Poker is probably one of, if not the, most iconic card game most of us have ever encountered. Even if you haven’t played it yourself, there is a good chance that you’ve seen it on TV, gangster movies, heist films, video games and a host of other media.
So, how did this one game rise to such a celebrity status considering the sheer number of other card games there are? Well, in this article, we’ll be looking into the history and evolution of the game of poker to divine what makes it so popular.
Poker’s Early History
As you might expect, there are no firm dates for the creation of the game we know as poker. For a start, modern poker has a dozen different variations and no clear original root. While amazing new historical discoveries are made all the time, history tends to be more difficult than finding a post-it note with a date and “invented poker today” on it.
There are, however, a few card games from antiquity that are generally accepted to potentially be the root, or one of the roots, for the game we understand as poker.
One of the most commonly sited games as an ancestor of poker is a sixteenth-century Persian card game called As Nas. As Nas bears similarity to poker in that it has 25 cards in 5 suits and was apocryphally thought to have been taught to French settlers by Persian sailors in the port of New Orleans.
There are however other games from a similar time that also have more than a passing similarity. The game Primero, which originated in either Spain or Italy or both, and the French game Poque were both popular at the time and were as similar to poker as As Nas is. The English game of brag also uses similar bluffing and betting techniques and uses rounds in a similar manner to poker.
While none of these games can be identified as the originator of poker, there is a good chance that poker evolved from a combination of all these games as people picked and chose the mechanics that they liked and incorporated them into their games.
American Poker
The game we would recognize as poker was developed in the American West and slowly evolved during that time. Originally the game only used 20 cards in what was called Mississippi Steamboat poker, but over time it was brought up to a 52 card deck and the number of different hands also increased.
Literature from the 1800s shows that the Flush, Straight, Wild Card and the Draw were all mechanics that were added into the game later. The game also started to diverge at this time, with different sub-games developing in different parts of the country.
The best known of these is probably Texas hold’em, which is said to have started in one casino in Robstown, Texas, The Golden Nugget, before going on to become the most played variation of poker in the world.
Modern Poker
For the modern audience, poker has mostly moved to a different medium. Online poker is now the most common way for the game to be played and it continues to evolve.
In line with gaming treads that have seen the market solve towards the dominance of games which are fast-paced, easy to gain access to and reward competitive play, such as Overwatch and Fortnite, online gaming providers have introduced similar ideas, opting for quick joining and fast-paced poker games like KO Poker that reward you for taking chances in order to knock out your opponents.
With newer technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) making their way into poker and new game formats popping up all the time, it seems clear that Poker is a game that will continue to evolve over time.
From its somewhat unclear historical roots, poker has evolved into one of the most popular card games in the world and, as it continues to evolve with the times, it looks set to stay that way.