Dr. Jerry Cardplayer and the Vying Games That Gave Rise to Poker

Whether playing cards were the work of yawning courtesans, frostbitten prognosticators, or the Devil himself, wood-block printing of standardized decks gradually made them affordable to the common folk of nearly every country and religious persuasion. By the early 15th century, much of Judeo-Christian Europe had taken up cards with a vengeance.



The Venetian game of trappola became popular in Bohemia, Moravia, and much of central Europe. It was played with a deck from which the threes, fours, fives, and sixes had been stripped. The main object was to take as many tricks as possible, so while its name might sound to our ears like a contest for check-raising specialists, trappola was actually more similar to hearts and contract bridge than to poker.



The Spanish vying game of Mus, on the other hand, can be seen as a forerunner of both draw and the high-low poker variants. Mus (which means "draw") originated among the Basques before spreading throughout Spain and South America. Players competed in teams and were allowed to use their hands to signal information about their cards. The goals were to score exactly 40 (or sometimes 100) points, and to make high and low hands. Most cards counted at face value, with the ace worth one point and the king, caballo (horse), and sota (jack) all worth 10. But since threes counted as kings and the deuces as aces, there were effectively eight kings and eight aces. Four cards were dealt to each player, followed by an optional replacement mus to a better hand. After that, there were four rounds of drawing and betting. As in all vying games, the timing and size of a wager could win the pot for the player, or in this case the team, with the second-best hand.



So too with English brag, which is still played in pubs today, though brag players compete only as individuals. The value of three-card brag hands climbs a pokerlike ladder: pair, flush, run (straight), flush-run, and three of a kind, called a prial, an abbreviation of "pair royal." In keeping with the spirit of 3, that number is treated as a special case, so that even a prial of aces loses to a prial of treys. Yet as the game's name implies, bragging is at least as important as hand strength – even more so, perhaps, given that it isn't uncommon to brag without even looking at one's cards.



The German game of Poch (also called Pochen and Pochspielen) originated in the early 15th century. More technically complicated than most games, Poch required a circular board with eight distinct compartments labeled Ace, King, Queen, Jack, Ten, Marriage, Sequence, and Poch. During the first round of action, players "dressed the board" by placing chips into seven of the eight compartments before being dealt five cards apiece. The next card turned over determined the trump suit. The player holding the king and queen of that suit was sure to win the Marriage compartment, for example.



In the next round, players vied to have – or to represent – the best combination of cards. Quartets were the highest-ranked grouping, followed by triplets, then pairs, with ties broken by the highest side card. But a player with no pair at all could still win the second round by betting enough to chase away all opponents. "Ich poche," he would mutter (meaning "I bash" or "I pulverize"), followed by the amount he was betting. His opponents could match his bet, raise it, or pass. If one or more opponents matched him, the first bettor had the option of raising, in a kind of Stuttgart Straddle.



We now see that even before the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria sailed west from Spain, heading for India under a Genoese admiral funded by the royal Castilian risk-takers Ferdinand and Isabella, the introduction of kickers and fluxes and draws, not to mention the pulverizing of strong hands by weak ones, were all helping to prepare the card player's mindset for what became American poker.



Meanwhile, as the New World came slowly into focus, an even closer relative of poker became the rage of Renaissance Europe. Called prime in France, primera in Spain, primiera in Italy, and primero in England, this complex bidding and vying game was ardently contested by commoners and courtiers, playwrights, and poets. The final act of King Henry VIII finds the much-married sovereign in a game with the Duke of Suffolk on the evening of Sept. 7, 1533, as his latest wife, Anne Boleyn, is painfully giving birth to Elizabeth. (We should also note that Henry's haughty bearing, parted whiskers, elaborately embroidered vest, and ermine stole were said to inspire the image of the modern king of hearts.) More than a century before that, Falstaff had grumbled, "I never prospered since I foreswore myself at Primero."



In Italy, primiera was played with a deck stripped of eights, nines, and tens. After putting up an ante, the players (ideally four to six of them) received two cards facedown. Starting from the dealer's left, their options were to bid, stake, or pass. Those who didn't pass then received two more cards, and a second round of bidding ensued. Primiera anticipates bridge in that the bids involved point total, hand type, and number. The hand type had to be higher than those previously bid; or, if it was the same, the point total had to be greater. The hierarchy of hands placed a quartet at the top. Other strong hands included a fluxus (four-card flush), a supremus (highest possible three-card flush), a prime (one card from each suit, and which gave the game its name), all the way down to the lowly numerus (two or three suited cards). A prime sets the stage for the lowball poker variant called badugi, in which players receive only four cards and may draw up to three times to improve them, with the best hand being the A-2-3-4 of different suits.



Again, we turn to David Parlett for context: "Primiera is often described as 'the' ancestor of Poker. This oversimplification is correct at least to the extent that the game embodies the hierarchical principle whereby several different types of combination compete

against one another in a single series of relative values." The family resemblance is also expressed when players vie with each other by betting amounts not necessarily related to the value of their combination.



As the stratagems for solving these "prime" games became more sophisticated, and skill therefore more decisive, the card-playing public naturally developed a keener appetite for tactical guidance.



But it wasn't until 1564 that the Milanese physician and math wizard Girolamo Cardano produced Liber De Ludo Aleae (Book on Games of Chance), showing how to make logic and probability work in one's favor. A brilliant if cantankerous fellow, Jerome Cardplayer – as his Latin name, Heironymus Cardanus, might be translated – offered advice on several card games, but deemed primero "the noblest" ²⁰⁶ and devoted more pages to it than to all other card games combined. Much more radically, he provided convincing evidence that his tactics were sound by inventing a way to combine probabilities. In doing so, he prepared the ground not only for modern algebra, probability theory, and financial analysis – at least one risk-management firm has been named after him – but for the sun-blotting flocks of hold'em primers flying off the shelves of 21st-century bookstores.



Cardano's pioneering manuscript marked another kind of departure, as well. Most pamphlets and sermons had indicted gamblers for immorality and mathematics as the work of the Devil, with more than a few clerics railing that the minimum sentence for either ought to be an excruciating death followed by seven to 10 eons roasting on Lucifer's gas-fired Weber. As a doctor and ethicist, Cardano humanely demurred: "Even if gambling were an evil, still, on account of the very large number of people who play, it would seem to be a necessary evil. For that very reason it ought to be discussed by a medical doctor like one of the incurable diseases." ¹⁸⁹



This was all well and good, but various Inquisitions were in full swing as he wrote, with zero tolerance for anything remotely heretical. The mere accusation that Cardano (1501-1576) was born illegitimate had barred him from the College of Physicians in Milan. He was thus forced to practice his healing art sub rosa, supplementing his income with lectures and books on mathematics, ethics, music, medicine, and gambling. The epitome of what we call a Renaissance Man, Cardano was also notorious for his mala fortuna. He was prone to being struck by falling masonry and attacked by mad dogs. His bad luck at cards landed him briefly in Milan's debtors prison, making the peculiar suitability of his name best appreciated by imagining a crash-prone stock car driver baptized Ford Nascaretti.



Yet despite his ill fortune, Cardano's medical and scientific expertise made him a trusted advisor to princes and popes. He was even commissioned to cast the horoscope of 15-year-old King Edward VI, the sickly only son of Henry VIII and half-brother to Elizabeth. In a highly fraught milieu in which errant advisors and daughter-bearing wives were often beheaded, Cardano forecast that Edward would soon marry, bear sons, and continue his reign as he lived out a normal span of years. The only problem with the star-crossed horoscope was that it first appeared in print a few days after Edward passed away, probably of tuberculosis contracted during a bout with measles.



Cardano somehow managed to keep his head on his shoulders, though he was imprisoned for a while by agents of the Bolognese Inquisition, this time for casting the horoscope of Jesus. His treatise On Subtlety then provoked what the historian Anthony Grafton has called "the longest and most vitriolic book review in the annals of literature," which seems a fair assessment of Julius Caesar Scaliger's contemptuously unsubtle 1,200-page diatribe. [Ore 55] 'Twas enough to drive a scrivening bastard back to the card tables.



Cardano's autobiography, written shortly before his death at age 75, recounts a particularly long day of primero in Venice. It begins in the home of a senator who turns out to be a cheat. "When I observed that the cards were marked," writes Cardano, "I impetuously slashed his face with my poniard, though not deeply." He managed to escape the senator's palazzo with his life and most of his money, at which point events became positively Snoop Doggian. "On that same day about eight o'clock in the evening, while I was doing my best to escape from the clutches of the police because I had offered violence to a Senator, and keeping meanwhile my weapons beneath my cloak, I suddenly slipped, deceived in the dark, and fell into a canal. I kept my presence of mind even as I plunged, threw out my right arm, and, grasping the gunwhale of a passing boat, was rescued by the passengers. When I scrambled aboard the skiff, I discovered in it, to my surprise, the Senator with whom I had just gambled. He had the wounds on his face bound up with a dressing; yet he willingly brought me out a suit of garments such as sailors wear. Dressed in these clothes, I traveled with him as far as Padua." [BoML 93] In Venice's watery hotbed of knife-wielding card sharps, or shizzles, all was well that ended well, apparently.



And Cardano's bad luck at the tables must have become less pronounced after he invented his method for combining probabilities, a one-man brainstorm that allowed him to calculate the exact odds of drawing certain hands at primero. Had he experienced better luck beforehand, of course, he would have had less incentive to come up with his radiant discovery and put his ideas onto paper.



The 32 chapters of Liber De Ludo Aleae cover the history of dice and backgammon, how to recognize and thwart cheaters, the psychology of gambling, and the critical difference between a card and dice game: "the latter is open, whereas play with cards takes place from ambush." ²⁰⁶ In the algebraic heart of the book, Cardano walks his reader through the math and logic of typical primero head-scratchers. If a player has three clubs, for example, he needs to know his chances of completing a fluxus. With seven clubs among the 36 unseen cards, Cardano's combinative method shows the odds against drawing a club in two tries to be 29/36 [dot for "times"] 28/35 = .6444. The player thus has only a 33.33 percent chance of hitting his fluxus. Even so, knowing he isn't quite a 2-to-1 dog will help him determine how big a bet he can rationally call to continue with his draw.



Basic as this might seem to modern poker players, combining probabilities had evidently never been done before. Yet Cardano's work remained unknown for 145 years. Why? Because his well-founded fear of the Inquisition probably caused him to hide his manuscript. Finally published in 1663, the book rewrote mathematical history – that is, it would. It wasn't until 1953 that Oystein Ore of Yale, in Cardano: The Gambling Scholar (which includes a translation of Cardano's Latin text), dated probability theory to the 1564 manuscript, written at least a century before the work of Blaise Pascal and Pierre Fermat, the pair who'd been credited with launching the theory [viii]. Cardano's bad luck seems compounded by the fact that his book and Ore's are both long out of print.



The Book on Games of Chance has also blazed a wonky trail for such best-selling pokeraticians as Herbert O. Yardley, Frank R. Wallace, David Sklansky, Mason Malmuth, Matt Matros, "Action Dan" Harrington, Bill Chen, and even a few of Doyle Brunson's co-authors, all of whom have enjoyed the advantage of working with mathematical tools designed by Dr. Cardplayer. Nor is it very surprising that each of them has chosen to ignore the unfortunate physician's ultimate counsel: "The greatest advantage in gambling lies in not playing at all." ¹⁸⁸