History of Poker

As millions more live and virtual hands are dealt every day, poker seems poised to become the world's card game. East Asians, for example, continue to do remarkably well at poker, though it's the Vietnamese in particular who dominate tournaments more than any other ethnic group. One reason is that being clever and lucky are highly esteemed in Vietnamese culture. Gambling carries little stigma and is often lionized.



The Vietnamese who managed to emigrate after the Communists took over in 1975 were an ambitious and tough-minded lot. One report concluded that they tended to be "risk-takers willing to leave the familiarity of their homelands" and to "develop more aggressive gambling strategies than their U.S.-born counterparts." Buddhists in general seem to embrace randomness more readily than those brought up in the Christian tradition, and many Vietnamese believe that "guts" and "dare" are essential. Most of those who emigrated to the United States after the war, the so-called boat people, settled in California just as poker was becoming legal throughout the state. Men "The Master" Nguyen and others who had early success at the poker table tutored members of their extended families and gave their best students a stake in tournaments, often in exchange for half of their winnings. By the late 1990s, a stunning percentage of tournament champions were named either Nguyen, Pham, Phan, or Tran.



Card Player's 2007 Player of the Year (POY) title was awarded to David "The Dragon" Pham, who also won it seven years earlier. Pham is the cousin and former student of Men the Master, the only four-time winner of this widely respected award. The runner-up was J.C. Tran, who was born in South Vietnam and now has a business degree from Cal State Sacramento.



The main reason the Card Player award is respected is that any good player can get lucky for a few days and win a big tournament. The Player of the Year needs to be successful over 52 weeks. Whoever wins has a far more valid claim on the laurels for those 12 months than whoever won the World Series of Poker main event. The only misleading aspect of the POY system is that it doesn't factor in a per-start success rate, so it favors tournament grinders who buy into more than 300 events over players like John Juanda, Chau Giang, Jennifer Harman, Erik Seidel, Dan Harrington, Jay Heimowitz, and Alan Goehring, who tend to enter only the majors. Not that playing every day (which more or less requires living in Los Angeles or Las Vegas) should be penalized, only that on-average excellence against the toughest competition should be a more important criterion in the POY standings.



The 2008 Player of the Year leader at press time for this issue of the magazine was John "The Razor" Phan, one of the very toughest players around. Phan plays a mix of live games and tournaments out of Long Beach, California, but he was born in Da Nang in 1974 and is considered the first Vietnamese hip-hop poker star. The more buttoned-down Dragon was third in the standings at press time, and Men the Master 12th – of the almost 6,000 tournament players the computer kept track of worldwide. We should also recall that Johnny Chan, the first Asian-born WSOP champion and a man who came within a couple of hands of winning it three consecutive times, is from Guangzhou, a Chinese city not far from the Vietnamese border.



The Indonesian-born master John Juanda, who was twice the runner-up for Player of the Year and won his fourth WSOP bracelet at the main event in London in 2008, is ethnically Chinese. When he first came to America in 1990, he spoke almost no English. He learned it well enough to sell Bibles door-to-door and earn an MBA while gradually picking up the American card game. But since he couldn't always follow the mumbled conversations taking place across the felt, he concentrated more on the action and the players' body language. When he couldn't understand what an opponent was saying, he studied his facial expressions to make educated guesses. "You learn a lot more by listening than you do by talking," he says, advice any player could profit from, whatever language he speaks, or doesn't speak, at the table.



It's hard to predict the future of poker in Asia, but the enormous integrated resorts featuring megacasinos on the Chinese island of Macau earned more money in the first three quarters of 2008 than they did in all of 2007, which was more than all the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip put together. Large casinos are also being built in Singapore, Vietnam, and Australia. Because poker celebrities are among the most appealing lures for new customers, all of these new casinos virtually guarantee that more poker tournaments will be hosted in these countries. Similar resorts are being studied in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Thailand.



While the number of events on the Asian poker circuit grew to six in 2009 and the boom in Australia continued, the European Poker Tour, sponsored by PokerStars, had multimillion-euro events in London, Deauville, Dortmund, Copenhagen, Prague, Barcelona, Budapest, San Remo, and Monte Carlo, with major events hosted by other online sites in Dublin, Paris, Helsinki, and Moscow. More than a few Scandinavians have suggested that poker has become the second-most popular pastime in their part of the world, especially after the 22-year-old Dane Peter Eastgate won the 2008 WSOP main event, becoming the first Dane and the youngest player ever to do so. Relatively new to Latin America, the circuit now stops in Costa Rica, Columbia, Equador, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Sizable events are also being hosted in Swaziland and South Africa, while the All Africa Poker Channel, launched in 2005, continues to build audience share.



Who else makes long money from poker these days? The owners of cardrooms, casinos, and online gaming sites, mainly. Among the players, it seems to be mostly young "ballas." Many of these hyperaggressive young men cut their teeth online long before turning 21, the minimum age for playing live tournaments in the U.S. Eastgate earned $9,152,416 for winning the "Big One"; Moscow resident Ivan Demidov, an old-timer at 27, won $5,809,595 for finishing second. Tom "durrr" Dwan, an online pro born the same year as Eastgate, has already won many millions, though he's also famous for losing $723,938 in a single pot on Oct. 26.



What do the moist-eared ballas and grizzled rounders do after the fish have been gutted? They wait for more fish to arrive. And they seldom have to wait very long. "Stakes have doubled in terms of what the out-of-towners will play for," Daniel Negreanu told one reporter. "Random recreational guys who used to be $80-$160 players at The Mirage have moved up to $300-$600. And now the $10-$20 no-limit games attract novices who would have once sat down in $5-$10 limit games. But they're playing no-limit and losing $20,000 or $30,000 in a sitting." Negreanu recalled that a few years earlier, no-limit cash games were "dead because good players get the money so quickly in that game. These days, though, people lose their money and we see a never-ending supply of fresh meat. It never seems to stop. Suckers come and leave and more suckers replace them. But people are willing to gamble. They see it on TV and think it's easy."



After winning another eight Olympic gold medals in Beijing, Michael Phelps said, "I think it would be cool to play in the World Series of Poker. My game is a little off right now, so I'll have to start improving it a little bit. But I think that would be cool … It would be cool to meet some of those poker guys." By September, he was regularly competing in Las Vegas tournaments, honing his game for the WPT circuit, NBC's Heads-Up Championship, and the WSOP the following summer. On Oct. 18, he made the final table of the third event he entered. As his hero Young Jeezy might put it, "Nothin like ya man, he aint grindin like this." Or maybe that should be, "I'm so paid."



Phelps is continuing the tradition of successful competitors from other fields turning to professional poker on a part- or full-time basis. This faction includes magician Antonio Esfandiari, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté, French pop star Patrick Bruel, PGA pro Rocco Mediate, mixed martial arts fighters Mike Swick and Matt Hughes, six-time Grand Slam tennis champion Boris Becker, and Cy Young Award winner and World Series MVP Orel Hershiser. The hundreds of actors who play major events include Ben Affleck, Gabe Kaplan, Tobey Maguire, Jennifer Tilly, James Woods, Don Cheadle, Chad Brown, Mimi Rogers, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Their numbers are swelled by the facts that Los Angeles is a hotbed of hold'em and most stars have plenty of money and leisure time, and by the importance of acting when competing against live opponents.



Then there's the fact that the man who has won more poker tournaments than anyone, T.J. Cloutier, used to make his living as a tight end and linebacker in the Canadian Football League. Another tight end, Shannon Sharpe, a likely NFL Hall of Famer, represented AbsolutePoker on the circuit in 2005. Pro Bowl defensive tackle Chris Zorich plays in a variety of home games and charity events in and around Chicago.







According to a USA Today cover story, "The World Series of Poker has nothing on the NFL draft. As the league's 32 teams have nitpicked hundreds of college players eligible for this weekend's draft in New York City, many of the teams also have jockeyed for an edge by trying to conceal their true intentions." The story notes that the weeks before the draft "are filled with misinformation campaigns, media leaks and smoke screens as teams play what amounts to a high-stakes game of bluffing." One way a football team executes a pre-draft bluff is by concocting or exaggerating drug-use or injury reports about a particular player. Misleading information is leaked through the media or passed by word of mouth along the NFL grapevine. The bluffing team's goal is to downplay the value of a player it covets so that a team picking earlier doesn't draft him; the other teams' job is to suss out that player's actual market value. Several teams have flown a player they have no interest in drafting to their headquarters for pre-draft visits while ignoring the player they most want to draft. "Every head coach, every GM, everyone involved with any team right now is playing poker" was how Kansas City Chiefs coach Herm Edwards described these tactics. "Whatever someone says, it's about half-true. That's the way the game is played."



Exactly which game is played is also evolving, of course. Even as H.O.R.S.E. has begun to establish itself as the gold standard of limit poker skill, exotic new variants like badugi are becoming more popular. Badugi is a four-card game in which the lowest hand with four different suits takes the pot. While badugi seems to have roots in China or Korea, it is also reminiscent of both Renaissance mus and primero.



New variants have always developed in opposition to the reigning game of choice. The facedown cards in traditional draw poker gave way to the exposed cards of stud, much as the original high-only games gave way to lowball, high-low, and badugi. Today, especially online, nine-handed action is becoming less popular than six-handed and heads-up play. That a premium hand in pot-limit Omaha includes four high cards from two different suits is part of the reason badugi is catching on: If you keep catching terrible Omaha hands, why not play a game in which those cards will win you some money? Such trends are very much in keeping with pendulum swings in other parts of the culture, where the crew cuts and narrow pants of one decade give way to long hair and bell-bottoms, then bristle and exposed boxer shorts, or Anglo muscle cars raised up on struts become catalysts for the low-riding cars of Latinos.



Whatever the variant, what used to be called the cheater's game is now, for better or worse, at the heart of our on-again-off-again romance with market democracy. More than in politics, warfare, business, or physical sports, poker has become the arena in which men and women compete on the most equal footing. The World Series has already crowned champions from the United States, China, Vietnam, Ireland, Spain, Australia, Laos, Norway, Indonesia, Denmark, and two from Iran. America has long been a melting pot, and our national card game – some say our national pastime – has become a sturdy crucible in which folks from all over the planet find themselves welcome contenders.