The Untamed History of Poker: Cards, Cowboys, and Algorithms

Poker has swaggered through history like a cigar-smoking cowboy in a dusty saloon: part outlaw, part legend, never quite respectable, and always the centre of attention. It didn’t just show up one day with a Royal Flush and a stack of chips. No, it shuffled into the human story over centuries, picking up a little bluff here, a dash of probability there, and a whole lot of folklore along the way. And the road to global obsession with the history of poker was anything but straight.

The earliest ancestor of poker didn’t even know it would someday be blamed for countless broken sunglasses in Las Vegas. It was a Persian game called As-Nas, a 16th-century card game with a striking resemblance to poker’s betting mechanics. With four players, a twenty-card deck, and the urge to lie through their teeth, As-Nas was all about raising and bluffing – though probably without the cowboy hats. The game spread quietly, passed down not through tournaments or televised showdowns, but through merchant routes and whispers in candlelit rooms.

Europe got involved soon after, naturally. The Germans had a game called “pochen” (to knock), which not only contributed a verb to poker’s eventual vocabulary but also the idea of betting on a good hand. The French, never ones to miss out on an elegant gamble, called their version “poque.” It sauntered over to New Orleans with French colonists and began to settle in like a gambler at a riverboat table with no clear intention of leaving. French settlers, Spanish influence, and a sprinkling of Creole flair turned poker into a gumbo of cultural mechanics, each hand played under gaslight and watched over by stern-faced barkeeps.

In early 19th-century America, poque became poker, and the cards themselves underwent a bit of a growth spurt. The deck expanded to 52 cards, flushes and straights joined the party, and steamboats on the Mississippi turned into floating casinos. There were no security cameras, no card shufflers, and certainly no anti-cheating software. Just moustached gentlemen in waistcoats doing their best not to get shot over a badly timed bluff. The stakes? Sometimes a pile of coins, sometimes a plot of land, occasionally someone’s last good pair of boots.

It was the Civil War that really filled poker’s boots with American grit. Soldiers on both sides played it in tents, trenches, and makeshift camps. They added new hands like the straight and the draw, and poker began to mutate faster than a rumour in a gold rush town. By the time the 1870s rolled around, stud poker had arrived, and so had the idea of poker being more than just a game. It was a statement of character. The kind that made you squint suspiciously at anyone who folded too quickly. For many, it was less about winning money and more about asserting presence, reading men like they were badly written novels.

Then came the Wild West. You know, saloons with swinging doors, whisky that could strip paint, and poker tables where fortunes changed hands more often than the local sheriff. Doc Holliday didn’t just fix teeth and cough dramatically into handkerchiefs – he was also an accomplished poker player. Wyatt Earp? Played too. And the Dead Man’s Hand? That’s two aces and two eights, supposedly the cards Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he got shot. Just a little bedtime story for gamblers. Poker became the backdrop for shootouts, the cause of duels, and the secret hobby of preachers on their day off.

Poker might have stayed in the whisky-soaked backrooms of American mythology if it weren’t for the 20th century’s flair for drama and media. The World Series of Poker (WSOP) debuted in 1970 thanks to casino owner Benny Binion, who thought it might be fun to lock a bunch of the best players in a room and see who didn’t blink. It worked. From a dusty Las Vegas corner, poker went televised, glamorous, and global. Suddenly, people weren’t just watching the game – they were learning it, mimicking it, dreaming of bracelets and million-dollar pots.

The WSOP final table became a stage of legends. Doyle Brunson and his cowboy hat, Johnny Chan with his orange, Phil Hellmuth with his theatrical tantrums, and eventually, the meteoric rise of a certain accountant named Chris Moneymaker in 2003. He won the WSOP Main Event after qualifying through an online tournament that cost him just $39. Cue the poker boom. Suddenly, everyone with a Wi-Fi signal and a hoodie fancied themselves the next big thing. You couldn’t swing a mouse without hitting a wannabe online poker prodigy. Dorm rooms, internet cafes, and kitchen tables became training grounds for armchair legends.

Online poker exploded. No longer limited to dodgy backrooms or smoke-filled casinos, poker turned into a click-and-play phenomenon. Virtual tables replaced velvet ones, avatars replaced poker faces, and bad beats now came with emojis. It got so big that governments started to panic. The USA brought out the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006, because nothing says “we love freedom” like banning a card game. The poker world split: American players were locked out of sites like PokerStars and Full Tilt, while the rest of the world merrily raked in pots, sipping espresso and bluffing across borders.

Yet poker refused to fold. In fact, it doubled down. Europe took up the mantle with gusto, especially in places like the UK, Germany, and Sweden, where players embraced the maths, the psychology, and the heady allure of bluffing a stranger across time zones. Online forums buzzed with hand analysis, YouTube tutorials taught everything from bankroll management to reverse tells, and suddenly, poker was both a hobby and a discipline.

Back in the flesh-and-blood world, poker kept reinventing itself. High Roller tournaments popped up, with buy-ins that could pay off a small nation’s debt. Poker tours sprang into life across Asia, Latin America, and Africa. And TV kept up, with hole-card cameras, dramatic music, and commentators pretending that checking the turn was a Shakespearean tragedy. Poker Night in America, the European Poker Tour, the Asian Poker Tour – all part of the new globe-trotting card circus.

It wasn’t just about cards anymore. Poker theory became an academic pursuit. Game theory optimal (GTO) strategy emerged, turning players into part-time mathematicians. Books, blogs, solvers, and coaching schools turned poker into a sort of cross between gladiator sport and computer science seminar. Players analysed decision trees, memorised ranges, and debated whether to c-bet on dry flops. The old gunslingers raised eyebrows at the spreadsheets, but the money kept flowing.

Women have always played poker, but now they’re storming the felt in greater numbers, tired of being relegated to side tables or patronised by amateurs. Players like Vanessa Selbst, Kristen Bicknell, Liv Boeree, and Maria Ho became household names, proving poker doesn’t care what gender you are – just whether you can make the right call under pressure. They’re not just playing to win – they’re changing the perception of who belongs at the table.

Cultural moments have kept poker weirdly cool. James Bond played it in “Casino Royale,” replacing baccarat for cinematic tension and smug double-breasted tuxedos. Films like “Rounders” gave us the smoky, underground vibe. And poker apps kept the obsession alive during lockdowns, giving housebound humans one more reason to stare into their screens at 2am. Twitch streams, TikToks, and poker-themed merch followed. Even celebrities like Ben Affleck and Tobey Maguire joined the high-stakes games, swapping scripts for chips.

Artificial Intelligence has now joined the game, obviously. Bots can beat humans in heads-up matches, and yet people still log on in droves to test their intuition against the machines. It’s a bit like bringing a knife to a spreadsheet fight, but it hasn’t dimmed poker’s appeal. The challenge of beating the bot is irresistible. And sometimes, just sometimes, intuition still wins. At least until the next software update.

Even the language of poker has gone global. From “all in” to “the river,” from “slow roll” to “bad beat,” poker-speak has become a dialect of bravado and nerves. You’ll hear it in boardrooms, on dating apps, even in politics. Everyone’s bluffing something. We all raise stakes in different ways, whether it’s negotiating a salary or asking someone out.

So here we are. Poker, the game that once lurked in frontier saloons and was whispered about in polite society, now struts through the digital age with the confidence of a player holding pocket aces. It’s a dance of logic and luck, bravado and brains, staring contests and statistical gymnastics. And whether you’re playing for matchsticks or millions, one truth remains: in poker, you’re not really playing the cards. You’re playing the people. And those people? They’re getting better every day.