The History of Poker: From Earliest Origins to How We Know It Today
The world of poker is a largely hidden world. The next time you sit at a table in a poker casino, look around and pay attention to the people who are playing and to the others who are watching. You’ll notice that virtually everyone who is playing at the tables doesn’t seem to be from any particular country. Most are American or Canadian or Brit, or they have family or friends who live in the States or Canada.
These people are there to have a good time, not to have some kind of grandiose display of national pride or some cultural significance to their ability to play poker. They are there to enjoy the sport of poker. And while the major player and dealer banks and casino books of all of the major poker rooms in the US are available, there is much more that remains hidden from public view.
It is generally thought that there was little knowledge of the game of poker until the arrival of Marco Polo to the West, and that it spread to Europe with him. However, there are other things that were known in those times, such as card games played with a strip of playing cards known as a Tarot deck. Modern tarot decks make use of a jumble of 52 cards, and the tradition of playing with the cards came from the courts of the Middle Ages, which had been playing with cards since the Middle Ages.
With no printed material about the game, players learned about the game from oral tradition or from books or other pieces of printed material. Eventually they made their way to France in the 16th century and there were many different styles of play until the arrival of most card games from Italy.
The Coded Casino Game in 1559
The first known published treatise on poker, The Coded Casino game, was printed in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1559. This is considered the most important document on poker to date, and in it poker is called paris pique pique (or simply Paris), which is derived from the French word pique, meaning “pocket” or “hand.” The original printing included 52 hand cards and a set of 32 “poker blanks,” which consisted of empty cards, the sizes of which match the four-card poker hand dealt to a player in the game. The oldest surviving copy is that held in the collection of the Science Museum in London.
Paris brought about a major change to the culture of playing cards, and effectively allowed for a standardized deck of cards that could be used in the game of poker. The different sets of cards that were used in the 16th and 17th centuries were the ones found in the Tarot deck. Although there were plenty of those decks used in early stages of the game, they had become completely inconsistent by the time Paris was printed. This was due in part to their popularity, as the cards themselves were actually used by gamblers for gambling purposes. Many sets had little resemblance to their literary descriptions, and players had difficulty telling a ”Spades” and “Knights” from a “4 of Spades” and a “3 of Spades.” These problems led to the decline of the Tarot cards, which were eventually abandoned altogether.
The Pokers in 18th and 19th Century
When the French Renaissance moved on to the Regency era in the 18th century, interest in the deck of cards became renewed. Napoleon’s win in the Napoleonic wars, the popularity of chess, and the advent of the airplane and machineguns in the first years of the 19th century increased interest in gambling. The combination of these things, along with the fact that gambling at tables was illegal in the United States, made the United States an attractive location for players in the game of poker. But they didn’t have to travel there.
By the 1850s the United States was just getting started in trying to develop a gambling industry and by the end of the century the general public had become much more comfortable with the idea of gambling, but it still wasn’t very popular. In other countries, poker cards were commonplace, especially in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain, where the Tarot decks were still used. While the United States was still trying to gain a foothold in the gambling industry, the deck of cards were suddenly making a comeback in American culture.
As an adult, Joseph Fels first read about the game of poker in The Dandy, a British adult comic published in London. Fels considered the game to be “most remarkable and probably unique in history, both as an intellectual discipline and as a collection of great games in a single deck of cards,” which proved to be a key factor in turning the game into a mainstream hobby.
Though he read The Dandy in 1860, it took until the early 20th century for poker to reach its full and continued popularity in the United States. After several decades in which its popularity would grow only gradually, poker was recognized as a game of skill in the first decade of the 20th century, and eventually as a game with an emphasis on intellectual skill.
Poker During World War’s Era
Though the cards became a very serious business in the 1920s, the Great Depression was to blame for most of poker’s diminished success in the years following World War II. By the 1950s, organized play had begun, with a World Series of Poker becoming the first major poker tournament, held in 1954. The World Series would later give rise to the World Series of Poker Circuit (WSOPC), which would be the precursor to the World Series of Poker (WSOP), which is considered the “Super Bowl” of poker tournaments. The popularity of poker during the post-World War II boom era was helped along by the fact that people really were using their brains to play the game, and the ability to accurately calculate odds and accurately handicap a game became an essential skill of poker.
Though the game’s popularity grew, the 1950s were a bit of a low point for the game of poker. The advent of television, video, and electronic gambling had eroded people’s interest in cards, and the War on Drugs had made the purchase and ownership of cards illegal. In 1964, the Supreme Court ruled that the Federal government could not regulate poker in Washington, D.C., which led to the legalization of public poker games that year, starting with the Aqueduct Club in New York City.
Poker’s Social Aspirations
Although the legality of card games had been a big problem for many years, in the 1950s and 1960s there were some efforts to make cards more acceptable for the public. In 1956, for example, a group of representatives from San Francisco’s military community created a poker tournament as a fundraising event. The community decided to make it a family affair, with the tournament encouraging poker players to bring their wives and children. The tournament was such a success that it prompted members of the gambling industry to take notice, and the idea of bringing poker to all parts of the country began to get serious consideration. The tournaments that followed the one In San Francisco would prove successful, and in 1964, a poker convention was held in Miami, Florida.
The idea of bringing in a team of professional poker players to Miami was dismissed, and at the time, the only other successful attempt at creating a tournament had been made in Chicago, Illinois. The success of the Chicago tournament prompted other cities to start tournaments of their own, and eventually, a team of professional poker players began to visit cities across the U.S. and Canada to play poker. The most famous of these professional poker players was Doyle Brunson.
Poker’s Landmark Victory
The U.S. had many urban areas at this point in time, but in 1971, for the first time, an organized, poker-related tournament was held in a Las Vegas casino. The 1972 World Series of Poker, which was hosted by the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, was a landmark for poker as a game of skill, and it would serve as an impetus for bringing poker to other cities. In addition to the legal problems gambling faced after World War II, Las Vegas was also on the brink of financial ruin in the early 1970s, due to a tough economic climate and high gambling costs. With the benefit of hindsight, it appears that this was the perfect time to open an organized, poker-based tournament in Las Vegas. The World Series of Poker was a huge success, and the publicity generated by the tournament turned the city of Las Vegas into a hotspot for gamblers around the country.
At this time, public poker games were open to the public, and a huge surge of interest in the game took place. By the mid-1970s, a poker boom began, and even the celebrities of Hollywood were catching on to the trend. Celebrities like Steve McQueen, Jack Lemmon, and Woody Allen were all playing poker, and most of the celebrities who visited Las Vegas at this time were playing cards. The game of poker was introduced into the culture of the United States by the popular movie The Sting, which was released in 1975. This was also the year that Jack Binion and Howard Lederer became the first celebrities to join the world of professional poker players. In 1976, the World Series of Poker began to attract even more attention.
The Fate of the $10,000 Hand
The game of poker seemed to have gone mainstream, and the public was increasingly interested in the game. It was during this period that Howard Lederer, a professional poker player from New Jersey, lost one of the most important hands of all time. Lederer was playing in a game of Pot Limit Omaha with a dealer. The game was nearing the end, and Lederer’s hand was bad. However, his hand was not that of a Blackjack hand. When the dealer raised Lederer’s hand, the pot was increased by $10,000.
Lederer would be in a bad position should the action come down to him and the dealer. However, the dealer would have a good hand, and he could bust Lederer. After several rounds of betting, the dealer raised Lederer’s hand. He dealt a deuce of diamonds to Lederer, and all of the other players in the game folded. As fate would have it, the dealer’s hand of deuce of diamonds came up on the turn, which meant that Lederer was winning his bet.
In conclusion, the luck of the draw affected the outcome of the game, but at least Lederer managed to improve his own hand by folding. Other players would have been in a worse situation had they won their bets, but didn’t have the luck of the draw to help them. These thoughts went through Lederer’s mind, and he quietly admitted that the player on the table who was dealt the hand could have benefited if he had folded his cards on the river.
Poker – Today’s Scenario
In 2017, there are currently more than 1.3 million Americans playing online poker. This is a number that does not include recreational players, but does include serious players. Many recreational players are people who have always loved the game and learned the game in college. However, many students still enjoy the game.
During the 1980s, it was normal to see students playing cards at bars, and today some have even taken it one step further and become professional poker players. It is important to note that there are other tournaments that are held in the United States. One of these tournaments is known as the WSOP. The WSOP is the biggest poker tournament in the world and is held at the Rio Convention Center in Las Vegas. For those interested in learning more about the game of poker, take a look at this article.
Conclusion
For almost 70 years, poker has been a part of the world’s culture. After studying some of the history of the game, it is apparent that the only thing that really hasn’t changed is the way we play the game. We enjoy playing the game, whether it’s for fun, for money, or for both. In fact, when we play, we are trying to win as much money as we possibly can.
In the end, poker can be referred to as a game of luck, so even if we did have a strong poker hand, we cannot really claim to have played any better than the other players. That is why the strongest player in the game is not always the winner. Nevertheless, we all enjoy the game and don’t take it too seriously. There is some truth to the words of actor and poker player.
