Wall Street dirtiest gambling secrets part one

Wall Street dirtiest gambling secrets part one

The earliest published references to poker date to 1829 (the published diary of English actor Joseph Cowell), 1837 (Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains by James Hildreth), and 1842 (Gambling Unmasked by Jonathan Green). Standards of nonfiction reliability were quite different than they are today. Few people were literate enough to write a book, so publishers relied on professional hacks to supply popular literature.

These people mostly lived in cities near publishers and were unlikely to have any firsthand experience with poker.

Green is the least reliable of the three—he clearly had no idea how poker was played and his accounts of life on the Mississippi are so unconvincing that I don’t think he ever left Philadelphia. Hildreth didn’t write the book attributed to him; he left the regiment long before the events described and may well have been illiterate. Several candidates have been put forward, all of whom imply that the author would not have been present at the poker scenes described. In any event, the game in question is so sketchily described, it could have been anything. Read Hildreth’s book for geography and military tactics, not for poker.

Cowell is the only one of the three who is a real person and who was definitely present at the events he describes. However, the stories he tells are standard gambling anecdotes, clumsily re-created for a Mississippi riverboat setting. He probably did see poker played, unlike Green and Hildreth, but he probably didn’t describe it.

What is interesting about all three accounts is what they don’t say.

All three authors are writing about strange and barbarous places (from the standpoint of their probable readers) and often introduce new words with comments about pronunciation.

All of them use the word poker as if it would be familiar to their readers, and none suggest that it had a foreign or unusual pronunciation. That seems to contradict silly accounts of the origin of the name as being French or Persian words. None confuse it with other, similar games.

All mention that the game was played throughout a large region. All assume their readers know general principles such as that players put money into a pot that one player wins, that players can fold and thereby lose any interest in the pot, and that hands with aces beat hands with kings. So even by the 1830s, poker was a well-known regional game, and people on the East Coast of the United States and in Europe knew the type of game but not the specific rules. It has its own identity; it was not considered a variant of poque or bragg.

All of this places the origin of poker much earlier than most histories state, given the slow spread of games without written rules. Not only was it established throughout the American Southwest, but it was known (if not played) more broadly by 1830. There was no hint of any ancestral relationship to any other game, meaning either that it had separated long ago and completely from its roots or that it was a new invention (of course, it borrowed from other card games, but that’s not the same as being descended from them). This is typical of the way card games evolve—not through gradual rule changes.

There are much better sources about the development of poker.

I start with the wonderful stories collected in G. Frank Lydston’s 1906 Poker Jim. Lydston was a new medical school graduate who joined the California gold rush and chronicled the life of miners, with an emphasis on poker, from the 1850s to the 1890s. This is real life, real poker. The other good source for this period is Hutchings’ California Magazine. The Complete Poker Player by John Blackbridge (1880) gives a lot of color about the East Coast version of the game at that time, as well as theoretical thinking. Among modern books, Seeking Pleasure in the Old West by David Dary (University Press of Kansas, 1995) has a lot of useful and entertaining information.

Foster on Poker by R.F. Foster (1904) is similarly useful. Its other virtue is that it draws on both an extensive library of poker texts and the results of efforts to find old poker players and learn about the early days of the game. A more recent book, The Oxford Guide to Card Games by David Parlett (Oxford University Press, 1990) is the most professional history of poker available—and a wonderful book to read.

Seattle newspaperman Kenneth Gilbert picks up where Poker Jim left off. I read his stories as a kid in reprinted newspaper columns; they were collected as Alaskan Poker Stories in 1958. He covers poker in the Alaska gold rush from 1898 to 1916.

Herbert Yardley is a crucial transitional figure. He learned poker around 1900 from an authentic Old West gambler, but went on to a career in cryptography and international espionage. So he links the roots of poker to modern mathematics and political thinking. His 1956 work, The Education of a Poker Player (reprinted by Orloff

Press in 1998), is a classic.

Allen Dowling handled public relations for Louisiana political boss Huey Long in the 1930s. As a newspaperman and publicist in New Orleans from the 1920s to the 1960s, he provides invaluable accounts of that time and place in Confessions of a Poker Player (1940), Under the Round Table (1960), and The Great American Pastime (A.S.

Barnes, 1970).

The first two were written under the pseudonym Jack King, and are now out of print. A different view of the period is presented in Alfred Lewis’s great biography, Man of the World: Herbert Bayard Swopes: A Charmed Life of Pulitzer Prizes, Poker and

Politics (Bobbs-Merrill, 1978). The Complete Card Player by Albert Ostrow (McGraw-Hill, 1945) and Common Sense in Poker by Irwin Steig (Galahad, 1963) cover poker from the 1930s to the 1950s.

A couple of wonderfully literate English authors next picked up the poker nonfiction mantle. Anthony Alvarez’s The Biggest Game in Town (1982; new paperback edition from Chronicle, 2002) and David Spanier’s Total Poker (High Stakes, 1977) and Easy Money (Trafalgar, 1987) should not be missed. Anthony Holden wrote Big Deal in

1990. More recently, Poker Nation by Andy Bellin (HarperCollins, 2002) and Positively Fifth Street by James McManus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) are the most recent proud additions to the line of great poker nonfiction.

John Stravinsky has collected lots of great excerpts in Read ’Em and Weep (HarperCollins, 2004). Another fun collection is Aces and Kings by Michael Kaplan and Brad Reagan (Wenner Books, 2005).