A short history of poker

Since the 1990s people have been betting and gambling online in poker games all over the world... but few of them know how the whole game got started in the first place.

Introduction

Online poker  has witnessed an amazing rise in popularity since the 1990’s, it is accessible to anyone who has internet all over the world, and poker is probably  the one card game that people spend the most money on gambling, be it online or in traditional games “in-house”. The exact origins of the popular game got lost in time, but there are several theories concerning its birth, of which some are, as always with such histories, more plausible than others. The common consensus, however, seems to be that the name of the game originated in the United States somewhere around the beginning of the nineteenth century.

How card games got to Western Europe

Poker is a card game and to understand fully how it originated, it is useful to know a bit about the history of card games in general. The first reference to playing cards is said to have been made by Chinese Emperor Mu Tsung, who spoke about “domino cards” rather than the usual tiles when speaking about the domino game which was then very popular in China. However, actual proof of the existence of playing cards didn’t emerge until the 13th century. There is no information as to what games were played then, but the design of the cards was quite similar to that of the deck of cards we are all familiar with nowadays. Playing cards are thought to have traveled westwards via India, Persia and then Egypt, at which point they arrived in Western Europe through Venice, which was at the time a very important gateway between the Eastern world and the Western world, around the middle of the fourteenth century. Initially, a variety of types of cards and games developed, none of which really had any close relation with poker.

How poker arose - from the 15th to the 19th century

By the fifteenth century, a lot of progress had been made. Card games that required other players to guess what cards they had had already emerged, as well as card games in which deliberate “bluffing” was required. All of those games can be said to have influenced poker in a way because their rules already contained components of what would make up the rules of poker later. The historic ancestors, if you will, of poker, were either three-card, four-card or five-card games, and all of those three types were known and played across Europe. Elements of various games that now figure in poker are frequent, yet three card games especially are particularly likely to have been the fore-runners of poker. Those were, chronologically, the German game called Pochen, and later around the same time, the English game of Brag and the French game of Bouillotte. Out of the German Pochen game developed the French Poque. Given this happened around the 18th century and the fact that France was very involved in the settlement and civilization of North America and Canada, it is fair to assume that the popular French Poque later evolved into the English word ‘poker’.

Poker - an American card game

The original rules of American poker were different from those well-known to online poker gamblers all over the world today. At the very beginning, only 20 cards would be used, and only four players would bet over who had the best hand. The game was first played in New Orleans, where there were large settlements of French speakers. This further supports the theory that the name ‘Poker’ simply evolved from the French ‘Poque’. Poker spread rapidly and became very popular quickly; amongst other things because New Orleans was a port and sailors came in and went again, taking the game with them and making it known internationally. Soon, the game had evolved into the 52-card game it is today. When the 52 cards were introduced, the possibility of playing poker online was still some 150 years away, but the many different styles and rules of poker were just about to be invented.