Poque (or Poqas) to Pokuh

As the rage for primero gradually subsided over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, the most pokerlike pastimes in Europe were brag, pochen, and the newer French game of poque. An updated version of prime, poque was limited to four players, each of whom was dealt five cards before vying for the antes and straddle bets. The hand ranks were quartet, full, triplet, then pair – the same as poker's eventual pecking order except without straights or flushes. Poque was popular among French aristocrats prior to the 1789 Revolution, while its three-card cousin bouillotte appealed more to working-class players. Patricians who happened to be living abroad were the likeliest to avoid the guillotine during the Jacobin Reign of Terror that followed. The card games they played, in Persia and elsewhere, survived along with them.



It remains uncertain whether poque imitated the Persian game of As Nas (My Beloved Ace) or vice versa. Ever since 1673, when the French East India Company obtained from the Shah the right to trade freely in Persia, commerce between the two countries had flourished. The most commonly exchanged items were Persian textiles, carpets, and opium for French wine, indigo and cochineal dyes, and perfume, but card games and decks changed hands, too.



In the 1937 edition of Foster's Complete Hoyle, R. F. Foster declared: "The game of poker, as first played in the United States, five cards to each player from a twenty-card pack, is undoubtedly the Persian game of as nas." This confident view was echoed in 1968 by Wallace Ward, a du Pont chemist whose pen name was Frank R. Wallace. In a hasty appendix to his self-published and optimistically titled Poker: A Guaranteed Income for Life, he wrote: "Sailors from Persia taught the French settlers in New Orleans the gambling game As, which was derived from the ancient Persian game of As Nas."



In 1970, Allen Dowling proposed in The Great American Pastime: "Poker probably originated in New Orleans among French inhabitants who had been in the French Service in Persia circa 1800-20."



By 1990, the Oxford gaming historian David Parlett and others had come to believe that As Nas emulated poque, instead of the other way around. Parlett noted, for example, that As isn't a card-related word in Persian but is the French word for ace, as well as the lack of evidence that As Nas had been played before 1790. Two years later, Lynne Loomis and Mason Malmuth, in The Fundamentals of Poker, also delinked poque from As Nas, at least as far as poker's pedigree was concerned: "When French colonists arrived to settle the Louisiana Territory in the 1700s, they brought poque with them." No Persian sailors were necessary.



In 2002, the English poet Al Alvarez melded these later hypotheses, concluding that poker's closest ancestor was first played in the final years of the 18th century by French merchants and diplomats in Persia who "adapted their own game of poque or bouillotte to the local As-Nas deck, then taught it to their Persian hosts." Combining poque with As, this new game was known as Poqas.



Everyone seems to agree that As Nas involved a special deck with either 20 or 25 cards, depending on whether four or five people were playing. Its aces depicted the shir va khurshid (lion and sun) atop the hierarchy, followed by the shah or pisha (king), bibi (lady), sarbas (soldier), and lakat (something of little value), usually represented by a dancing girl. The dancing girls always had a green background and were often sparsely clad in explicitly sexual poses.



Whichever game copied the other, poque and As Nas players were dealt five-card hands, with the lowest card being either a 10 or a dancer. No draws to better hands took place, and only quads, fulls, trips, and pairs were accepted. Once they'd evaluated their cards, French players vied for the pot by announcing "Je poque de dix," or however much they wanted to bet. The single round of betting provided only one chance to bluff. Four aces or four kings with an ace were the only unbeatable hands, and – ignoring mathematical scarcity as the measure of value – a measly pair of deuces beat what we would recognize as a royal flush. But even if you held no pair at all, you could bluff – a tactic requiring confidence, a knack for risky self-advancement, and the ability to leverage uncertainty, all of which proved to be very much in the spirit of America's fledgling free-market democracy.



That poque is pronounced with two syllables (in French mouths, more like one and a half) makes it even more likely as the parent of poker. After all, it wasn't a very big step – once you'd sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and most of the Gulf of Mexico, that is – from playing and saying poque to the Southern pronunciation, pokuh. Later, when the action had moved north of the Mason-Dixon Line, the unstressed syllable would pick up an r.



No Creole Jacques McClelland ever said, "Shuffle up an' deal," of course, so an exact date for pokuh's first hand can never be established, just as none can be fixed for the first baseball game or session of jazz. But we can say with confidence that the United States had just begun to expand into the ethnic and geographical contours we recognize today when pokuh was being injected into the portal of its main artery: New Orleans. Deck types and game names (poque, pokuh, poqas, As, As Nas, and no doubt a few others) varied from saloon to saloon along Bourbon Street, and players had little reason to publish and date them; in any case, no such document has been discovered so far. What's clear is that pokuh gradually emerged from the womb of a French vying game inflected with Persian characteristics (or vice versa) as the flags above New Orleans were changing from Spain's to France's to the Stars and Stripes around the turn of the 18th century and in the tumultuous decade that followed. If we wanted a symbolic birth date, however, I would nominate July 4, 1803.



To understand why, we must backtrack to 1718, when a trading post along the Indian portage to Lake Pontchartrain was founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville of the French Mississippi Company, who named the place la Nouvelle-Orleans to honor his sponsor, the Duke of Orleans. Its location was crucial. Instead of a weeklong trip down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, a ship could cut back through the lakes and be at the gulf in two days. The site was also at the nexus of transatlantic commerce for upriver traders moving their furs, grain, and produce by barge, and for European goods moving in the other direction. The city that grew up around it served as the main port and custom for a rapidly expanding commercial network.



The vast territory surrounding, drained by the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, was named Louisiana after Louis XIV, the Sun King who reigned at Versailles for an astonishing 72 years. When the Territory was named a French crown colony in 1731, Acadians were encouraged to migrate there from Canada. After losing the French and Indian War to the British, however, France ceded Louisiana to Spain as part of the almost hilariously complex Treaty of Paris signed in 1763 by Europe's three major colonial powers.



Thousands more French Acadians had already been driven by British troops from their homes in Nova Scotia, and most of them resettled in Louisiana. It also seems likely that, as Loomis and Malmuth suggest, at least a few brought the game of poque with them.

As the white population became increasingly French, Spain ceded control of the Territory in 1800 back to Napoleon in the Treaty of San Ildefonso. But no matter which European power held sway, polyglot New Orleans by then had become one of the world's most savory melting pots. Its population of 10,000 or so was an unruly gumbo of Spaniards, French administrators and citizens, Germans from the Upper Rhine region, Anglos from Canada and the original 13 colonies, Native Americans (mainly from the Choctaw and Acolapissa tribes), sailors and merchants from several navies, plus a steady stream of nationless pirates and slavers. Yet even while the slave trade ignominiously thrived there until 1808, the city was home to hundreds of what were called "free persons of color." All took their place in a vibrant if contentious Creole society like no other on earth, and one that was particularly receptive to hybrid forms of music, language, commerce, and gambling. Taking up a new kind of French card game in the saloons along its waterfront would have come naturally to them. But only a few were aware that politicians in the newer, more artificial town of Washington, DC, had made no small plans for New Orleans.



When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated on March 4, in 1801, the population he presided over was 5,308,483. Nine-tenths of these persons lived east of the Appalachians. Washington had been the seat of American government for less than 10 months. Older northern cities had become overcrowded, and 200 years of tobacco cultivation had severely depleted the Chesapeake soil. Farmers and land-hungry city dwellers were migrating across the Appalachians through the Cumberland Gap.



Even before Napoleon proved willing to sell the entire Louisiana Territory, Jefferson had dispatched James Monroe to Paris to try to purchase New Orleans. In spite of his affection for France, Jefferson believed American control of that port was vital to his country's commercial and military prospects. The great river system above it was the main highway of what he thought of as America's Manifest Destiny. He likened the Mississippi itself to "the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic, formed into one stream."



On July 4, 1803, word reached Jefferson from Paris that Napoleon had agreed – shockingly – to sell all of Louisiana for $15 million, which came to about 4 cents an acre. Sold, said the president. The Territory comprised the area drained by the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and their tributaries, and was anchored by the flourishing ports of St. Louis and New Orleans. But the French Emperor was desperate for money to finance his doomed war against Britain. Never having crossed the Atlantic, he also failed to envision the vastness and grandeur of the land he was parting with.



After two and a half centuries of halting colonial expansion along the Atlantic seaboard and a seven-year war of independence, the United States had doubled in size overnight. In Jefferson's visionary imagination, if not yet in fact, his country now reached all the way to the Pacific. The entire continent, he fervently believed, would now be settled by one people "speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws." What he did not say was how natural it would be for such a people to share a taste for a new kind of card game, one whose rules favored an entrepreneur's creative sense of risk, a frontiersman's independence, a marketeer's (not to say a preacher's or a snake-oil salesman's) cunning deceptiveness, and a democratic openness to every class of player. As Dowling and others have observed, poker and the United States grew up together, and the game is often said to epitomize the American ethos. Actor Walter Matthau, taking his cue from Yogi Berra, apparently agreed: "The game exemplifies the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great."



My own opinion is that the story of poker helps explain who we are. It has gone hand in hand with pivotal aspects of our national experience for more than two centuries now. The ways we've done battle and business, enriched and impoverished ourselves, made political and diplomatic decisions, and explored our vast continent have echoed, and been echoed by, its definitive tactics. In 2007, the game's distinctive double helix continues to be an integral strand of our evolving DNA.



Because America's new borders were not precisely mapped in 1803, they would prove to be dangerously controversial. The $15 million had also made a sham of Jefferson's republican commitment to an austere federal budget and played into the hands of his staunchest political opponents. The Purchase was nonetheless deemed a "noble bargain" by the president. "It is incumbent on those who accept great changes," he said later, "to risk themselves on great occasions."



Meanwhile, now that New Orleans was an American city, more English-speaking whites tried to make a go of it in what felt like subtropical climes. Their own taste for bluff-based card games had developed while playing brag up north or in England. And lo and behold, bragging turned out to be the ultimate tactic in the pokuh games they found in the saloons along Bourbon Street, where drinking, dancing to live music, gorging on succulent cooking, and of course prostitution were found. More than a few of them must have sat down, learned the rules of this not-so-strange local card game, and felt right at home at these tables. The influence of brag on poker would also be felt in the 1830s and '40s, when flushes, straights, and draws (called "taking in" by brag players) were introduced, along with the 52-card deck.



Next: Mississippi steamboats, the Internet cardrooms of 1811.