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The Origin of Poker

There was a time in the Middle-East when things were not so chaotic. I believe it was for a few hours on a lazy Saturday, a few hundred years ago. The Crusades were over, and the Catholics had switched focus to farm women who may or may not have been witches. They put up less of a fight for those who considered torches and really long blades good tools of evangelism. This was also long before extremists started strapping bombs to their chests and sprinting into elementary schools, after being told some story about martyrdom and seventy-two virgins. Somewhere between these events, someone in what used to be Persia had the time to invent the game that would become poker.

During the 16th century a game was developed in Persia (today this country is Iran). Nobody knows who invented this game or even the origins of its creation, but one thing most historians agree on is that the Persian game of “Nas” was the precursor modern day poker.

Nas was played with 25 cards and 5 different suits. There are of course many differences from the game we know, but there are just as many similarities. If you play 5 card stud, you would probably recognize what was going on in Nas. The two games are just that similar. The Persian game also has similar poker hand rankings. For example, a three-of-a-kind in poker is the same as a three-of-a-kind in Nas.

Europeans traveling between the east and west brought Nas back home. They called the game “poque” or “pochen”. When citizens of Europe began to populate the new world, they brought the game with them. It was here in America where poker found a home. It grew to prominence in the American west, and has been a solid part of our American pop culture and identity ever since.

Poker History – Whats in a Name?

Most people don’t give the name much thought. They are too busy trying to perfect the mechanics of stealing the pot with only a pair of threes to bother themselves with how the game was actually named. Those of us with too much time on our hands tend to ponder such things.

The earliest written description of the game was scribed by a gentleman named Jonathan H. Green in 1834. At this point in time the game was being played primarily on Riverboats that traveled the Mississippi. Giving the reader a hint of exactly the sort of person Green thought was the type to travel by riverboat, he referred to poker as the “cheating game”.

It wasn’t long before he realized that he had stumbled on to something that was fairly unknown. The game did not appear in the American Hoyle, a gentleman’s handbook of games, that was the authority on games being played in the United States. No reference here meant that Green was more or less the discoverer of this form of recreation. He named the game Poker.

Was this random? Did he name it with the thoughtless ease that he would name his dog spot, or his son Allan? No, there had to be something else there. Chances are he heard the name from one of the players who frequented the riverboat games.

Most people accept the explanation that the word “Poker” is a variation of the French word, “Poque”. This was a similar card game played in Paris at roughly the same time. Of course French people are generally unpopular, so we started looking for anything that didn’t give them the credit.

Another possibility is a German card game called “Pochspiel”. This game bears some resemblance to modern poker, in the fact that bluffing plays a part in this pursuit as well. A small minority of people think that “Poker” actually comes from the Hindu word “Pukka”, but those people live mostly in Roswell and have devoted their lives to proving the moon landing never happened.

As you can see, theories abound. Considering Green’s reference to Poker the “cheating game”, the name he gave it could reflect that impression. Cardsharps would use the term “Poke” when separating a sucker from their wallet in a rigged game. This would make them the “Poker”.

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