The History of Texas Hold’em: From Robstown to Las Vegas

Texas Hold’em is the most recognizable form of poker in the world, yet nobody can say who dealt the first hand. The state of Texas has formally named a birthplace, the road gamblers who carried the game to Las Vegas have left their own recollections, and historians disagree about almost every date in between. What the record does show is a clear path: a regional game of the Texas rounders in the first half of the 20th century, a quiet arrival in Las Vegas in the 1960s, and a place in the 1970 World Series of Poker that eventually made it the game of the championship. This article follows that path from Robstown to the Horseshoe, flags every point where sources disagree, and leaves the later boom to other stories.

A Game Without a Birth Certificate

In May 2007 the 80th Texas Legislature passed a concurrent resolution that formally recognized Robstown, Texas, as the birthplace of Texas Hold’em. The text says that the game’s invention dates to the early 1900s, when it is traditionally held that the first hand was dealt in Robstown, and that it traveled northward in the hands of rounders. The word traditionally matters. A 2023 piece in The Bend magazine points out that the resolution cites no names or locations and appears to rest on local lore.

Writer James McManus, in Card Player magazine in 2008, noted that the time and place of the first hand are impossible to pinpoint, and that the phrase early 1900s itself shows how hard it is to be precise. He wrote that hold’em arrived in Dallas, the state’s unofficial gambling capital, around 1925. The veteran player Johnny Moss claimed to have played limit hold’em at a Dallas club and no-limit hold’em at another in the 1930s, but McManus found no record of hold’em in Moss’s legendary 1949 showdown with Nick the Greek.

The game also carried other names. Scott Sloan, a student author writing in the Sports Lawyers Journal, notes that it was called Hold Me Darlin’, Tennessee Hold Me, or simply Hold’em. The Bend adds that books about poker published into the 1950s contain no profile of Texas Hold’em, even though they describe variants that come close.

Road Gamblers Carry It West

By the 1950s, the game was spreading through the state in the hands of professional card players, known as rounders or road gamblers, who drove between Texas towns in search of high-stakes games. The Bend reports that Doyle Brunson learned the game in Fort Worth in 1958 under the name hold me darling, and that Crandell Addington first saw it in 1959. Addington recalled in Super System 2 that hold’em spread through Texas in the early 1960s, and he named leading road gamblers who promoted it: Pinky Rhoden of Lubbock, Duck Mallard of Lockhart, Jesse Alto of Corpus Christi, Jack Straus of Houston and Tom Moore of San Antonio.

McManus offers a pointed explanation for their enthusiasm: an expert would want to play for high stakes against opponents who were only just learning the game. The same road gamblers were drawn to Las Vegas because poker was legal there. Addington credited Felton McCorquodale, whose surname is also spelled McCorkindale, with introducing hold’em to Las Vegas in 1963 at the California Club on Ogden and Main Street downtown, according to McManus. Sloan, citing a book by Sam Farha and Storms Reback, also dates the California Club’s first hold’em game to 1963.

Other texts give a later date. The Texas Legislature’s resolution says that the game was first played in Las Vegas at the Golden Nugget Casino in 1967, and Sloan notes the conflict between the two accounts. McManus describes the Golden Nugget game as one that tempted few tourists from the Strip to drop in, so that hold’em remained an unintentionally well-kept secret for the rest of the decade. He adds that the game was so insular that, at the height of the war in Southeast Asia, McCorquodale reportedly asked Brunson where Vietnam was.

The Dunes, the Horseshoe and the Championship

The game left its hiding place in 1969, when, according to McManus, the Texans were invited by Sid Wyman to play hold’em near the entrance of his Dunes Casino, on the site where the Bellagio later stood. Public awareness had begun a year earlier, when a story by A.D. Livingston in the August 16, 1968 issue of Life magazine introduced readers to a version of poker called Hold Me Darling, Tennessee Hold Me or Texas Hold’Em, according to The Bend. The forerunner of the World Series, the same article explains, was the Texas Gamblers’ Reunion in Reno, which drew players such as Brunson and Moss. In 1970, Benny Binion and his Texas associates held the first World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe. The Texas resolution says the inaugural event featured no-limit Texas Hold’em, while McManus is more precise: hold’em was one of five games in the inaugural World Series of Poker in 1970.

The step that made hold’em the game of the championship is dated differently by different sources. McManus writes that the organizers picked it to decide the championship event the following year, 1971. Sloan writes that in 1972 Binion dedicated the tournament exclusively to hold’em. McManus judged that the choice made hold’em’s later status inevitable. The tournament’s own story, from its 1969 Reno precursor to the freezeout format, is told in the related stories below.

Why Hold’em Spread

Sloan offers a reason that was visible at the table. Hold’em appealed to spectators because it includes exposed community cards in the center of the table, in contrast to variants with fewer visible cards. Even so, audiences could not see the players’ hole cards, the two private cards each player holds, until a showdown. Sloan notes that a hole-card camera was eventually invented so that television viewers could see them.

The sources consulted for this article do not give a single cause for hold’em’s rise, and a single cause is unlikely. Sloan’s point about visible community cards is a plausible contributor, not a proven one. The record does show the sequence of exposure: a secret among Texas road gamblers in the early 1960s, a game played in public on the Strip by 1969, and a place in the first World Series of Poker in 1970, where it was one choice among five. Each step moved the game in front of a wider audience, which is a narrower claim than saying that any one of them made it the world’s favorite.

Legends, Disputes and the Other Side

Four points remain open. First, the Robstown claim: the 2007 resolution relies on tradition rather than cited evidence, and Brunson, as reported by The Bend, remembered other possible origin cities, including Corpus Christi and Waco, although he was not from the Coastal Bend. Second, the Las Vegas debut: 1963 at the California Club in McManus’s and Sloan’s accounts, against 1967 at the Golden Nugget in the resolution. Third, the championship: 1971 or 1972. Fourth, Moss’s claim of playing hold’em in Dallas in the 1930s, which McManus reports as a claim and not as a documented fact.

There is also an other side to the story. The Bend notes that the game has been, through its history, of varying degrees of legality in Texas, and that no agency tracked new games or reported on what was dealt in private spaces. McManus suggests that the road gamblers valued a new game because it let experts play for high stakes against novices. The sources describe the successes of a handful of professionals, not the experience of typical players.

Texas Hold’em Timeline

Related Stories

To follow the tournament that carried hold’em into the mainstream, read how the World Series of Poker began. For the older story of where poker itself came from, including the disputed poque and brag theories, see the origins of poker. Both rest on the pack of cards traced in the history of playing cards.

Sources & References

• Texas Legislature — H.C.R. No. 109, 80th Legislature, Regular Session (2007), enrolled version
• James McManus, Card Player — Hold Me, Darlin’ (2008)
• Scott Sloan — Putting Texas Back in Texas Hold ‘Em, Sports Lawyers Journal, vol. 27
• Jillian Becquet, The Bend Magazine — The Origins of Texas Hold’Em (2023)