Poker: The Story of America's National Pastime

Prologue

In this column I'll do my level best to narrate the history of poker, from the game's arrival in New Orleans as 20-card poque (or poqas), its evolution into 52-card poker aboard Mississippi steamboats and later in the camps of Union and Confederate armies, its migration to the Dakotas and California, its importance as both entertainment for servicemen and a tactical model in war games and nuclear diplomacy, through its emergence as a tournament spectacle at Binion's World Series of Poker and its mushrooming popularity in scores of other countries as well as in cyberspace, the fastest growing segment of the $100 billion poker industry.

The industry is now under attack from puritanical congressmen and the Justice Department of George W. Bush. By lumping poker together with lotteries, blackjack, and other mindless schemes guaranteed to fleece their constituents, these cynical politicians have conveniently forgotten that eminent statesmen and judges and business people – including Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Ulysses S. Grant, Nathan B. Forrest, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, William Rehnquist, and Bill Gates, to name just a few – together with tens of millions of ordinary soldiers and citizens, all have played poker for profit and enlightenment. Even before New Yorkers like Alexander Cartwright began tinkering with the English game of rounders, our other national pastime was being cooked up in the unruly polyglot gumbo of New Orleans during its turbulent first decade after Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase, news of which arrived from Paris on July 4, 1803. Both baseball and poker have been among the brightest, most durable threads in our social fabric ever since.



My goal is to give a clear sense of how the story of poker helps to explain who we are. The game, after all, has gone hand in hand with pivotal aspects of our national experience for a couple of centuries now. The ways we've done battle and business, chosen our leaders, and explored our vast continent have echoed, and been echoed by, poker's definitive tactics: cheating and thwarting cheaters, leveraging uncertainty, bluffing and sussing out bluffers, managing risk and reward. Memoirs and diaries of ordinary citizens as well as revealing presidential biographies by David McCullough, Garry Wills, Robert Caro, and Doris Kearns Goodwin have brought into sharper relief poker's distinctive double helix in our evolving DNA.



Yet sometimes outsiders can see our traits even more clearly than we see them ourselves. The Budapest-born historian John Lukacs, for example, called poker "the game closest to the Western conception of life … where men are considered moral agents, and where – at least in the short run – the important thing is not what happens but what people think happens." Our keenest observer of all, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in Democracy in America: "Those living in the instability of a democracy have the constant image of chance before them, and, in the end, they come to like all those projects in which chance plays a part." This was true, he deduced, "not only because of the promise of profit but because they like the emotions evoked."



It remains unclear which gambling games Tocqueville had witnessed, but the perceptive Frenchman came to appreciate our allegiance to chance while traveling in 1831 aboard the steamboat Louisville along Mark Twain's Mississippi, the original American mainstream, at the very moment poker was coming of age. Twain himself was a highly paid steamboat pilot before the Civil War closed the river to commercial traffic. Forced to become a writer instead, he produced numerous reports and tales about the game, the best known being "The Professor's Yarn" in Life on the Mississippi. Echoing both Tocqueville and Twain, a headline in the April 23, 2003, New York Times declared: "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn poker."

This column won't always proceed chronologically, because I want to explore a few themes (luck in poker, political poker, advice books, female players) independently of the historical timeline. But since timelines are crucial to any story, here is the one I will work with: prehistoric dice – the invention of playing cards – vying games that gave rise to poker – Old Poker in New Orleans – Mississippi Steamboats – The Cheater's Game – Civil War – Wild West and Rough Riders – Gilded Age – World War I – Relief Poker During the Depression – World War II – Poker and Game Theory During the Cold War – The Bicycle Ace of Spades in Vietnam – The World Series of Poker – Vietnamese Masters – Internet Poker – Televised Poker – The Iraqi Most Wanted Deck – Andy Beal vs. Team Brunson – Plutonium Poker with Iran and North Korea – The Boom. Along the way I'll describe major variants, including Old Poker, five-card draw and jackpots, stud, lowball, high-low, Texas hold'em, Omaha, Badugi, and H.O.R.S.E.



Above all, I hope to trace poker's development from what was accurately called the Cheater's Game, a cutthroat enterprise that for much of its first century was dominated by white male cardsharps, to what is today an honest contest of cunning, mathematic precision, and luck that is open to everyone. America has been a melting pot since New Orleans was defended in 1815 by Andrew Jackson, Jean Lafitte, and a sizable contingent of freed Haitian slaves, but it wasn't until about 30 years ago that poker became a crucible that welcomes and tests a few hundred million male and female contestants on every inhabited continent.



But before we return to Creole New Orleans, it might be useful to understand poker's emergence in light of some other games humans have played, going back to the origins of dice, chips, and the Korean divinatory arrows that gradually evolved into playing cards.



Loaded Knucklebones to Donkeys in Cyberspace

Despite what some preachers and politicians may tell us, nothing is more natural, or more crucial to human progress, than gambling. For two and a half million years, our brains have evolved by genetic chance amid environmental uncertainty. Actively taking other kinds of chances has been necessary to basic survival since long before we walked on two legs. In the 21st century, risk haunts nearly every decision we make – whether to cross the street or board a 757, invest in real estate or the stock market, enroll in an MBA program or go on the poker circuit, figure out whether or when to have children.



But it's not only humans, of course. Every organism needs to constantly manage a series of life-or-death risks. Ants and beetles, algae and trees, hyenas and monkeys all must maintain their physical safety while competing for nourishment and opportunities to copulate. When either of these pursuits could be lethal, especially to our early human ancestors, success became all the more satisfying – caused all the more dopamine, that is, to be released by the hypothalamus, while failure caused the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland to release more prolactin. Today, when we take a "sick" beat at the poker table, what we're actually experiencing is too much prolactin, the result of both our genetic heritage and the coolly vicious laws of randomness. We somehow got lost in the shuffle.



As far as our genes are concerned, the urge to embrace chance developed along the following lines. Pleistocene hunters risked life and limb for the best opportunities to slaughter ferocious but protein-rich animals. The closer they got to a scared, angry buffalo with a chipped-stone spearhead, the more likely they were to be trampled or gored, but the better chance they had of actually killing the beast. Courage and aggressiveness counted. Avoiding risk by hanging back from the fray may have helped a timid male survive the day's hunt, but it wouldn't have served him well otherwise. Hunters who took down fresh meat, after all, were lionized within the tribe; they received larger portions of protein and more opportunities to mate with nubile females. Meanwhile, the females were competing among themselves – via face painting, hair grooming, displaying their breasts and genitalia – for the chance to mate with the best food providers. Once this mating was accomplished, protection became even more vital to the females who might have become pregnant, so the sexual bounty was even more lavish for the hunters-turned-warriors who defeated enemy tribesmen. By this means and others, a taste for bold risk was efficiently bred into our species.



We no longer hunt or fight with spears, but in every tribe and country today, physical sports represent, and often have whopping monetary value attached to, hunter and warrior skills. Since our ancestors depended for survival on the ability of elite males to run fast and wield lethal projectiles, it shouldn't be surprising that today's male and female athletes mimic those feats in symbolic rituals, sometimes called games.



The penetrative power of a golfer or fullback or pitcher, the home-protecting prowess of a center or goalie or catcher, evokes the life-and-death urgency felt on hunting grounds and battlefields a thousand generations ago. This is why most of us have such intense emotional interest in the outcomes of sporting events.



But at the higher symbolic level on which many modern humans also operate, cerebral games like chess, bridge, poker, and what we call handicapping – betting on the performance of animals, humans, teams, corporations, or currencies – mimic what scouts, hunting-party leaders, and tribal chiefs used to do and, nowadays, what captains, coaches, CEOs, generals, and presidents do. While our physical and mental skill sets are both still evolving, the competitive goal in our brains feels pretty much the same as it did 12,000 years ago on the Colorado plateau or Kenyan savannah: don't starve to death, or get eaten alive by hyenas, or pillaged and raped by the guys from across the river. Go, team! Who's your daddy? She's all in. He scores!



Our most advanced ancestors also wanted to understand the nature of their perilous world: to divine the will of their war god or decide which direction to send the hunting party. Lacking even rudimentary science, they searched for meaningful portents in the patterns of thrown sticks and bones, or by studying the entrails of eviscerated animals. Patterns in splashes of urine and fresh piles of feces were also believed to be telling, if sometimes overwhelmingly pungent. It was high time, more than one feces decoder must have thought, to come up with a better system for divining what the gods held in store.

As humans evolved further, their systems for reading portents grew more complex, and the step from divination to wagering games was a short one. Archaeologists tell us that astragali, the roughly cuboid huckle-bones (or, in a common mispronunciation, knucklebones) above the heels of goats and sheep, began to be widely used several thousand years ago. The bones were cleaned and dried, then marked with crosshatching or drilled with holes that were either left empty or, ominously, filled with lead. With different values ascribed to each side, they were tossed across a flat surface, then tallied. Whichever side landed faceup was believed to indicate, for example, where a herd of antelope would be grazing the next morning – or, saving one tribesman the trouble of hunting, to establish that the guy grunting the Neanderthal version of don't come owed the shooter a couple of flank steaks by sundown.



Long before they had words for such concepts, some of these early bonesmen must have thought dice were the conduits of chance or fate, while others believed them to be messengers of one god or another. Still others must have thought they were both. (For much more detailed discussions of all this, check out UNLV professor David G. Schwartz's brilliantly informative and entertaining new book, Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling, and Edward O. Wilson's 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, Sociobiology.)



In any case, few things were more intimately connected to fate, or to the will of the gods, than the emotions accompanying a wager. Indeed, it's easy to imagine humankind's very first prayer being hopefully uttered as a couple of huckle-bones tumbled across a flat patch of earth. Yet because of variations, inadvertent or otherwise, in shape or lead content, the astragali were inevitably "loaded," which must have led to some hairy exchanges among people with inch-high foreheads to go with their spears, clubs, and questionable hygiene.

One obvious next step was to grind down irregular edges to produce freely rolling four-sided dice shaped like pyramids. Thousands of years before Roman numerals, or before numbers were introduced by Arabs and Hindus around 700 A.D., an arrow, antler, or trio of dots on the surface of a bone indicated to our ancestors what the future might hold – or, less grandly, who had won a bet. For chips or counters in their betting games, they used colored pebbles. The statute of limitations in both Nevada and Egypt declares, however, that it would be a faux pas to bring any old pink and white stone to the Bellagio cage and ask for $25,000.



By 3500 B.C., Egyptians and Sumerians were tossing pairs of dice to determine how many spaces a piece could advance in their complex, warlike board games. Their gods gambled, too. Thoth, the great god of science and writing, was believed to have defeated the moon god, Sin, in a game much like checkers. Thoth's prize was 1/72nd of each day, which he combined into five full days and added to the 360-day lunar year to create the first solar calendar.



Yet four-sided objects could be cast only as quartenary lots, though tossing two of them doubled the range of possible outcomes. So the next stage of gaming R&D yielded a six-sided die. Precisely carved from ivory and wood, cubic dice began showing up in Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C., along with painted wood objects resembling backgammon boards. The elaborate scoring possible in such dice games marked an appealing leap forward – appealing in that almost by definition, the more civilized a tribe, the more complex the games it preferred.



A game much like backgammon is under way on a famous Greek amphora painted by Exekias around 530 B.C. but depicting an earlier epoch. Holding spears in one hand, dice in the other, the black figures of Achilles and Ajax compete across the surface of a low, legless table during a break in the battle for Troy. Their shields are leaning close by, at the ready. Achilles, on the left, in his tall plumed helmet, calls out, "Four!" while Ajax pleads, "Three!" Since April 2003, more than a few female art historians have claimed to make out a faint background image of either Odysseus or Gus Hansen imploring Achilles to "Double!"



Homer's Iliad tells us that Patroclus, when young, in a wrathful act worthy of his future lover (or close friend) Achilles, had once killed a boy with the eyebrow-raising name of Clitonymus over a game of dice. Forced into exile by this murder, Patroclus eventually sought refuge in the house of Peleus. It was here that he first met Achilles, the demigod whose rage and lethality would soon doom the Trojans, his friend, and himself.



The Romans upped the ante by betting on gladiatorial contests on the floor of their Colosseum, the oblong design of which both concentrated the butchery and allowed bloodthirsty spectators to view it up close – and may have inspired the shape of contemporary poker tables. Roman artisans also produced dice, called tesserae, exquisitely carved from bone or ivory, while the cleverest gamblers were concocting new games in which up to four dice were rolled across a board. The worst possible throw, in which all four sides showed the same value, was called canis, the dog, which may well be the etymological root of our term "underdog."



What's certain is that dice-throwing figured prominently in the works of Tacitus, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Goethe, Moliere, and numerous other European writers. Shakespeare's King Richard III was speaking for a long line of existential risk-takers when he said:

Slave, I will set my life upon a cast,

And I will stand the hazards of the die



Yet more than two thousand years before Shakespeare wrote these lines, the great Hindu epic Mahabharata tells of dice carved from nuts being used for both divination and gambling. Sanskrit poems even more ancient tell of the god Shiva throwing dice with his wife, Pravati, and their sons. And the 34th hymn of the 10th mandala of the Rig-Veda, a collection of religious hymns dating back to 4000 B.C., is known as the gambler's hymn. "These dice nuts," goes one verse, "born of a lofty tree in a windy spot, which dance on this gambling ground, make me almost mad. These nervous dice intoxicate me like a draught of soma from Mount Mujavant.



"Without any fault of hers I have driven my devoted wife away because of a die exceeding by one. My mother-in-law hates me. My wife pushes me away.



"In his defeat the gambler finds no one to pity him. No one has use for a gambler. He's like an aged horse put up for sale."



Whether or not a stuck gambler is like an old horse, or his mother-in-law and wife are both nags, modern Indians who fail to place at least a small wager during Diwali, the Festival of Lights celebrating Shiva and his family, are believed to be reincarnated as donkeys. So thank Shiva that making such wagers became dramatically easier in 2000 A.D., when the Bengali software whiz Anurag Dikshit (pronounced Dixit) wrote the platform for PartyPoker.com.



That site quickly became the world's busiest by enabling tens of thousands of players in 24 times zones to compete at thousands of virtual tables. Is it thus fair to say that the religious dimension of gambling seems weirdly confirmed when playing pitifully at one of these tables, during Diwali or Festivus or any other occasion, is to risk being labeled a donkey?



Next issue: the invention of playing cards.