The Origins of Poker: Where Did the Game Come From?

Nobody can name the person who invented poker, and nobody can name the day. What historians can document is a rough place and period: a five-card betting game for four players, using a 20-card pack, in and around New Orleans and on the Mississippi steamboats in the first decades of the 1800s. David Parlett, the card-game historian and author of the Oxford History of Card Games, calls the birth of poker convincingly dated to the first or second decade of the nineteenth century. Its name most likely descends from the French poque and the German pochen, yet the Persian game as-nas and the English game brag have each been proposed as ancestors or close relatives. This article follows the documented trail: the competing theories, the earliest printed references, the change from 20 cards to 52, and the arrival of the draw, stud, the straight, jackpots and wild cards. It also marks where the sources disagree.

Poker’s Family Tree: Poque, Pochen and Brag

Poker is a vying game, in which players bet on who holds the best hand. Parlett notes that one of its earliest names was Bluff. By definition, poker cannot be older than playing cards, which his history says are first positively attested in thirteenth-century China and reached Europe about 1360 by way of Venice.

Europe had many vying games before poker. Parlett groups them by the number of cards dealt. The German game Pochen, or Pochspiel, which he equates with a fifteenth-century game recorded as Bocken, was a five-card game in which the verb pochen meant to knock and, by extension, to bet or raise. In France it was played first as Glic and then, from the late sixteenth century, as Poque. Parlett calls Poque the likeliest immediate ancestor of poker, because poker arose in culturally French territory. Relatives include Bouillotte, a French 20-card game for four, and Brag, a three-card English game first described by Lucas in 1721.

The setting was New Orleans, which the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 transferred from France to the young United States. Parlett says its gambling saloons, and especially the floating saloons of the Mississippi steamers, which began to ply their trade from about 1811, were poker’s cradle. American Heritage adds that Robert Fulton’s steamboat New Orleans reached the city in 1812, and that by 1820 sixty-nine paddle-wheelers worked the Western rivers.

New Orleans, the Steamers and the First Printed Traces

Parlett’s summary is that original poker, in which four players each received five cards from a 20-card pack and vied over the best hand, evidently arose in New Orleans between 1810 and 1825. No one recorded the moment, since a game is rarely documented while it is being born.

The earliest contemporary reference, Parlett writes, is in James Hildreth’s Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains, published in New York in 1836. It describes a late-night game in a soldiers’ barracks and calls poker popular in the South and West. American Heritage dates the book to 1837 and says Hildreth felt the need to explain in a footnote that poker was a favorite card game of the south and west. The sources therefore differ by a year, and Hildreth does not say whether the pack held 20 cards or 52.

Two slightly later books, Parlett says, independently show poker in use by 1829. The first is by Joe Cowell, an English comedian, whose memoir Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America appeared in 1844. Cowell described a game on a Mississippi riverboat for four players with aces high, then kings, queens, jacks and tens, which he called “a high-gambling Western game, founded on brag”. He placed the game in 1829, although his text says twenty-five cards and the context implies twenty. American Heritage places the game on a St. Louis to New Orleans boat, while True West Magazine names the steamboat Helen M’Gregor.

The second is Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling (1843) by Jonathan H. Green, a reformed cardsharp. According to American Heritage, Green called the 20-card game a “cheating game”. Parlett lists Green’s accounts of 20-card poker on a steamboat bound for New Orleans in February 1833 and at a Louisville house in 1834, and Sol Smith’s memoir recounts a riverboat game in 1835. The 1845 Hoyle’s Games by Henry F. Anners is the earliest American Hoyle to mention it.

Turning Points: 52 Cards and the Draw

The first great change was the pack. Parlett writes that between about 1830 and 1845 poker was increasingly played with all 52 cards, which let more than four people join in. He gives three reasons: to accommodate more players, perhaps to give scope to the recently introduced flush, and chiefly to leave enough cards for the draw. Smith’s 1835 anecdote is evidence, in his view, that the 20-card game was being challenged by the 52-card game by the mid-1830s. True West Magazine says the 52-card deck first appeared in the 1830s but was not readily accepted until about two decades later.

The second change was the draw, in which players may exchange cards after a first round of betting. Parlett says it was borrowed from Brag, which had been described in America in The New Pocket Hoyle of 1805. The first printed mention of draw poker occurs, he says, in the 1850 American edition of Bohn’s New Handbook of Games. Citing Jeffrey Burton, he says Brag vanished within five or six years, roughly between 1848 and 1853, once its draw merged into the full-deck game.

American Heritage agrees that draw poker spread rapidly in the late 1840s and that by 1850 play with a full deck had largely replaced the 20-card original. The old game did not die at once: Parlett cites Allen Dowling for an 1857 New York guidebook that still warned readers against 20-card poker.

Aftermath: Stud, Straights, Jackpots and Wild Cards

American Heritage says poker came to maturity during the Civil War, when gambling was a welcome diversion for soldiers on both sides. Stud poker, in which some cards are dealt face up, first appears in The American Hoyle of 1864, according to both Parlett and American Heritage. Parlett calls it a cowboy invention said to have been introduced around Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

The straight arrived awkwardly. Parlett reports that the 1864 Hoyle listed it, ranked below three of a kind, an order he calls mathematically wrong, and that editions of 1875 and 1887 still called four of a kind the best hand when straights were not played. American Heritage calls the straight a regional variation in 1864, and says its inclusion was optional even in the 1890s. John Keller was still defending it in 1892.

Jackpots, which required a pair of jacks or better to open the betting, followed. Parlett says John Blackridge opposed them as “equivalent to a lottery except that all players must buy tickets”, and that the rule reportedly began at Toledo. American Heritage dates their spread to the 1870s. Wild cards appear as Mistigris, poker with a 53rd blank card, in the 1875 American Hoyle. Parlett dates high-low poker to 1903, deuces wild to a 1919 Hoyle, and the first communal-card variant, Spit in the Ocean, to 1926.

Myths, Disputes and the Other Side

The best-known dispute concerns as-nas. Parlett says the theory of a Persian origin rests on resemblance alone: the earliest descriptions of the game date from 1890 and 1895, and the word as appears to derive from the French for ace. He notes that as-nas would be an ideal ancestor were there any evidence it was known in New Orleans at the time. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica offered other lines of descent: it said most writers traced poker to Il Frusso and Primiera, and it dated draw poker to about 1860, a decade later than Parlett’s first print mention.

Legends also cling to the game. Cowell wrote that poker had been invented, as it is said, by Henry Clay in his youth, and nothing documents the claim. The same 1911 entry names G. B. Zieber as the author of the 1843 Exposure, whereas Parlett and American Heritage name Green.

Early poker had a human cost. Green wrote his book as a warning against gambling, and American Heritage reports that sharping was rampant. It also describes an 1838 account of a Black steamboat fireman who staked his value as a slave on a card and lost, and calls the wagering of human lives an ignoble facet of early poker.

Poker Origins Timeline

Related Stories

Poker’s story continues in the twentieth century, and WagerPast follows several related threads. The tournament era that reshaped the game is told in how the World Series of Poker began. The same Mississippi and New Orleans world appears in the history of dice, which follows craps to 1840s New Orleans, and in the history of roulette, another French import. Poker even lent its hands to early machines, as the history of slot machines shows with its 1891 Brooklyn card machine, while the history of lotteries gives wider context.

Sources & References

• David Parlett — A History of Poker, Pagat (2005)
• David Parlett — History of Poker: References, Pagat (2005)
• Jack Kelly — A History of Poker, American Heritage (November/December 2006)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911) — Poker
• Johnny D. Boggs — Long Before Texas Hold ’em, True West Magazine (2005)