Poker is a card game in which the participants bet on who holds the best hand. The card-game historian David Parlett describes it as a game of French-American origin that became the national vying game of the United States and later spread around the world in many different forms. Today's rules are on the Poker page.
European ancestors
Among the European games related to poker, Parlett lists the Italian game primero (16th–17th centuries), the German game Pochen and the English three-card game brag. The German name comes from a verb meaning primarily to hit or knock on the table and secondarily "to play", "to bet" or "to raise".
Because poker was born in culturally French territory, Parlett considers its likeliest immediate ancestor to be poque, the French version of Pochen. Under the influence of brag, poker later adopted the draw, and Parlett observes that it could equally well have been called "five-card brag".
An older theory linked poker to a Persian game called As-Nas. Parlett rejects it for two reasons: there is no description of As-Nas earlier than 1890, and "as" is not a Persian word but obviously derives from the French word for ace.
New Orleans and the Mississippi steamers
According to Parlett, poker appeared in former French territory centred on New Orleans. Its "cradle" was the gambling saloon and, in particular, the Mississippi steamers, which began to ply their trade from about 1811. Parlett concludes that original poker, in which four players each received five cards from a 20-card pack and bet on the best hand, originated in New Orleans some time between 1810 and 1825.
The earliest printed reference to the game is in J. Hildreth's Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains, published in 1836. Two slightly later works, by unconnected witnesses, show that the game was already well in use by 1829: the reminiscences of Jonathan H. Green (An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling, 1843) and those of the English comedian Joe Cowell (Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America, 1844). Both describe the early form with a 20-card pack (ace, king, queen, jack and ten) dealt evenly among four players.
From 20 to 52 cards
Between about 1830 and 1845 poker was increasingly played with the full 52-card pack. The change allowed more than four players and gave rise to the flush. The straight was accepted with more difficulty. Parlett notes that traditionalists clung to the four aces of the old game, a hand that could be neither beaten nor tied, while innovators found the game more interesting with straights.
The main families of variants also date from the 19th century:
- Draw poker is first mentioned in print in the 1850 American edition of Bohn's New Handbook of Games.
- Stud poker, said to have been introduced around Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, first appears in The American Hoyle of 1864. The same edition lists the hands: one pair, two pairs, straight, triplets, flush, full house and fours.
- The wild card appears in the 1875 edition of the same manual, in a variant called mistigris, played with a 53rd card: the blank card that came with every pack.
- Community cards, shared by all players, came later. The earliest variant of this kind noted by Parlett and McLeod, "Spit in the Ocean", appears in a 1926 edition.
Texas hold'em
Parlett and McLeod give Texas hold'em, the variant with two private cards and five community cards, as today's example of the community-card family. According to the Wikipedia encyclopedia, the Texas Legislature officially recognised the town of Robstown as the game's birthplace in a 2007 resolution, dating it to the early 20th century.
What the mathematics says
A 52-card pack allows 2,598,960 different five-card hands. The frequency of each combination is calculated on the Poker page, and the basic notions are in Probability basics. The history of the variants shows that the rules changed many times; the probabilities that follow from the pack stayed the same.
Sources
- David Parlett, "Poker — a brief history", card-game history section of the author's website.
- David Parlett and John McLeod, "A History of Poker", 2005, online encyclopedia of card-game rules.
- Wikipedia (English), article "Texas hold 'em".