Poker History 101

Over the next couple of blogs, I want to give my readers a history lesson in poker and cards. Most of us know the current culture, but have never bothered to know the origins of cards.

The Chinese Turkestan produced the earliest knonwn playing cards in the 1100s, but poker did not evolve until the past four hundred years. The first poker games were betting and bluffing games by the Europeans.

Poker gets it root from the words “Poch”. Poch was a card game with rounds of betting played in Germany. (Imagine if they saw the online poker we play today.) Similarly, “Poque” was developed in France about a century later. The English ruined it and called in “Brag”.

Poker had its invasion into the US when the French owned Louisiana. Southerners loved the game and called it “Pokah”. Of course, the proliferation of the game headed upstream and Northerners finished off the evolution of the word with poker.

Riverboat gamblers (guess where “the river” came from) helped insure the games spreading like wildfire because they played while traveling up and down the Mississippi.

I wish I could go back in history and just feel the atmosphere of cards and see some of the primitive beginnings of those early riverboat gamblers. I’ll wager there was a lot of cheating going on. Would be cool to see those first players in action.

SXC.hu