Poker's Strangest Hands

INTRODUCTION

No one knows for sure how the game of poker came by its name.

It almost certainly derives from a variety of similarly styled card games, such as the Persian ‘As Nas’, which was played with five cards dealt to two players from a twenty-card deck, containing all ‘honour’ cards – lion, king, lady, soldier and dancing girl. It also featured pairs, triplets, straights, flushes and bluffs.

Poker historian David Parlett has rubbished the ‘As Nas’ theory, explaining, ‘The problem with this theory is that it is based on no more than a strong resemblance and suffers from a total lack of contemporary evidence, since the earliest descriptions of As Nas do not occur until the 1890s.’

The British three-card game, brag, has many similarities, and in the 1882 book Poker: How To Play It, by ‘One of its Victims’, it is stated, ‘it would appear that poker is an immediate development from this latter game’. Another poker researcher, Jeffrey Burton, supports this viewpoint, declaring that what emerged when the two games were brought together ‘could equally well have been dubbed five-card brag’.

But poker also shares similarities with Italy’s fifteenth-century game Il Frusso, which developed into Prim(i)era or Premiere, or La Prime; France’s Gilet; and Spain’s Mus while Germany’s Pochspiel contained an element of bluffing.

Poker: How To Play It also makes a case for poker to derive from ‘Gleek, which was played in England more than three hundred years ago’, and another ancient game, ‘Pot and Paire’. The book also cites evidence from Ben Jonson’s 1596 comedy Every Man in His Humour, which contains the phrase ‘Here’s a trick vied and revied’. A note to the 1816 edition of the comedy explains, ‘To vie was to hazard, to put down a certain sum upon a hand of cards. To revie was to cover it with a larger sum, on which the challenged became the challenger, and was to be revied in his turn with a perpetual increase of stake.’ The author of Poker: How To Play It used this as evidence that, ‘long years before the game of Poker reached its present development, its principles were known in this country, and England must be credited with the honour of being the home of its origin’. He went on to envisage the Pilgrim Fathers exporting the game to America, picturing how ‘the sweet simplicity of Gleek gradually blossomed out into the fierce and seductive Poker’.

Poker writer Dale Armstrong admitted in his 1977 work Win at Gin & Poker, ‘Modern poker climbed up through a long line of European and British card games, changing here and cross-breeding there until finally it crystallized into Straight Poker, the basic principles of which govern all Poker games.’

But the leading contender for the source of poker’s nomenclature is the French game Poque (pronounced po-kay), apparently introduced to the States by one of the eighteenth-century founders of New Orleans, Jean Baptiste le Moyne. Poque saw three cards dealt to two or three players from a 32-card – all numbered cards – deck.

Gambling expert John Scarne notes, ‘I have even heard it argued that Poker derives from the Hindu pukka ’, but goes on to outline his support for it deriving from underworld slang for a pocketbook or wallet: a poke.

Some claim that the German game Poche or Pochspeil may have been the source of the name – with the word ‘poche’ once having described an imaginary, bizarre, hobgoblin-like creature. Apparently, the Dutch version of ‘pochen’ means to act boastfully – which would be appropriate.

Notice that a combination of As Nas and Poque would utilise 52 cards. And both games were popular by the year 1800 in New Orleans. ‘They came into the city’s life via European sailors,’ posited 1950s gambling expert, Jerry D Lewis, ‘but it was a group of unknown Americans who did the vital laboratory work of combining the two games.’

From New Orleans the fledgling game spread via the Mississippi steamboats upriver and thence to all points of the compass. ‘It caught on as the great American game because it reflected the distinctive traits of the men who played it,’ wrote expert Henry Chafetz. Writer Andy Bellin believes that the ‘distinctive traits’ were not necessarily honourable: ‘the fact of the matter is, poker was created by card cheats,’ he avowed in Poker Nation, adding, ‘the inventors were a far cry from the hard-working European ancestors upon whose broken backs this country was built. Poker was conjured out of the smoke-filled air of the saloons of the South by drunks, thieves and gunfighters.’

Scarne believed that the first written reference to poker was made by Jonathan H Green, who, in 1834 or 1843, depending on which source you accept, in a book called An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling, gave the rules for what he described as a ‘cheating game’ being played on the steamboats, stating that it was the first time the rules had been published. ‘In my opinion,’ declared Scarne, ‘Poker, like Three-Card Monte, was developed by the card-sharps.’

In the early days the game boasted an almost infinite number of variations – in Toledo, Ohio, they devised a game called Jack Pots in which each player would ante before the deal and in which the first bettor must hold a pair of Jacks at least. Other early variations included Whiskey Poker and Spit in the Ocean. Not all were welcomed by serious players.

In 1860 the A Dougherty Playing Card Company came up with a likely wheeze – they introduced into their packs an extra card, depicting a Court Jester in cap and bells – the Joker. The ability thus afforded to allow the Joker to act as a ‘wild’ card did not receive universal acclaim.

By 1879 writer John Blackbridge was demanding, ‘The time has arrived when all additions to the present standard combinations in draw poker must be worthless, the game already being complete. Neither Jack-Pots, nor any other variation of pure poker should be tolerated by any tradition-loving, decent-minded player.’

Blackridge made a further sage observation, whose truth is evident to this day: ‘Poor players usually increase their bets when losing, on the principle that bad play and bad luck united will win. A slight degree of intoxication aids to perfect this intellectual deduction.’

The United States Playing Card Company published a book of poker rules in 1889, and eight years later R F Foster wrote Hoyle’s Encyclopaedia of Indoor Games, which included poker, thus perpetrating the belief among some that Edmund Hoyle himself, the noted English barrister who had indeed codified the rules of many games, pastimes and sports of his day, was also responsible for doing so to poker. Those who dispute this are on pretty strong ground, as Hoyle died in 1769.

Despite being the home of playing cards, invented there in around AD 975, China did not discover poker until the 1920s, when an American, Carl Crow, editor of a Shanghai newspaper, printed 10,000 copies of a rule book for the traditional, five-card version of the game. This went on to sell over one million copies including, it was said, one to a monastery in Tibet.

The game also caught on in Siam, author Gordon Sinclair reporting, ‘Some dentists in Bangkok specialise in poker teeth. Holes in the shape of a heart, spade, club or diamond are drilled in sound front teeth, and filled with green, red, black or light blue cement.’

By 1934 a variation of the game called ‘Jackpots – Sevens Wild’ was unveiled in the 21 July edition of Literary Digest. There were many others: Whiskey Poker, Rum Poker, Gin Poker – are you spotting a theme here?

Phrases deriving from poker have passed into common parlance over the years – for example ‘blue chip’, signifying top quality, came from the fact that the highest value chips when playing poker were customarily of that colour. The first chips were made of materials like bone, ivory and mother-of-pearl – all materials which, observed poker writer Phil Gordon, ‘would nowadays lead animal activists to set your house on fire’. Eventually, though, clay and plastic became the materials of choice.

It is also worth keeping an eye out for unusual chips you may come across. An Ohio man bought one from the defunct Hacienda Casino in a local market and then put it up for sale on eBay – it turned out to be one of a kind, and made $15,000.

POKER’S FIRST HISTORIAN

USA, 1808

Jonathan H Green was born in 1808. He grew up to serve in the 35th Indiana, Company F, and became both an observer of and participant in the world of gambling to such an extent that by the time he reached his eightieth birthday and entered the Soldiers’ Home at Dayton, Ohio, to see out his remaining days, he was described as ‘a reformed gambler’.

In the intervening years he had made an indelible mark on the world of poker by writing a sequence of books that would act as a history of the early days of the game.

Green makes reference in his books to poker games taking place as early as 1834 and gives details of a game that took place in 1837 on a steamer called Smelter, running between Cincinnati and Galena, in which a gambler called John Howard spoke of ‘full-deck poker’ as being different to the more frequently played and widely known twenty-card poker.

Green wrote of the latter game, ‘It would seem to be a variation of the game of Brag, being similar in many particulars, such as making pairs, passing, becoming eldest hand. It is usually played with twenty cards – ace, king, queen, jack, ten of each suit – and by two, three or four persons, each having five cards.’

THE FIRST CHEAT MAKES A GREEN SPECTACLE OF HIMSELF

LOUISVILLE, 1829

Joe Cowell, a touring actor from England, found himself on board a steamboat chugging along from Louisville en route to Kentucky in December 1829. Cowell observed a game taking place that he recognised as a derivative of the popular gambling game, brag, going by the name of poker.

His account of one hand in the game he watched is possibly the earliest report of skulduggery in a poker game.

Cowell records that on what was a foggy night, the boat ran aground, causing most of the travellers to dash around to see what had happened. He noted one man, wearing distinctive green spectacles and a diamond ‘stickpin’, who had remained calmly seated, shuffling his pack of cards, and who then got the game under way once more.

‘It was his turn to deal and when he ended, he did not lift his cards, but sat watching quietly the countenances of the others. The man on his left had bet ten dollars.’ One by one the players, including a young lawyer new to the game, matched the ten dollars, before one player raised a massive $500.

‘Green Spectacles’ called the $500 before taking up his hand in anticipation. Then, ‘he paused for a moment in disappointed astonishment, and sighed, I pass, and threw his cards upon the table’. The left-hand man then bet ‘that $500 and $1000 better!’

What had actually happened, it was by now obvious to ‘Green Spectacles’, was that his intention to deal himself a pre-ordained winning hand had resulted in the hand going to another player, leaving him with a guaranteed loser in his own hand.

‘The young lawyer,’ continued Cowell, ‘. . . had had time to calculate the power of his hand – four kings with an ace – it could not be beat! But still he hesitated at the impossibility, as if he thought it could – looked at the money staked and then put his wallet on the table and called.’

One of his two opponents left had four queens with an ace; the other, four jacks and an ace.

‘Green Spectacles’, noted Cowell, had discarded a hand of four tens with an ace. He added, deadpan, ‘In that pursuit, as in all others, even among the players, some black-sheep and black-legs will creep in, as in the present instance.’

Yes, and green specs, too.

KNIFE ONE, BOWIE

LOUISVILLE, 1832

Not only did James Bowie secure immortality by inventing the eponymous knife, he also became a kind of avenging angel on behalf of the innocent gamblers who were preyed upon by unscrupulous gangs of card sharps who would lure them unsuspectingly into crooked poker games taking place on the riverboats of the time.

In 1832, Bowie was apparently on board the steamer New Orleans, as was a young businessman who had been on honeymoon with his wife, mixing business with pleasure in New York, where he had collected $50,000 on behalf of merchants and planters to take back with him to Natchez.

‘This young gentleman, who fancied himself as a card player and a man of the world,’ according to chronicler of the Mississippi gambling scene Herbert Asbury, writing in the early 1900s, became the target of ‘a syndicate of gamblers formed to despoil him’. This group were so thorough in their preparations they had sent one of their number to make the newlywed’s acquaintance in New York.

‘When the young gentleman took a boat at Pittsburgh the sharper was on board, and so were two Louisiana planters, who made themselves very agreeable,’ recorded Asbury. A poker game was suggested and the young honeymooner was soon several hundred dollars up. They were getting on so well that it seemed only natural that the ‘planters’ and the sharper should accompany them on the New Orleans.

Well, no sooner had they departed from Louisville than the man was invited to sit down again for a few hands of poker, and with the gloves off he had soon lost – well, been relieved of – $45,000, and was becoming desperate as he watched his fortune disappear.

At the Vicksburg stop James Bowie boarded, ‘wearing a black, broad-brimmed slouch hat and black broad-cloth clothing of clerical cut, and became an interested spectator of the game, which he saw immediately was crooked’.

The young man lost more and more, until finally he saw his last dollar disappear. In a fit of remorse he ran to the boat’s rail intending to throw himself overboard.

Bowie helped the young man’s new bride restrain him and took him back to their cabin before returning to the bar, where he ‘casually displayed a bulging wallet and asked for change for a hundred dollar bill. One of the gamblers, who were opening wine to celebrate the success of their coup, obliged, and after a few moments of conversation suggested a card game, to which Bowie agreed.

On the first few hands Bowie won, and then the sharpers began to forge ahead. At length one of the ‘planters’ dealt Bowie a hand which any Poker player would bet as long as he could see, and which Bowie recognised as being intended for the big cleanup.

The ‘planters’ dropped out after a few bets, but Bowie and the ‘merchant’ continued to raise each other until $70,000 was piled on the table between them. Finally, Bowie saw what he had been watching for – the gambler’s hand flicking quickly into his sleeve. Like lightning Bowie seized the sharper’s wrist, at the same time drawing from his shirt-bosom a wicked-looking knife.

‘Show your hand,’ he commanded. ‘If it contains more than five cards I shall kill you!’

The gambler attempted to break loose, but Bowie twisted his wrist and his cards fell to the table – four aces, a queen and a jack.

‘I shall take the pot,’ said Bowie, ‘with a legitimate Poker hand, four kings and a ten.’

‘Who the devil are you anyway?’ cried the discomfited gambler. ‘I,’ said the famous duellist, ‘am James Bowie!’

A contemporary report of the incident records: ‘The voice was like velvet, but it cut like steel into the hearts of the chief gambler’s confederates and deterred them from any purpose or impulse they might have had to interfere. They, with the crowd, shrank back from the table, smitten with terror by the name. Bowie softly swept the banknotes into his large slouch hat and lightly clapped it to his head.’

There are two versions of the drama’s final act – according to one he let the gambler go on his way with a warning, but in the more dramatic account he was challenged by the gambler to a duel, which resulted in the death of the card sharp.

What is agreed upon is that Bowie ‘gave the young gentleman of Natchez two-thirds of the contents of the hat and kept the remainder as spoils of war.

‘With tears in his eyes the young gentleman swore never to touch another card, and both he and his bride prayed that Heaven might bless their benefactor.’

Oh, well, not all prayers are answered – Bowie died just four years later, along with Davy Crockett, in defence of the Alamo.

MARK MY WORDS

MISSOURI, 1835

Samuel Clemens was born on 30 November 1835 in Hannibal, Missouri. He would become the