Contents
1. The history of poker
Poker has no birth certificate. It is the product of a long blending of European betting games, which reached Louisiana in the early 19th century and then spread across North America by river, war and railroad.
The European ancestors
Three games come up again and again in poker's family tree:
- Poque (France, 17th-18th century): a game of combinations and raises whose name, pronounced the American way, most likely gave us "poker". French settlers brought it to New France and then to Louisiana.
- Pochen / Poch (Germany): the same verbal root, the idea of "knocking", that is, announcing a raise.
- Brelan and prime (France), and above all the Persian As Nas, a 20-card game with 5 cards per player, often cited for its betting and bluffing mechanics, even though historians still debate the direct line of descent.
Bluffing itself comes from English brag and Spanish primero: the idea that you can win a pot without holding the best hand is older than poker and is its real core.
New Orleans and the steamboats
The first reliable descriptions place the game in New Orleans around 1810-1820. It was played with a 20-card deck (ace, king, queen, jack, ten), four players, five cards each, with no draw: a single deal and a single round of betting. The game then travelled up the Mississippi aboard steamboats, where professional players, the gamblers, made a living from it, along with a good share of organised cheating.
The switch to 52 cards and the first variants
Around 1834, the 52-card deck took over: it made room for more players and created the flush as a hand. Changes then followed quickly:
- 1850s: appearance of draw poker (closed poker, with a draw), and of the straight and the flush in the hand rankings.
- American Civil War (1861-1865): poker became the game of both sides in the army camps. 5-card stud, where some of the cards are face up, spread, along with the first notions of a common pot and unlimited raising.
- Late 19th century: the conquest of the West, saloons, jokers and wild cards, then the gradual codification of the rules in American game manuals (Hoyle).
The 20th century: legalisation and professionalisation
Nevada legalised gambling in 1931, creating the framework in which Las Vegas would become the world capital of poker. Seven card stud dominated American card rooms during the first half of the century. In 1970, Benny Binion organised the first World Series of Poker (WSOP) at the Horseshoe in Las Vegas: a handful of players, and a winner first chosen by a vote. The following year, the tournament adopted the knockout format with an entry fee, which has remained the norm.
The internet and the "poker boom"
- 1998: the first real-money online poker room opened (Planet Poker).
- 2003: Chris Moneymaker, an amateur accountant who qualified for 86 dollars through an online satellite, won the WSOP Main Event and 2.5 million dollars. The effect was immediate and carries his name: the Moneymaker effect. Main Event entries rose from 839 players in 2003 to more than 8,700 in 2006.
- 2000s: television coverage with under-the-table cameras showing the hole cards, an explosion of online play, and the appearance of a generation of players trained on volume and statistics.
- 15 April 2011: the online poker "Black Friday" closed the US market to the major international sites and reshaped the industry.
- 2010s-2020s: extreme professionalisation, work with solvers and game theory (GTO), and in 2017-2019 victories by the artificial intelligences Libratus and then Pluribus against top professionals, first heads-up and then at a six-player table.
In France, online poker was legalised and regulated in 2010 with the creation of ARJEL, which became the ANJ in 2020.
2. The arrival of Texas hold'em
Robstown, Texas
The Texas Legislature officially recognises Robstown, Texas, as the birthplace of hold'em, in the early 1900s. The innovation is simple but decisive: instead of giving each player five cards, you give only two, and you lay five community cards in the middle of the table.
From Dallas to Las Vegas
For a long time the game stayed confined to Texas, played in private and travelling games by a group of players who would later make its reputation: Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim Preston, Crandell Addington and Sailor Roberts. In 1967, they took hold'em to Las Vegas. It was then offered in only one place, the Golden Nugget, a downtown casino rarely visited by high-stakes players.
Hold'em earned its place when it was adopted by the Dunes, on the Strip, and above all when the WSOP made it the premier event from 1971: the Main Event is played as no limit Texas hold'em, and has never changed format.
Why no limit took over
Crandell Addington summed up the difference: in limit, you play the cards; in no limit, you play the players. Since a player can bet their whole stack at any moment, every decision potentially puts the entire game on the line. That is what makes the format so spectacular on television, and what has made it the world standard since the 2000s.
In 1979, Doyle Brunson published Super/System, the first book to openly set out high-level strategy for no limit hold'em. Many professionals saw the book as a betrayal: it gave the general public the keys to their edge.