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A Brief History of Poker

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.

—JOHAN HUIZINGA, Homo Ludens

What is the greatest human achievement of all time? Some might argue for the discovery of fire. Organized religion. Space travel. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

But what about the discovery of play?

Think about it: Before play, people had to satisfy their competitive urges by beating each other over the head with big sticks. In today's society, playing is so ingrained that we take it for granted. How much time, money, and energy do we dedicate to watching, betting on, and otherwise living and dying by college and professional sports? What is the entertainment industry if not the evolution of ancient play? Businessmen play the stock market. Politicians play to their audiences. Bachelors and bachelorettes looking for love (or something less high-minded) play the field.

Who knows what the first "games" were? "Hey, Wulfgar, my stack of hides is larger than yours." "Yeah? Well, I can throw this rock farther than you can."

Whatever these games were like, they made a quantum leap when somebody discovered playing cards.

One thousand years after the discovery of paper, a feat most historians attribute to the Chinese around 100 B.C.E., the Emperor Mu-Tsung celebrated New Year's Eve playing a game of "paper dominoes" with his wife. We don't know who won that contest, but if the empress played anything like Jennifer Harman or Annie Duke, the emperor may have lost his silk shirt.

This new fad made its way to the Islamic world, where "cups" and "swords" were added to the traditional Chinese "circles" and "bamboos" to create the first four-suited deck of cards. Some innovative Muslims began including "court cards" as well, representing the malik (king), na'ib malik (vice-king), and thani na'ib (vice-vice-king).

No one is exactly sure when these decks swept into Europe. What we do know is that in 1377, a Swiss monk found card playing fascinating enough to put quill to paper and produced a manuscript on the subject of card games. He wasn't alone—fast-forward only twenty years, and the powers-that-were in France, Germany, and Italy have already begun regulating the time, place, and amounts wagered by their card-crazed subjects. It was, perhaps, a great time for finding loose games.

We have to thank the French for our modern-day cards. They not only re-jiggered the deck to align with their own notions of royalty—kings, queens, and jacks replaced the Muslim court cards—but they also replaced the four suits with their current-day counterparts. An early French deck featured Charlemagne as the king of diamonds, Emperor Julius Caesar as the king of hearts, Alexander the Great as the king of clubs, and biblical King David as the king of spades.

The "American" fifty-two-card deck, which was actually designed by the French, might be regarded by most as the world's standard, but it's certainly not the world's only deck.

To this day, traditional German decks consist of only thirty-two cards, bearing leaves, acorns, and bells instead of spades, diamonds, and clubs. Their court cards have a more military bent—no queens and jacks, but the all-male Obers ("over-officers") and Unters ("under-officers").

Spain's forty-card deck—kings, knights, valets, and the numbers one through seven—are divided into swords, cups, coins, and real clubs, i.e., heavy sticks you might hit somebody over the head with after receiving a bad beat.

The Swiss and Italians also have their own variations.

The French cards flooded the European marketplaces and soon became the standard in England as well. Trade proved so brisk that in 1628, King Charles I banned their import, granting an exclusive charter to the Company of the Mistery of Makers of Playing Cards of the City of London for their continued production. These were the first decks to cross the Atlantic, as the British monarchy forbade its colonists from manufacturing any of their own. The upstart Americans, bristling from the exorbitant excise taxes they were forced to pay on their playing cards (and a few other goods as well) decided to revolt.

Free from the yoke of British rule, the new Yankee ingenuity soon made its mark on the history of playing cards. American manufacturers introduced double-headed court cards (no more having to read the card upside down), varnished surfaces (more durable, easier to shuffle), and rounded corners (less wear and tear). These decks, like the rest of the new country, began moving west.

The frontier gambler of history was not always tall and thin; he was often short and sometimes quite stout. His hair was frequently fair rather than dark, and sometimes he wore a full beard. There were some gamblers who neglected to shave and still others were beardless because they were women. Some of the professional gamblers of the western frontier were scrupulously honest and some were as crooked as a Colorado creek bed. There were the generous and the niggardly, the courageous and the cowardly, the intelligent and the stupid. They were, in a word, human, with all the virtues and vices of any other segment of mankind.

—ROBERT K. DEARMENT, Knights of the Green Cloth

In 1834, American writer Jonathan H. Green noticed a new game growing in popularity among the gamblers who rode the riverboats up and down the Mississippi. It involved only twenty cards (tens through aces), a fair degree of bluffing, and an enormous amount of cheating. So much, in fact, that Green—who would go on to write a tell-all about the troubles he'd seen called The Exposures of the Arts and the Miseries of Gambling—described it as "the Cheating Game." The gentlemen (and ladies) who played it, however, called it something else.

Some etymologists argue that "poker" derives from hocus pocus, a popular expression among magicians of the day. Others believe that it came from poke, a slang word used by criminals to describe pickpocketing. There were some similarities to the French card game poque (which we vulgar Americans would have pronounced "pokah"), and even more to the German Pochspiel, a bluffing game where players opened a round of betting by declaring Ich Poche! Both of these games may have been derived from a Persian game called As-Naz, which translates to something akin to "my beloved ace." But as some historians point out, there were no aces in the original Persian decks, meaning they must have learned the game from someone else. Like so many things American, the game seems to be a mishmash of elements begged, borrowed, and stolen from other cultures.

These early games along the Mississippi gave birth to an entirely new, uniquely American character: the riverboat gambler. Their stories are the stuff of legend. Like J. J. Bryant, a Virginian who ran away from home to join the circus (where he swallowed swords and walked the "slack-wire"), dabbling in slave trade and hotel management before finding his niche as a poker player. Or Charles Cora, an Italian cardsharp raised from infancy by the Louisiana madam of a bordello in Natchez-Under-the-Hill, a town described by many at the time as the most lawless place in America.

Text copyright © 2004 by Phil Gordon and Jonathan Grotenstein