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 its
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 hAKQJ10 or s5432A)
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
hJ-h-9-h8-h7-h2)
straight (five cards in sequence but not in suit, 🍊 as
s10-s9-d8-c7-h6)
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 type of Commerce 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 of 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). Another form of poker to spring up 🍊 over recent years is what's known
as Pai Gow poker (also called Double-hand poker) which is a spin off of 🍊 the Chinese
dominoes game Pai Gow. I won't go into details about this game here, so instead please
see Pai 🍊 Gow poker on pagat.
BIRTH AND GROWTH
New Orleans and the Mississippi
steamers
The birth of Poker has been
Mississippi steamer
(courtesy of Look and
🍊 Learn
history picture library) 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 (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. (American Brag is no longer played, and modern British Brag differs
substantially from it.)
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 edition of Bohn's
New Handbook of Games, p.384. (Or 🍊 so says Dowling, who reproduces a facsimile of the
text; but no such reference appears in the British version of 🍊 this title published as
late as 1879.)
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
Introducing draw, stud and jack-pots
From the middle of
the 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 grea t 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 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 1926 edition under the name 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
Laying myths 🍊 to rest
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 (Kaiserspiel). 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 from 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 any 🍊 other possible way of doing it. Two fundamentally different types of vying may
be categorized as the Equalization method (Poker 🍊 style) and the Matching method (Brag
style).
Equalization method. A player wishing to stay in the pot must increase his
stake 🍊 by the amount necessary to match the total so far staked by the last raiser, and
may also raise it 🍊 further. If unwilling to do either, he must fold. In the following
example, column 2 shows the total staked so 🍊 far by each player, and column 3 the total
in the pot.
1 2 3 A opens for 1 1 1 🍊 B 1 to stay, raise 1 2 3 C 2 to stay 2 5 D 2 to
stay, raise 1 🍊 3 8 A 2 to stay 3 10 B 2 to stay, raise 1 4 12 C fold - 12 🍊 D 1 to stay 4
13 A 1 to stay, raise 1 5 15 B fold - 15 D 1 🍊 to stay 5 16
A and D have now equalized,
thus calling for a showdown. Whichever of them wins it gains 🍊 a pot of 16 less his total
stake o 5, making 11 profit.
Matching method. In this case a player wishing 🍊 to stay in
the pot must match the stake just made by the preceding active player, instead of
merely making 🍊 up the difference between his total stake and that of the last raiser. As
before, he may then also raise 🍊 it further, or, if unwilling to do either, must fold.
1
2 3 A opens for 1 1 1 B 1 🍊 to stay, raise 1 2 3 C 2 to stay 2 5 D 2 to stay, raise 1 3 8
🍊 A 3 to stay 4 11 B 3 to stay, raise 1 6 15 C fold - 15 D 4 🍊 to stay 7 19 A 1 to stay,
raise 1 9 24 B fold - 24 D 5 to stay 🍊 12 29
In this case the winner gains a pot of 29
less the amount of his own stake, which in 🍊 A's case is 29 - 9 = 20 and in D's is 29 -
12 = 17.
Further variations may be 🍊 encountered, especially in Brag. For example, under
what might be called a 'flat rate' system, each in turn must either 🍊 add a fixed,
invariable unit to his stake or else fold, and play continues until only two remain in
the 🍊 pot, when one of them can call by betting double. American Brag, as played
according to an 1830 American Hoyle, 🍊 used the equalization method, but an edition of
1868 points out that the game is played in various ways and 🍊 describes a different vying
procedure. In this, a player who brags when holding a pair (but not otherwise) may
demand 🍊 a private showdown with the next active player in rotation. They then examine
each other's hands without showing them to 🍊 the others, and the lower of the two must be
folded. Play continues until only two remain and one of 🍊 them either folds or 'calls for
a sight [showdown]' upon equalizing. This procedure has the peculiar consequence that
you can 🍊 be forced into a showdown without having had a chance to raise. In Bouillotte
there are circumstances in which equalizing 🍊 does not necessarily force a showdown but
entitles the next active player in rotation to instigate another round of raising. 🍊 It
is also possible for a player who cannot meet the last raise to call a sight for the
amount 🍊 he has left and stay in the pot (without further betting) until a showdown,
when, of course, he cannot win 🍊 more than the amount he has staked even if he proves to
have the best hand.
RELATIVES AND ANCESTORS
Pochen, Poque and 🍊 others
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 the 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 has 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
Poch boards of 1713 and 1745 in the
Bavarian Sate Museum, Munich 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/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
"La 🍊 Bouillotte Parisienne" 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
Often cited, never 🍊 proved
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" - //en.wikipedia/wiki/Franco-Persian_alliance. 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 as follows:
Schindler's description of As-nas cards and the game
played with them reads in part as follows (p.928-9): "The 🍊 word ganjifeh is in Persian
now only employed for European playing-cards (four suits, ace to ten; three picture
cards each 🍊 suit), which, however, are also called rarak i âs - rarak i âsanâs - or
simply âs, from the game 🍊 âs or âsanâs. From travellers to Persia in the seventeenth
century we know that a set of ganjifeh consisted of 🍊 ninety or ninety-six cards in eight
suits or colors. At present a set consists of twenty cards in five colors 🍊 or values,
namely:
1. Shîr va Khurshíd or âs: Lion and Sun, or Ace.
2. Shâh or Pishâ: King.
3.
Bîbî: Lady (or 🍊 Queen).
4. Sarbâs: Soldier (or Knave).
5. Lakat (meaning something of
little value): generally a dancing-girl.
The backs of the cards
17th century As-nas
🍊 cards are always black or of a dark color, but their faces have grounds of different
colors, viz: The Lion 🍊 and Sun, a black ground; the King, a white ground; the Lady, red;
the soldier, gold; the Lakat, green. The 🍊 pictures on the cards show much variety and
are often obscene, particularly those on the card of the lowest value. 🍊 The ordinary
types as now made are: Ace, a Lion and Sun, as in the Persian arms; a King sitting 🍊 on a
throne; a European lady in a quaint costume; a Persian soldier shouldering his rifle; a
Persian dancing-girl. The 🍊 word ganjifeh I have explained. Âs is no doubt our word
'ace', probably introduced into India through the Portuguese. Neither 🍊 of the words is
found in Persian dictionaries. The game of Âs is exactly like Poker, but without any
flushes 🍊 or sequences. There are four players, and each player gets five cards, dealt to
the right. The dealer puts down 🍊 a stake. The first player then looks at his cards. If
he 'goes', he says dîdam (I have seen), and 🍊 covers the stake or raises it. If he does
not wish to play, he says na dîdam, (I have not 🍊 seen) and throws his cards. He may also
'go' without looking at his cards - that is, in poker parlance, 🍊 'straddle' - and says
nadîd dîdam (not seeing, I have seen). The second player, if he wishes to play, must
🍊 cover the stakes, and can also raise. The third player and the dealer then act in the
same way just 🍊 as in poker, and when the stakes of all players are equal and no one
raises any more the cards 🍊 are turned up and the player holding the best hand wins the
stakes.
The hands in the order of their value 🍊 are as follows:
She va just, i.e., three
and a pair; a 'full'., i e., three and a pair; a "full."
Sehta, 🍊 i.e. threes, aces,
kings, etc.
Do just, i.e., two pairs; aces highest.
Just, i.e., one pair; aces
highest.
When two players have the 🍊 same pair or pairs, the other cards decide; for
instance, a pair of kings, ace, soldier, and lakat. 'Bluffing' is 🍊 a feature of the game
and is called tûp zadan, literally 'fire off a gun'. A bluff is tûp.
The following
🍊 table shows how the earliest form of Poker compares with Schindler's game and the two
most relevant contemporaneous French vying 🍊 games. [On a hand-held device this table
needs to be viewed horizontally.]:
Bouillotte Poque As-nas Poker I Brag Poker II
players 🍊 4 (3, 5, 6) 4 (3, 5, 6) 4 4 3-6 3-6 cards 20 (28) 32 (36) 20 20 52 🍊 52 deal 3 5
5 5 3 5 turn-up yes yes no no no no draw no no no yes 🍊 yes yes hands
fours
-
-
threes
-
point fours
-
-
threes
-
pair fours
full
-
threes
2 pair
pair
fours
full
-
threes
2 pair
pair -
-
-
threes
-
pair fours
full
flush
threes
2
pair
pair
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'. (Does 'and' specify a second requirement
for a showdown, or does it merely amplify the first?)
The question naturally arises 🍊 as
to which way round any borrowing may have taken place. Favouring the priority of As-nas
is the fact that 🍊 As-nas cards, a subset of the Persian ganjifeh pack, are attested as
early as 1800 in Persia, though without any 🍊 account of the game played with them.
Against it are -
the absence of any description of the game earlier than 🍊 1890;
the fact
that As is not a Persian word and obviously derives from the French for Ace; and
(hence)
the probability 🍊 that As-nas derives from a European vying game rather than the
other way around.
THE ROLE OF BRAG
Draw Poker is Five-card 🍊 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-stak 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) an 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
"The great
American pastime"
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 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 o 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'.
REFERENCES
Hildreth,
James, Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains; Being a History of the Enlistment,
Organization, and First Campaigns of the 🍊 Regiment of U.S. Dragoons; Together With
Incidents of a Soldier's Life, and Sketches of Scenery and Indian Character. By a
🍊 Dragoon. (N.Y., 1836) Pages 128-130 describe a late-night game of poker in the
soldiers' barracks, beginning "The M- lost some 🍊 cool hundreds last night at poker...".
Hildreth refers to it as popular in the South and West but little known 🍊 in the East. He
does not specify whether it was played with the 20-card or full 52-card pack.
Return
Dowling, Allen, 🍊 The Great American Pastime (New jersey, 1970). This is the only
accessible history of Poker worth reading. Return
Green, Jonathan H. 🍊 , in Exposure of
the Arts and Miseries of Gambling, (New York, 1843; republished with additional
material in 1857 as 🍊 Gambling Exposed.) Return
Cowell, Joe, Thirty Years Passed Among
the Players in England and America (New York, 1844). "One night, while 🍊 I was getting
instructed in the mysteries of uker [Euchre], and Sam was amusing himself by building
houses with the 🍊 surplus cards at the corner of the table, close by us was a party
playing poker. This was then exclusively 🍊 a high-gambling Western game, founded on brag,
invented, as it is said, by Henry Clay when a youth; and if 🍊 so, very humanely, for
either to win or lose, you are much sooner relieved of all anxiety than by the 🍊 older
operation.
"For the sake of the uninformed, who had better know no more about it than I
shall tell them, 🍊 I must endeavour to describe the game when played with twenty-five
cards only [sic; evidently twenty as implied below], and 🍊 by four persons.
"The aces are
the highest denomination: then the kings, queens, jacks and tens: the smaller cards are
not 🍊 used; those I have named are all dealt out, and carefully concealed from one
another; old players pack them in 🍊 their hands, and peep at them as if they were afraid
to trust even themselves to look. The four aces, 🍊 with any other card, cannot be beat.
Four kings, with an ace cannot be beat because then no one can 🍊 have four aces; and four
queens, or jacks, or tens, with an ace, are all inferior hands to the kings 🍊 when so
attended. But holding the cards I have instanced seldom occurs when they are fairly
dealt; and three aces 🍊 for example, or three king with any two of the other cards, or
four queens, or jacks or tens, is 🍊 called a full, and with an ace, though not
invincible, are considered very good bragging hands. The dealer makes the 🍊 game, or
value of the beginning bet and called the ante- in this instance it was a dollar-and
then everybody 🍊 stakes the same amount, and says, "I'm up". Return
Schenck, Robert
Cumming, was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St James 🍊 in 1870. Return
Blackridge,
J, The Complete Poker Player (New York, 1880) Return
Smith, Sol, Theatrical Management
in the West and South 🍊 for Thirty Years (New York, 1868). (Citation and reference kindly
provided by Professor Evert Sprinchorn.) Return
Eliot citation and reference from 🍊 the
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. poker. Return
Foster, R. F. Foster's Complete Hoyle
(London 1897); see also Foster, Practical Poker (London 🍊 1904). Return
Glic: See
Depaulis, Thierry, "Une boîte à jeux du musée de Cluny", in La revue du Louvre
(February 1987, 🍊 No 1). Return
Coffin, Louis, former treasurer of the United States
Playing Card Company, in the Introduction to George Coffin's The 🍊 Poker Game Complete
(London 1950). Return
Keller, John, The Game of Poker (New York, 1892) Return
Morehead,
A, and Mott-Smith, G, Culbertson's 🍊 Card Games Complete (New York, 1952).
Return
Cardano, Girolamo Liber de ludo aleae (1564); also Gould, Sydney (trans.) The
Book on 🍊 Games of Chance (Princeton University, 1953) Return
French service: The phrase
is Dowling's, his source possibly Louis Coffin, who write "American 🍊 Poker probably
originated in New Orleans among French inhabitants who had been in the French Service
in Persia circa #1800-20". 🍊 Return
'Aquarius' (Louis d'Aguilar Jackson): Italian Games
at Cards and Oriental Games (London, 1890). Return
'Theophilus Lucas', Lives of the
Gamesters of 🍊 the Restoration (1714). 'Bragg' first appears in an appendix to the 1721
edition. Republished London, 1930, with an introduction by 🍊 Cyril Hughes Hartman.
Return
Burton, Jeffrey, 'Bluff English Game - with American Branches: Brag in
Literature and Life', The Playing Card 🍊 (Journal of the International Playing-Card
Society, Volume XXIV, 3 - 4, Nov 1995 - Jan 1996). Return
Hoyle, Edmond, A Short
🍊 Treatise on the Game of Brag (London, 1751) Hoyle's unsatisfactory work was not
republished, and only two copies are known 🍊 to survive. As Burton (prec.) says, it
"betrays evidence of haste and muddle. Hoyle was almost 80 years old in 🍊 1751, and may
not have had any especial interest in what he was writing about. His reputation as an
oracle, 🍊 perhaps not unmixed with vanity, may have prompted him to produce a handbook on
a new variation of Brag which, 🍊 all of a sudden was all the rage in the clubs and
drawing-rooms of the capital. Just two years earlier, 🍊 indeed, Horatius (Horace) Walpole
had informed a correspondent, Sir Horace Mann, that 'Methodism is more fashionable than
brag'; t women, 🍊 he added 'play very deep at both'. And it was news of the Brag revival
that had moved Lady Montagu 🍊 to refer [in 1749] to its first burst of popularity,
forty-some years previously." Return
