Skillful play

Poker rewards skillful play better than any other card game. Though it is not so complex a game as bridge, the player has greater control over the result (largely because the player is permitted to drop bad hands). Consequently, a good player is less likely to lose in a game with inferior players.

Since poker has a mathematical basis (the less probable a particular holding, the higher its rank), the science of the game begins with the relative expectancies of the several hands. There are a possible 2,598,960 different five-card hands that may be dealt from a 52-card pack. A person beginning the study of poker on purely theoretical grounds would find a list of these possibilities indispensable. It would tell, for example, that if a player is dealt a flush, there are only a few thousand possible hands that might beat him, while there are more than 2,500,000 he can beat, whereupon usually he would be justified in making or calling a maximal bet.

From a practical standpoint, the player chiefly needs to know what constitutes a good hand, a fair hand, and a poor hand in a given form of poker. The fundamental principle of skillful play is that a person should generally stay in the pot only if he probably has the best hand or if the odds against his drawing the best hand are less than the odds offered by the pot. To illustrate the latter: There are four chips in the pot, and the player must put in one chip to stay. Therefore, the pot offers odds of 4 to 1. The player has a four flush or a “bobtail” straight (also called an “Arkansas flush”)—that is, open at both ends, as 8-7-6-5—from either of which he can draw one card. The odds against filling either of these hands are almost 5 to 1. The pot offers less than the odds against filling, so the player should fold.

Beyond the mathematical odds for holding or improving different hands, observation plays a significant role. In particular, body language often gives away whether a player is bluffing or has the “nuts” (an unbeatable hand). Such tell signs, or “tells,” include a player’s breathing patterns, facial expressions, hand movements, and manner and content of speech. In general, inexperienced players tend to act contrary to their hands—trying to appear bold to scare off calls when they bluff and meek (or suddenly quiet) with a strong hand in the hope that other players will call or raise.

In addition to disguising one’s emotions—affecting the proverbial “poker face” (i.e., a consistent facial expression combined with other mannerisms that do not betray the true quality of one’s hand)—good players will adjust their style of play according to the style of their opponents. In typical casual games with low betting limits, too many people play weak hands out rather than fold. In such “loose” games, it pays to play “tight,” since bluffing will seldom work. However, tight players who never bluff, even in loose games, will lose opportunities for bigger pots, because their reputation will limit the action they can get when they do get a strong hand. For this reason, good players may try to convince the other players that they play loose and often bluff, even at the expense of losing a few (small) pots when they are called with weak hands.

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History of poker

The principle of poker is very ancient. One of its ancestral games—primero (Spain), primiera (Italy), la prime (France)—appears in literature at least as early as 1526. In this game each player had three cards, and the counting combinations were three of a kind, a pair, and a flux (flush; three cards of the same suit). In later developments certain cards had special value, equivalent to wild cards in modern poker. By about 1700 the betting and bluffing aspects had produced the games of brag in England (one of four card games about which Edmond Hoyle wrote) and pochen (its name meaning “to bluff”) in Germany. From the latter the French developed a similar game called poque, first played in French America in 1803, when the Louisiana Purchase made New Orleans and its environs territories of the United States. During the next 20 years, English-speaking settlers in the Louisiana Territory adopted the game, Anglicized its name to poker, and established the essential features of the modern game.

The earliest known reference to poker in American literature occurs in the memoirs (1829) of Joe Cowell, a touring English actor. From his description it is clear that the original American game was played with a pack of cards that included five cards for each player; all the cards were dealt, and the players bet on who had the best five-card combination. So played, poker is virtually indistinguishable from an older Persian game called as nas, a four-hand game played with a 20-card pack, five cards dealt to each player. This coincidence led some students of games to call poker a derivative of as nas, but this theory has been discredited.

By 1834, the date of the second known reference to poker, the game had been adapted to the modern 52-card deck. No description of poker is given in any book of the rules of games before 1858, but, in such books published in the 1860s, it is not characterized as a new game. The history of the game since then consists entirely of new features introduced to encourage freer betting: the straight, introduced as an additional valuable hand; the draw, so that players might stay in even when not originally dealt good hands; stud poker, to increase the number of opportunities for betting; and the jackpots, originally applying only to a pot to which each player antes, creating an unusually large pot at the start. Most of the innovations came in the decade 1861–70 and probably were engendered in the great amount of poker played by soldiers on both sides in the Civil War. Poker was a favourite in saloons throughout the American “Wild West” during the 1870s and ’80s, and, contrary to Hollywood movies, the games rarely led to shoot-outs over accusations of cheating.

The spread of poker to other countries probably began in 1871, when Colonel Jacob Schenck, the U.S. minister to Great Britain, explained the game to a group of gentlemen that included members of the British court. Queen Victoria heard about the game and expressed interest, whereupon Schenck wrote and had privately printed (1872) a set of rules to send to her. This is the earliest known work devoted exclusively to poker, although the game had previously been treated in compendiums. Poker was already sufficiently identified with the United States so that Schenck described it as “our national game.” However, this may have been only because all other card games played in the United States were undeniably of European origin. Although poker had a brief vogue in British court circles in the 1870s, its widespread acceptance in Great Britain and on the Continent came chiefly in the decade 1911–20 and was undoubtedly much influenced by the American Expeditionary Force in World War I.

For nearly 100 years in the United States, poker was considered a gambling game of men—unsuited to polite or mixed gatherings—but after the 1920s its popularity extended to both sexes and all levels of society. Surveys conducted in the middle of the 20th century showed poker to be the favourite card game of American men and the third most-favoured (after rummy and bridge) of American women, and in Great Britain it ranked next after contract bridge with both sexes.