
in America and existed side by side with poker through
much of the nineteenth century. Both bluffing and wild
cards were elements of brag.
One influence on early poker was the ancient German
game of Pochspiel. Pochen, meaning to knock, was used
to announce bets: “Ich poche eins [I bet one].” A French
version was known as Poque. It’s likely that poker
borrowed certain of its elements as well as its name from
these games.
Whatever its origins, poker was born at a propitious time.
In 1812 Robert Fulton’s New Orleans became the first
steamboat to churn into the Crescent City. Eight years
later, as poker was finding its legs, 69 paddle wheelers
were plying the Western rivers. These watery corridors
provided the ideal pathway for the spread of what would
one day become America’s national game.
The Devil’s Picture Book
Poker is a contest in which the gambling element is
integral; it cannot be played in any meaningful way without
wagering. As such it has always been linked to Americans’
ambivalent attitude toward games of fortune.
America was founded on gambling; Jamestown was one of
several colonies backed by the proceeds of English
lotteries. But the gambling craze that swept Europe in the
seventeenth century was sternly condemned by the
Puritans who settled New England. To them, card playing
was sinful idleness that smacked of the sacrilegious. To
the devout, playing cards were “the devil’s picture book.” In
1633 authorities imposed a fine for card playing in
Plymouth Colony.
In Europe the situation was different. Gambling was the
prerogative of gentlemen, idleness a courtly virtue. The
southern colonies of America, beyond the influence of
Puritan moralizing, embraced this aristocratic view of
gaming. If Americans did not have the cash or the
insouciance to wager on the scale of European gentry,
they still loved to bet. George Washington recorded his
modest wins and losses in his daybook (but gave orders to
squelch the rampant gambling among Continental Army
soldiers).
These conflicting patterns persisted after the Revolution.
Gambling remained subdued in New England but was
pursued with abandon in the South and on the frontier. In
1827 a man named John Davis opened the nation’s first
full-fledged casino in New Orleans, making the city a
perfect incubator for the new game of poker.
Poker’s early days are closely linked to the riverboat
gambler. This American fixture began as a cardsharp
preying on the boat crews that emerged from the interior.
He soon moved onto the river himself, or operated along
its banks, relieving cotton traders, plantation scions, and
incidental travelers of the wealth the frontier was
generating. The games professionals preferred were
mostly adopted from the French—roulette, vingt-et-un, and
faro. They were banking games; players wagered against
the house, which had a built-in advantage.
Poker was slower paced but acquired its own popularity. All
the gambler needed was to induce a few men to sit down
around a table and join in a friendly game of cards. If the
play was leisurely, the stakes could grow enormous. One
rash riverboat captain bet his entire interest in his vessel
on four kings, only to watch his opponent lay down four
aces.
Professional gamblers discarded the idea of wagering as
an avocation only of aristocrats. Any man was as good as
any other—as long as he had money in his pockets.
Riverboat sharpers delivered poker into the age of
democratic gambling, a phenomenon still on display in any
Las Vegas poker room.
With his slim mustache, white hands, ruffled shirt, and dark
frock coat, the professional gambler aped the manners of
the gentleman even as he followed the calling of the
swindler. For some, no amount of ostentation was too
much. The cardsharp Jimmy Fitzgerald sported a gold
watch chain 20 feet long (he looped it around his neck)
and traveled with three slaves to lug his two dozen suits
and custom-made Parisian boots.
“Advantage Tools”
The Mississippi riverboat provided an unmatched
environment for these gamblers. The floating hotels
carried men who were far from home and often flush with
ready cash from business dealings. The long, slow journey
demanded some activity to break the monotony. At every
stop new players climbed aboard. By the 1830s at least
1,500 gamblers were plying the river.
The reformed cardsharp Jonathan H. Green, in an 1843
book entitled Exposure of the Arts & Miseries of Gambling,
wrote about the early days of poker. Referring to the 20-
card version, Green called poker a “cheating game.”
Sharping was rampant, and primitive poker could be as
much a con game as a card game.
Poker established itself along the Mississippi during the
1820s, but references to the game didn’t reach print until
1837. That year it was mentioned in James Hildreth’s
Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains. In speaking
of a man who “lost some cool hundreds last night at
poker,” the author felt the need to explain in a footnote
that poker was “a favorite game of cards at the south and
west.”
Other references to poker appeared soon afterward,
including a poignant and often reprinted 1838 account of a
“colored fireman” on a Mississippi steamboat who was
caught in a wicked losing streak and “ventured his full
value as a slave” on the turn of a card. He lost, and the
winner handed him over to a slave dealer. The incident
was offered as an example of the “vile and pernicious
practice of gaming.”
The staking of human lives was an ignoble facet of early
poker playing. “It wasn’t at all uncommon to hear an old
planter betting off his Negroes on a good hand,” recalled
Tom Ellison, a riverboat professional. “I saw a little colored
boy stand up to $300 to back his master’s faith in a little
flush that wasn’t any good on earth.”
The English comic actor Joe Cowell remembered playing
cards on a St. Louis–New Orleans riverboat in 1829.
Poker, he noted in his memoir, was “a high-gambling
Western game, founded on brag.” When the cards were
dealt, “old players pack them in their hands, and peep at
them as if they were afraid to trust even themselves to
look.”
George Devol was a rogue who later wrote of his
experiences in Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi.
Starting as a riverboat cabin boy in 1839, Devol lived
through the heyday when “there were five games of poker
running at one time in the cabin.” On one trip he
represented himself as a horse trader and used marked
decks to win $4,300 before reaching New Orleans.
Secretly marking cards was only one of many techniques
by which gamblers fleeced suckers. An expert “mechanic”
could shuffle cards while palming another pack, deal
specific cards to selected players, or hand out “seconds”
and “bottoms” with moves that were virtually impossible to
detect.
“I’ve seen fellows pick every card in a pack, and call it
without missing once,” Tom Ellison noted. “A sucker had
no more chance against those fellows than a snowball in a
red-hot oven.”
Cheating did not end with the riverboat era. Later, more
elaborate techniques emerged, including the use of tiny
mirrors that allowed a look at cards as they were dealt,
pins that left telltale pricks in specific cards, and
“holdouts,” contrivances of clips and pulleys that helped a
player stash valuable cards up a false sleeve or under the
table for future use.
A commercial market grew up in these “advantage tools.” A
New York City distributor advertised decks of marked cards
at $1.25, or $10 a dozen. The company’s advertisements
stated, “There is but one way to gamble successfully, and
that is to get Tools to work with and have the best of every
Game you get into.”
Cardsharping, though, was a precarious profession.
Suckers from the backcountry might be naive, but they
could also hand out frontier justice to someone they
suspected of cheating. Professional gamblers were
sometimes tossed off riverboats into a swampy wilderness.
A bad streak of cards pushed some losers to extremes. In
1858 John Powell, who had a reputation as one of the few
honest professionals on the Mississippi, took an English
traveler in a game of poker for $8,000 and his luggage.
The next day the Englishmen shook hands with the other
passengers and shot himself dead. Powell sent the money
and luggage to the man’s family and stopped gambling for
a year.
Draw and Stud
Late in its riverboat phase, poker underwent two important
modifications. One was the introduction of the standard 52-
card deck. This allowed more than four players to
participate and opened the way to the next modification,
the draw. In Draw poker, players were given a chance to
exchange some or all of their cards for others. With one
round of betting before the draw and one after, games
grew more exciting and required a good deal more skill.
Draw poker spread rapidly in the late 1840s, and by 1850
play with a full deck had largely replaced the original 20-
card game.
These innovations enhanced the practice of bluffing, a
central feature of poker. By betting big and drawing no
cards, a player could give the impression of holding a
superior hand. If the others did not match his wager, the
bluffer won the pot. Bluffing gave poker a psychological
dimension and an enduring fascination. Early writers refer
to bluff as another name for poker.
If poker grew up on the Mississippi, it came to maturity
during the Civil War. Gambling was a welcome diversion
for soldiers on both sides, and poker was a convenient,
easy, and spirited game. When Sherman was advancing
on Atlanta, word reached his headquarters that John Bell
Hood had been appointed the new Confederate
commander opposite him. The story circulated among
Union ranks that a Kentucky colonel who had known Hood
approached Sherman to inform him that in a poker game
Hood had “bet $2,500 with nary a pair in his hand.”
Reading Hood’s aggressive, bluffing style, Sherman
prepared for the defensive. The Confederate attack came
the next day, and Hood’s gamble was soundly defeated.
A new version of the game emerged during the war. Stud
or Studhorse poker was first mentioned in The American
Hoyle of 1864. (Edmond Hoyle, the eighteenth-century
English barrister whose name became so closely linked to
the rules of card games, died before poker was invented.)
In Stud, a player received one card down and four cards
up, with a betting round after each card. A seven-card
version came into vogue later. Because of its complex and
shifting permutations of hand values, the game made for
suspense and encouraged liberal betting.
With peace, returning soldiers brought poker to every
corner of the country. Veterans seeking opportunity on the
frontier firmly established the game in the West. The
saloons of cowtowns and mining camps replaced the
riverboats as the nation’s wide-open gambling venues.
The cowhands who brought the longhorns to Kansas
railheads in Abilene or Dodge City sat down at the towns’
gambling tables with four months of tedium behind them
and perhaps $120 pay in their pockets. Miners whose luck
had paid off were eager to test it at cards. Serious
gamblers were always on hand to oblige.
Banking games like faro and blackjack remained the
preferred forms of action in commercial establishments,
but poker became increasingly popular during the late
1860s. Stakes could be astronomical. Sen. William Sharon,
of Nevada, once played a game with William Ralston,
president of the Bank of California. With the pot already at
$150,000, Sharon, holding a pair of jacks, raised $50,000.
Ralston re-raised $150,000. With more than $350,000 on
the table Sharon lost his nerve and folded. Ralston
showed a pair of tens and raked in the cash. Sharon had
been bluffed out of a fortune.
Jackpots and Jokers
The rules of poker continued to evolve. The flush, five
cards of the same suit, entered the hierarchy of hands
during the 1840s. Soon afterward five cards in sequence,
a straight, came along, although it was listed as a regional
variation in 1864 and its inclusion was optional even in the
1890s.
The variation of Draw poker known as Jackpots began to
spread during the 1870s. Rules required that a player hold
at least a pair of jacks to make the first bet and thereby
helped dampen reckless bluffing. If no player held
openers, the antes were left in the center, causing the
“jackpot” to grow. The wild card, known first as a mistigris,
later as a joker, entered the game. Wild cards livened the
play of many later poker variations.
In 1872 Robert C. Schenck, who had been an Ohio
congressman and a brigadier general in the Civil War, was
serving as the U.S. minister to Britain. Informal and chatty,
he became a welcome guest at English country houses,
where he frequently played cards. A lady of quality asked
him to explain this game that was so popular in America.
He obliged by writing down the rules of draw poker, along
with some advice on how to play. Friends had the pages
published without his knowledge. According to Schenck,
the booklet brought down “the wrath and reprehension of
so many good people in America” who were scandalized
that he had lowered himself to discuss the frontier game
with refined foreigners.
His treatise, which is the earliest rule book devoted to draw
poker, notes that “it is a great object to mystify your
adversaries.” It lists the main elements of the game as “(1)
good luck; (2) good cards; (3) plenty of cheek; (4) and
good temper.”
By the 1870s increasingly stringent laws were eradicating
commercial gambling. California passed a state ban as
early as 1854 making operating a gambling house a
felony. By 1873 the great gambling halls that had
enchanted San Francisco during the gold rush were
throwing in their cards. Dodge City, once the national
capital of sin, outlawed gambling in 1878. States followed
suit, forbidding not only commercial casinos but virtually all
games of chance. The laws became a badge of
respectability for regions that had moved beyond the
anarchic frontier ethos. Nevada was the last state to crack
down. On October 1, 1910, public gambling there was, as
the Nevada State Journal put it, “stilled forever.”
Pass the Garbage
Poker continued to be played in informal games and at
private clubs. The lawyer John Blackbridge wrote in the
1880s that “so many cultivated men love this game, that it
is impossible for me to do otherwise than respect it.”
After the turn of the century, games among friends for low
stakes were found to grow monotonous if the play never
changed. Players jazzed up the action with the concept of
“dealer’s choice”; the dealer for each hand could choose
from any of a growing array of poker variations.
The game now entered a baroque period. Around 1903
players added a version in which the holders of the lowest
and highest hands split the pot. Hi-lo poker was followed
by Lowball, in which the lowest hand won outright. These
innovations made the strategy of the game more slippery,
the odds harder to calculate.
Many of the new mutations involved wild cards. In
Woolworth, for example, fives and tens were wild, in
Baseball, threes and nines. Games began to proliferate.
There was Mexican Stud, otherwise known as Flip. Players
could choose English Stud, Sweat and Push, Kick Me
Down, Hurricane, or Pass the Garbage. Cincinnati was
sometimes known as Lame Brains. Twin Beds was another
variation, as were Crisscross, Butcher Boy, Screwy Louie,
and Name Your Poison. Wild Widow, later known as Spit in
the Ocean, started a trend toward the use of communal
cards laid face-up in the center and included in each
player’s hand.
Purists pointed out that wild cards so skewed poker’s
probabilities that winning became largely a matter of luck.
James Thurber captured this spirit in his 1935 story
“Everything Is Wild.” A wife drags her reluctant husband to
a party where they play poker with two other couples. Fed
up with games like Poison Ivy and Duck-in-the-Pond, the
hero suggests his own variation, which he calls Soap-in-
Your-Eye. The absurdly convoluted rules leave all players
with royal flushes.
30 Million Decks
If poker swept the country during the Civil War, it reached
around the globe during World War II. The armed forces
distributed more than 30 million decks of cards to GIs, who
popularized the game wherever they went. The rules had
already been translated into Chinese, with a million copies
floating around Asia by 1937.
One of those who whiled away the slow hours of the Pacific
campaign playing poker was a young lieutenant named
Richard Nixon. Picking up the game quickly, he managed
to amass several thousand dollars in winnings before V-J
Day, a bankroll that helped finance his first election
campaign against the California congressman Jerry
Voorhis. One of Nixon’s Whittier College professors later
asserted that a man who couldn’t “hold a hand in a first-
class poker game” was not fit for the Presidency.
Nixon joined a long line of poker-playing politicians (see
sidebar on page 45). President Truman was an inveterate,
low-stakes poker aficionado. His aide Clark Clifford
remembered a game in 1946 in which Winston Churchill,
who was preparing to give his Iron Curtain speech at
Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, sat in with
Truman and a few others. Churchill, an accomplished
rummy player, was a lamb among wolves when it came to
poker, wrote Clifford. Truman diplomatically suggested
they go easy on the prime minister. Nevertheless, the
Americans made sure they took Churchill for a modest
$250 so that he couldn’t boast that he had bested the
Yanks at their national game.
By mid-century, poker was the nation’s most popular card
game among men and followed only rummy and bridge
among women. Players could choose from more than 150
variations.
The Apocalyptic Pot
While friendly games were the norm, professional poker
continued on the margins of society. The attorney general
of California had mysteriously decided that although the
legislature had banned Stud poker as a game of chance,
the antigambling law did not apply to Draw poker.
Localities were left to make their own rules. In 1936 the
town of Gardena, south of Los Angeles, allowed
commercial Draw-poker rooms to operate around the
clock, the house charging a fee every half-hour. For
decades the town reigned as a somewhat down-at-the-
heel mecca for poker players, but the parlors’ drab
cleanliness attracted few high rollers. Many more games
were carried on illegally in clandestine locations.
In 1931 the state of Nevada had repealed its antiwagering
laws altogether. Las Vegas town fathers found in gambling
a potent way to lure Southern California tourists into the
desert. The trend took off after the war, and Las Vegas
soon passed Reno as the nation’s most popular gambling
haven.
Casino operators, like earlier professionals, did not care
for the rather plodding pace of poker. They could make
more money from blackjack, keno, and other banking
games. Gamblers, though, liked the fact that this was the
only game where they could play against each other rather
than against the house and where skill was a genuine
factor. To accommodate them, most casinos ran a poker
room off the main floor and took a small rake from each
pot.
Having become a fixture of American popular culture,
poker inevitably attracted the interest of eggheads. John
Von Neumann, a brilliantly eccentric mathematician and
mediocre poker player, wrote a 1928 article, “Theory of
Parlor Games,” in which he analyzed games like poker that
did not follow strict probabilities but depended on
interactions among players. He wanted to quantify how
bluffing and deliberate deception affected the dynamics of
play. In 1944 he collaborated with the economist Oskar
Morgenstern on an influential book titled Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior. Game theory had a resounding
impact on economic analysis, and the authors went on to
apply it to military and political concepts as well.
During the Cold War, with the Americans and Soviets
glaring at each other across the table and alternately
tossing new ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs into the
apocalyptic pot, poker analogies became a commonplace
way of making sense of what some insisted was madness.
Who was bluffing? Who had the better hand? Who was
willing to raise the stakes?
“Today a new hand is being dealt in the cold war that is a
game of cold poker between the Kremlin and the new
Administration in Washington,” Morgenstern wrote in 1961.
“Something substantial can be learned from good poker
principles.”
If poker offered insight into politics, the notion that it also
probed a man’s character went back at least to 1889,
when the author of a book on the game wrote: “Draw
Poker is insatiable in its exposure of human weakness. It
tears the mask of bravery from the face of the coward; it
exposes the hypocrite … and it continually unearths
unsuspected vices or develops astonishing virtues.”
Some have been ready to elevate poker’s significance
even higher. The historian John Lukacs wrote in 1963 that
“poker is the game closest to the Western conception of
life … where free will prevails over philosophies of fate or
of chance… .” But Lukacs didn’t like Stud poker: “In this
development I see reflected the erosion of the American
national character.”
The Return of the Pros
Professional poker in the postwar era became the domain
of “road gamblers.” These men, mostly from Texas and the
Southern states, traveled around the country, searching
for high-stakes games wherever they could find them.
They were the modern version of the riverboat
professionals, skilled at every nuance of the game and
fearless in laying down colossal wagers.
Typical of them was Johnny Moss. Having learned poker
as a child in Odessa, Texas, he survived the Depression
playing the game in juke joints and poolrooms.
In 1949 Moss was matched in a fabled poker game with
Nick “the Greek” Dandolos, whose high-rolling credentials
went back to the Roaring Twenties. Nick and Johnny
played for big money in the lobby of the Horseshoe, a
casino in downtown Las Vegas run by an ex-con named
Benny Binion. The game was a curiosity; normally the
Horseshoe didn’t even offer poker. But with two sharks
going head to head, spectators crowded six deep to watch.
The casino profited from the influx as the game dragged
on for five months with only occasional breaks. Dandolos
finally threw in the towel.
In 1970 Binion again decided to boost business by
sponsoring a poker tournament. The first version of what
he called the World Series of Poker drew scant attention.
Over the next two years, though, Binion reconfigured the
event to focus on a version of the game known as Texas
Hold ’Em. This was a fast-paced variant of Seven-Card
Stud in which players received two down cards and shared
five cards turned up in the center.
Hold ’Em is rumored to have emerged in the Corpus Christi
area during the Depression and may have had roots back
to the turn of the century. Also known as Hold Me Darlin’ or
Tennessee Hold Me, it hit Las Vegas casinos in the early
1960s. The game encouraged healthy wagering, and its
simplicity appealed to players. With few cards hidden, it
was a good game for spectators.
Eight professionals played in the 1972 tournament, with
Amarillo Slim Preston, another hard-bitten road player,
taking home the prize. The contest became an instant
success and has been a fixture of the poker scene ever
since.
The current national obsession with poker has its roots in
the success of these early tournaments. Professional
poker emerged from smoke-filled rooms and began to
acquire respectability. The top players found their pictures
in the paper and their autographs in demand. They
beguiled fans with stories of bygone contests in which the
threat of violence and astonishing quantities of
greenbacks played equal roles.
Poker playing has in recent years received two injections
of anabolic steroids. The first was the advent of a series
on cable television called the “World Poker Tour.” Its
creator, Steve Lipscomb, was inspired to use cameras that
could glimpse players’ hole cards. With viewers privy to
participants’ cards and the dull parts of the game edited
out, the programs were a hit. Celebrity versions along the
same lines drew thousands of new players to the game.
The second boost was provided by the Internet. Online
poker has attracted an increasing number of players since
its advent in the late 1990s. Scores of poker “rooms”
operated by off-shore companies let enthusiasts from
around the world meet online and play for real money.
Despite poker’s position as an American institution, the
nation has continued to equivocate about gambling.
Through the twentieth century police regularly descended
on organized poker games, hauling players to jail. Even
private games were subject to raids. In 1936 The New York
Times reported that New York City police broke down the
door of a West Seventy-ninth Street apartment and
arrested 20 women who were playing poker amid “a light
fog of cigarette smoke.”
Today celebrities may bet with impunity on television, but
games of chance remain forbidden in most states. Internet
gambling, available on any computer, is illegal nationwide.
Betting on Tomorrow
Yet the game’s momentum continues. Current trends
merged in 2003, when a Nashville accountant named Chris
Moneymaker entered one of many online “satellite”
tournaments. For a $40 fee he won a $10,000 buy-in to
the World Series of Poker. In Vegas, Moneymaker bested
838 other entrants to be declared the poker champion of
the world and to win $2.5 million.
Moneymaker’s story fueled the fantasies of tens of
thousands of casual players. This most democratic of
games, at which a truck driver can sit down with an
executive and an amateur can beat a professional, struck
a resonant chord in American culture. Three years later
the tournament drew more than 8,000 players, and the
winner took home $12 million. As the actor Walter Matthau
said of poker, “The game exemplifies the worst aspects of
capitalism that have made our country so great.”
# # #
(American Heritage, November 2006)
In 1875 a writer for the New York Times was “forced to the
conclusion that the national game is not baseball, but
poker.”
“Rich and poor, high and low, good and bad, male and
female yield to the fascinations of Poker,” another
observer wrote in 1889.
As you read this in 2006, nimble fingers are flicking aces
onto emerald baize in card rooms from eastern
Connecticut to southern California; friends are bluffing
friends across kitchen tables; television viewers are gazing
at “Celebrity Poker Showdown”; college students are
neglecting political science for Texas Hold ’Em; and the
Chicago Tribune offers readers a weekly poker column.
Americans are in love with poker, but it’s hardly a sudden
infatuation. For more than 150 years we have glorified the
game and condemned it, promoted it and banned it,
played it for fun and for profit. We have found in poker
hints of the American character and analogies to world
events. It has been the game of Presidents and
dockworkers, of immigrants, housewives, and professional
gamblers.
Why has poker so consistently inveigled the American
imagination? A perfect amalgam of skill and luck, the game
has the virtues of simplicity and versatility. You can learn it
in 10 minutes and spend a lifetime acquiring proficiency.
To the analytical, it’s about math; to the social, it’s pure
psychology; to the acquisitive, it promises gain. To
everyone, it offers the absorbing prospect of staking
something, whether a few pennies or a fortune, and waiting
giddily for the cards to decide your fate.
A Vying Game
Paternity tests attempting to pinpoint poker’s immediate
parents have come back inconclusive. Like most card
games, poker evolved, incorporating elements from other
games, modifying them according to the habits and whims
of players. Nor can the exact time of its birth be pinpointed.
The game emerged out of the French cultural milieu of
New Orleans during the decades after the Louisiana
Purchase of 1803. We know it came to prominence in the
1820s, but its roots are lost in the hazy air of long-ago
saloons.
Poker began as a simple, almost childish game in which 20
cards were distributed, 5 each to four players. Participants
bet on who held the best combination of like cards: pairs;
three or four of a kind. If two or more players backed their
cards, a “showdown” determined the winner.
The new game added an American wrinkle to card playing,
an activity that first appeared in Europe in the late
fourteenth century (one of the earliest references to
playing cards is a 1377 Florentine edict banning their use).
The cost of early, hand-painted cards made them
playthings of the aristocracy. In the fifteenth century the
printing press put cards into the hands of commoners, but
the activity long retained an association with the upper
crust. In England, ordinary folk were permitted their games
only during the 12 days of the Christmas holiday.
Poker is a vying game, one in which combinations of cards
are ranked according to their rarity. It differs from games
like bridge or rummy in that there is no actual “play” with
the cards, no trick taking or scoring of melds. The
participants simply wager on who has the best five-card
hand. This vying element had a long history in European
card games. One such game, called primero, was popular
in the Tudor court; Shakespeare has Henry VIII himself
playing it. Brag, a popular British vying game, was played
in America and existed side by side with poker through
much of the nineteenth century. Both bluffing and wild
cards were elements of brag.
One influence on early poker was the ancient German
game of Pochspiel. Pochen, meaning to knock, was used
to announce bets: “Ich poche eins [I bet one].” A French
version was known as Poque. It’s likely that poker
borrowed certain of its elements as well as its name from
these games.
Whatever its origins, poker was born at a propitious time.
In 1812 Robert Fulton’s New Orleans became the first
steamboat to churn into the Crescent City. Eight years
later, as poker was finding its legs, 69 paddle wheelers
were plying the Western rivers. These watery corridors
provided the ideal pathway for the spread of what would
one day become America’s national game.
The Devil’s Picture Book
Poker is a contest in which the gambling element is
integral; it cannot be played in any meaningful way without
wagering. As such it has always been linked to Americans’
ambivalent attitude toward games of fortune.
America was founded on gambling; Jamestown was one of
several colonies backed by the proceeds of English
lotteries. But the gambling craze that swept Europe in the
seventeenth century was sternly condemned by the
Puritans who settled New England. To them, card playing
was sinful idleness that smacked of the sacrilegious. To
the devout, playing cards were “the devil’s picture book.” In
1633 authorities imposed a fine for card playing in
Plymouth Colony.
In Europe the situation was different. Gambling was the
prerogative of gentlemen, idleness a courtly virtue. The
southern colonies of America, beyond the influence of
Puritan moralizing, embraced this aristocratic view of
gaming. If Americans did not have the cash or the
insouciance to wager on the scale of European gentry,
they still loved to bet. George Washington recorded his
modest wins and losses in his daybook (but gave orders to
squelch the rampant gambling among Continental Army
soldiers).
These conflicting patterns persisted after the Revolution.
Gambling remained subdued in New England but was
pursued with abandon in the South and on the frontier. In
1827 a man named John Davis opened the nation’s first
full-fledged casino in New Orleans, making the city a
perfect incubator for the new game of poker.
Poker’s early days are closely linked to the riverboat
gambler. This American fixture began as a cardsharp
preying on the boat crews that emerged from the interior.
He soon moved onto the river himself, or operated along
its banks, relieving cotton traders, plantation scions, and
incidental travelers of the wealth the frontier was
generating. The games professionals preferred were
mostly adopted from the French—roulette, vingt-et-un, and
faro. They were banking games; players wagered against
the house, which had a built-in advantage.
Poker was slower paced but acquired its own popularity. All
the gambler needed was to induce a few men to sit down
around a table and join in a friendly game of cards. If the
play was leisurely, the stakes could grow enormous. One
rash riverboat captain bet his entire interest in his vessel
on four kings, only to watch his opponent lay down four
aces.
Professional gamblers discarded the idea of wagering as
an avocation only of aristocrats. Any man was as good as
any other—as long as he had money in his pockets.
Riverboat sharpers delivered poker into the age of
democratic gambling, a phenomenon still on display in any
Las Vegas poker room.
With his slim mustache, white hands, ruffled shirt, and dark
frock coat, the professional gambler aped the manners of
the gentleman even as he followed the calling of the
swindler. For some, no amount of ostentation was too
much. The cardsharp Jimmy Fitzgerald sported a gold
watch chain 20 feet long (he looped it around his neck)
and traveled with three slaves to lug his two dozen suits
and custom-made Parisian boots.
“Advantage Tools”
The Mississippi riverboat provided an unmatched
environment for these gamblers. The floating hotels
carried men who were far from home and often flush with
ready cash from business dealings. The long, slow journey
demanded some activity to break the monotony. At every
stop new players climbed aboard. By the 1830s at least
1,500 gamblers were plying the river.
The reformed cardsharp Jonathan H. Green, in an 1843
book entitled Exposure of the Arts & Miseries of Gambling,
wrote about the early days of poker. Referring to the 20-
card version, Green called poker a “cheating game.”
Sharping was rampant, and primitive poker could be as
much a con game as a card game.
Poker established itself along the Mississippi during the
1820s, but references to the game didn’t reach print until
1837. That year it was mentioned in James Hildreth’s
Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains. In speaking
of a man who “lost some cool hundreds last night at
poker,” the author felt the need to explain in a footnote
that poker was “a favorite game of cards at the south and
west.”
Other references to poker appeared soon afterward,
including a poignant and often reprinted 1838 account of a
“colored fireman” on a Mississippi steamboat who was
caught in a wicked losing streak and “ventured his full
value as a slave” on the turn of a card. He lost, and the
winner handed him over to a slave dealer. The incident
was offered as an example of the “vile and pernicious
practice of gaming.”
The staking of human lives was an ignoble facet of early
poker playing. “It wasn’t at all uncommon to hear an old
planter betting off his Negroes on a good hand,” recalled
Tom Ellison, a riverboat professional. “I saw a little colored
boy stand up to $300 to back his master’s faith in a little
flush that wasn’t any good on earth.”
The English comic actor Joe Cowell remembered playing
cards on a St. Louis–New Orleans riverboat in 1829.
Poker, he noted in his memoir, was “a high-gambling
Western game, founded on brag.” When the cards were
dealt, “old players pack them in their hands, and peep at
them as if they were afraid to trust even themselves to
look.”
George Devol was a rogue who later wrote of his
experiences in Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi.
Starting as a riverboat cabin boy in 1839, Devol lived
through the heyday when “there were five games of poker
running at one time in the cabin.” On one trip he
represented himself as a horse trader and used marked
decks to win $4,300 before reaching New Orleans.
Secretly marking cards was only one of many techniques
by which gamblers fleeced suckers. An expert “mechanic”
could shuffle cards while palming another pack, deal
specific cards to selected players, or hand out “seconds”
and “bottoms” with moves that were virtually impossible to
detect.
“I’ve seen fellows pick every card in a pack, and call it
without missing once,” Tom Ellison noted. “A sucker had
no more chance against those fellows than a snowball in a
red-hot oven.”
Cheating did not end with the riverboat era. Later, more
elaborate techniques emerged, including the use of tiny
mirrors that allowed a look at cards as they were dealt,
pins that left telltale pricks in specific cards, and
“holdouts,” contrivances of clips and pulleys that helped a
player stash valuable cards up a false sleeve or under the
table for future use.
A commercial market grew up in these “advantage tools.” A
New York City distributor advertised decks of marked cards
at $1.25, or $10 a dozen. The company’s advertisements
stated, “There is but one way to gamble successfully, and
that is to get Tools to work with and have the best of every
Game you get into.”
Cardsharping, though, was a precarious profession.
Suckers from the backcountry might be naive, but they
could also hand out frontier justice to someone they
suspected of cheating. Professional gamblers were
sometimes tossed off riverboats into a swampy wilderness.
A bad streak of cards pushed some losers to extremes. In
1858 John Powell, who had a reputation as one of the few
honest professionals on the Mississippi, took an English
traveler in a game of poker for $8,000 and his luggage.
The next day the Englishmen shook hands with the other
passengers and shot himself dead. Powell sent the money
and luggage to the man’s family and stopped gambling for
a year.
Draw and Stud
Late in its riverboat phase, poker underwent two important
modifications. One was the introduction of the standard 52-
card deck. This allowed more than four players to
participate and opened the way to the next modification,
the draw. In Draw poker, players were given a chance to
exchange some or all of their cards for others. With one
round of betting before the draw and one after, games
grew more exciting and required a good deal more skill.
Draw poker spread rapidly in the late 1840s, and by 1850
play with a full deck had largely replaced the original 20-
card game.
These innovations enhanced the practice of bluffing, a
central feature of poker. By betting big and drawing no
cards, a player could give the impression of holding a
superior hand. If the others did not match his wager, the
bluffer won the pot. Bluffing gave poker a psychological
dimension and an enduring fascination. Early writers refer
to bluff as another name for poker.
If poker grew up on the Mississippi, it came to maturity
during the Civil War. Gambling was a welcome diversion
for soldiers on both sides, and poker was a convenient,
easy, and spirited game. When Sherman was advancing
on Atlanta, word reached his headquarters that John Bell
Hood had been appointed the new Confederate
commander opposite him. The story circulated among
Union ranks that a Kentucky colonel who had known Hood
approached Sherman to inform him that in a poker game
Hood had “bet $2,500 with nary a pair in his hand.”
Reading Hood’s aggressive, bluffing style, Sherman
prepared for the defensive. The Confederate attack came
the next day, and Hood’s gamble was soundly defeated.
A new version of the game emerged during the war. Stud
or Studhorse poker was first mentioned in The American
Hoyle of 1864. (Edmond Hoyle, the eighteenth-century
English barrister whose name became so closely linked to
the rules of card games, died before poker was invented.)
In Stud, a player received one card down and four cards
up, with a betting round after each card. A seven-card
version came into vogue later. Because of its complex and
shifting permutations of hand values, the game made for
suspense and encouraged liberal betting.
With peace, returning soldiers brought poker to every
corner of the country. Veterans seeking opportunity on the
frontier firmly established the game in the West. The
saloons of cowtowns and mining camps replaced the
riverboats as the nation’s wide-open gambling venues.
The cowhands who brought the longhorns to Kansas
railheads in Abilene or Dodge City sat down at the towns’
gambling tables with four months of tedium behind them
and perhaps $120 pay in their pockets. Miners whose luck
had paid off were eager to test it at cards. Serious
gamblers were always on hand to oblige.
Banking games like faro and blackjack remained the
preferred forms of action in commercial establishments,
but poker became increasingly popular during the late
1860s. Stakes could be astronomical. Sen. William Sharon,
of Nevada, once played a game with William Ralston,
president of the Bank of California. With the pot already at
$150,000, Sharon, holding a pair of jacks, raised $50,000.
Ralston re-raised $150,000. With more than $350,000 on
the table Sharon lost his nerve and folded. Ralston
showed a pair of tens and raked in the cash. Sharon had
been bluffed out of a fortune.
Jackpots and Jokers
The rules of poker continued to evolve. The flush, five
cards of the same suit, entered the hierarchy of hands
during the 1840s. Soon afterward five cards in sequence,
a straight, came along, although it was listed as a regional
variation in 1864 and its inclusion was optional even in the
1890s.
The variation of Draw poker known as Jackpots began to
spread during the 1870s. Rules required that a player hold
at least a pair of jacks to make the first bet and thereby
helped dampen reckless bluffing. If no player held
openers, the antes were left in the center, causing the
“jackpot” to grow. The wild card, known first as a mistigris,
later as a joker, entered the game. Wild cards livened the
play of many later poker variations.
In 1872 Robert C. Schenck, who had been an Ohio
congressman and a brigadier general in the Civil War, was
serving as the U.S. minister to Britain. Informal and chatty,
he became a welcome guest at English country houses,
where he frequently played cards. A lady of quality asked
him to explain this game that was so popular in America.
He obliged by writing down the rules of draw poker, along
with some advice on how to play. Friends had the pages
published without his knowledge. According to Schenck,
the booklet brought down “the wrath and reprehension of
so many good people in America” who were scandalized
that he had lowered himself to discuss the frontier game
with refined foreigners.
His treatise, which is the earliest rule book devoted to draw
poker, notes that “it is a great object to mystify your
adversaries.” It lists the main elements of the game as “(1)
good luck; (2) good cards; (3) plenty of cheek; (4) and
good temper.”
By the 1870s increasingly stringent laws were eradicating
commercial gambling. California passed a state ban as
early as 1854 making operating a gambling house a
felony. By 1873 the great gambling halls that had
enchanted San Francisco during the gold rush were
throwing in their cards. Dodge City, once the national
capital of sin, outlawed gambling in 1878. States followed
suit, forbidding not only commercial casinos but virtually all
games of chance. The laws became a badge of
respectability for regions that had moved beyond the
anarchic frontier ethos. Nevada was the last state to crack
down. On October 1, 1910, public gambling there was, as
the Nevada State Journal put it, “stilled forever.”
Pass the Garbage
Poker continued to be played in informal games and at
private clubs. The lawyer John Blackbridge wrote in the
1880s that “so many cultivated men love this game, that it
is impossible for me to do otherwise than respect it.”
After the turn of the century, games among friends for low
stakes were found to grow monotonous if the play never
changed. Players jazzed up the action with the concept of
“dealer’s choice”; the dealer for each hand could choose
from any of a growing array of poker variations.
The game now entered a baroque period. Around 1903
players added a version in which the holders of the lowest
and highest hands split the pot. Hi-lo poker was followed
by Lowball, in which the lowest hand won outright. These
innovations made the strategy of the game more slippery,
the odds harder to calculate.
Many of the new mutations involved wild cards. In
Woolworth, for example, fives and tens were wild, in
Baseball, threes and nines. Games began to proliferate.
There was Mexican Stud, otherwise known as Flip. Players
could choose English Stud, Sweat and Push, Kick Me
Down, Hurricane, or Pass the Garbage. Cincinnati was
sometimes known as Lame Brains. Twin Beds was another
variation, as were Crisscross, Butcher Boy, Screwy Louie,
and Name Your Poison. Wild Widow, later known as Spit in
the Ocean, started a trend toward the use of communal
cards laid face-up in the center and included in each
player’s hand.
Purists pointed out that wild cards so skewed poker’s
probabilities that winning became largely a matter of luck.
James Thurber captured this spirit in his 1935 story
“Everything Is Wild.” A wife drags her reluctant husband to
a party where they play poker with two other couples. Fed
up with games like Poison Ivy and Duck-in-the-Pond, the
hero suggests his own variation, which he calls Soap-in-
Your-Eye. The absurdly convoluted rules leave all players
with royal flushes.
30 Million Decks
If poker swept the country during the Civil War, it reached
around the globe during World War II. The armed forces
distributed more than 30 million decks of cards to GIs, who
popularized the game wherever they went. The rules had
already been translated into Chinese, with a million copies
floating around Asia by 1937.
One of those who whiled away the slow hours of the Pacific
campaign playing poker was a young lieutenant named
Richard Nixon. Picking up the game quickly, he managed
to amass several thousand dollars in winnings before V-J
Day, a bankroll that helped finance his first election
campaign against the California congressman Jerry
Voorhis. One of Nixon’s Whittier College professors later
asserted that a man who couldn’t “hold a hand in a first-
class poker game” was not fit for the Presidency.
Nixon joined a long line of poker-playing politicians (see
sidebar on page 45). President Truman was an inveterate,
low-stakes poker aficionado. His aide Clark Clifford
remembered a game in 1946 in which Winston Churchill,
who was preparing to give his Iron Curtain speech at
Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, sat in with
Truman and a few others. Churchill, an accomplished
rummy player, was a lamb among wolves when it came to
poker, wrote Clifford. Truman diplomatically suggested
they go easy on the prime minister. Nevertheless, the
Americans made sure they took Churchill for a modest
$250 so that he couldn’t boast that he had bested the
Yanks at their national game.
By mid-century, poker was the nation’s most popular card
game among men and followed only rummy and bridge
among women. Players could choose from more than 150
variations.
The Apocalyptic Pot
While friendly games were the norm, professional poker
continued on the margins of society. The attorney general
of California had mysteriously decided that although the
legislature had banned Stud poker as a game of chance,
the antigambling law did not apply to Draw poker.
Localities were left to make their own rules. In 1936 the
town of Gardena, south of Los Angeles, allowed
commercial Draw-poker rooms to operate around the
clock, the house charging a fee every half-hour. For
decades the town reigned as a somewhat down-at-the-
heel mecca for poker players, but the parlors’ drab
cleanliness attracted few high rollers. Many more games
were carried on illegally in clandestine locations.
In 1931 the state of Nevada had repealed its antiwagering
laws altogether. Las Vegas town fathers found in gambling
a potent way to lure Southern California tourists into the
desert. The trend took off after the war, and Las Vegas
soon passed Reno as the nation’s most popular gambling
haven.
Casino operators, like earlier professionals, did not care
for the rather plodding pace of poker. They could make
more money from blackjack, keno, and other banking
games. Gamblers, though, liked the fact that this was the
only game where they could play against each other rather
than against the house and where skill was a genuine
factor. To accommodate them, most casinos ran a poker
room off the main floor and took a small rake from each
pot.
Having become a fixture of American popular culture,
poker inevitably attracted the interest of eggheads. John
Von Neumann, a brilliantly eccentric mathematician and
mediocre poker player, wrote a 1928 article, “Theory of
Parlor Games,” in which he analyzed games like poker that
did not follow strict probabilities but depended on
interactions among players. He wanted to quantify how
bluffing and deliberate deception affected the dynamics of
play. In 1944 he collaborated with the economist Oskar
Morgenstern on an influential book titled Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior. Game theory had a resounding
impact on economic analysis, and the authors went on to
apply it to military and political concepts as well.
During the Cold War, with the Americans and Soviets
glaring at each other across the table and alternately
tossing new ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs into the
apocalyptic pot, poker analogies became a commonplace
way of making sense of what some insisted was madness.
Who was bluffing? Who had the better hand? Who was
willing to raise the stakes?
“Today a new hand is being dealt in the cold war that is a
game of cold poker between the Kremlin and the new
Administration in Washington,” Morgenstern wrote in 1961.
“Something substantial can be learned from good poker
principles.”
If poker offered insight into politics, the notion that it also
probed a man’s character went back at least to 1889,
when the author of a book on the game wrote: “Draw
Poker is insatiable in its exposure of human weakness. It
tears the mask of bravery from the face of the coward; it
exposes the hypocrite … and it continually unearths
unsuspected vices or develops astonishing virtues.”
Some have been ready to elevate poker’s significance
even higher. The historian John Lukacs wrote in 1963 that
“poker is the game closest to the Western conception of
life … where free will prevails over philosophies of fate or
of chance… .” But Lukacs didn’t like Stud poker: “In this
development I see reflected the erosion of the American
national character.”
The Return of the Pros
Professional poker in the postwar era became the domain
of “road gamblers.” These men, mostly from Texas and the
Southern states, traveled around the country, searching
for high-stakes games wherever they could find them.
They were the modern version of the riverboat
professionals, skilled at every nuance of the game and
fearless in laying down colossal wagers.
Typical of them was Johnny Moss. Having learned poker
as a child in Odessa, Texas, he survived the Depression
playing the game in juke joints and poolrooms.
In 1949 Moss was matched in a fabled poker game with
Nick “the Greek” Dandolos, whose high-rolling credentials
went back to the Roaring Twenties. Nick and Johnny
played for big money in the lobby of the Horseshoe, a
casino in downtown Las Vegas run by an ex-con named
Benny Binion. The game was a curiosity; normally the
Horseshoe didn’t even offer poker. But with two sharks
going head to head, spectators crowded six deep to watch.
The casino profited from the influx as the game dragged
on for five months with only occasional breaks. Dandolos
finally threw in the towel.
In 1970 Binion again decided to boost business by
sponsoring a poker tournament. The first version of what
he called the World Series of Poker drew scant attention.
Over the next two years, though, Binion reconfigured the
event to focus on a version of the game known as Texas
Hold ’Em. This was a fast-paced variant of Seven-Card
Stud in which players received two down cards and shared
five cards turned up in the center.
Hold ’Em is rumored to have emerged in the Corpus Christi
area during the Depression and may have had roots back
to the turn of the century. Also known as Hold Me Darlin’ or
Tennessee Hold Me, it hit Las Vegas casinos in the early
1960s. The game encouraged healthy wagering, and its
simplicity appealed to players. With few cards hidden, it
was a good game for spectators.
Eight professionals played in the 1972 tournament, with
Amarillo Slim Preston, another hard-bitten road player,
taking home the prize. The contest became an instant
success and has been a fixture of the poker scene ever
since.
The current national obsession with poker has its roots in
the success of these early tournaments. Professional
poker emerged from smoke-filled rooms and began to
acquire respectability. The top players found their pictures
in the paper and their autographs in demand. They
beguiled fans with stories of bygone contests in which the
threat of violence and astonishing quantities of
greenbacks played equal roles.
Poker playing has in recent years received two injections
of anabolic steroids. The first was the advent of a series
on cable television called the “World Poker Tour.” Its
creator, Steve Lipscomb, was inspired to use cameras that
could glimpse players’ hole cards. With viewers privy to
participants’ cards and the dull parts of the game edited
out, the programs were a hit. Celebrity versions along the
same lines drew thousands of new players to the game.
The second boost was provided by the Internet. Online
poker has attracted an increasing number of players since
its advent in the late 1990s. Scores of poker “rooms”
operated by off-shore companies let enthusiasts from
around the world meet online and play for real money.
Despite poker’s position as an American institution, the
nation has continued to equivocate about gambling.
Through the twentieth century police regularly descended
on organized poker games, hauling players to jail. Even
private games were subject to raids. In 1936 The New York
Times reported that New York City police broke down the
door of a West Seventy-ninth Street apartment and
arrested 20 women who were playing poker amid “a light
fog of cigarette smoke.”
Today celebrities may bet with impunity on television, but
games of chance remain forbidden in most states. Internet
gambling, available on any computer, is illegal nationwide.
Betting on Tomorrow
Yet the game’s momentum continues. Current trends
merged in 2003, when a Nashville accountant named Chris
Moneymaker entered one of many online “satellite”
tournaments. For a $40 fee he won a $10,000 buy-in to
the World Series of Poker. In Vegas, Moneymaker bested
838 other entrants to be declared the poker champion of
the world and to win $2.5 million.
Moneymaker’s story fueled the fantasies of tens of
thousands of casual players. This most democratic of
games, at which a truck driver can sit down with an
executive and an amateur can beat a professional, struck
a resonant chord in American culture. Three years later
the tournament drew more than 8,000 players, and the
winner took home $12 million. As the actor Walter Matthau
said of poker, “The game exemplifies the worst aspects of
capitalism that have made our country so great.”
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