Famous for featuring in films such as ‘Oceans Eleven’, ‘Casino Royale’ ‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ and the Gregory Peck Western, ‘The Gunfighter’, attached to the game of poker is a stigma of gangster cool. Here is a brief outline of Poker’s rise from local beginnings in small New Orleans gambling saloons and Mississippi floaters, to its eventual status as an internationally renowned modern tournament.

Poker is a type of card game in which players bet on the value of the card combination in their possession by placing a bet into a central pot. The winner is either he who holds the hand with the highest value according to an established rankings hierarchy, or he who remains in the hand after all the others have folded (to ‘fold’ means to make an uncalled bet.)

The birth of the game is generally taken to be in the first or second decades of the nineteenth century, when it appeared in the New Orleans territory ceded to the inchoate United States by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The game’s cradle was, first, the gambling saloons of New Orleans and, then from 1811, the large floating saloons otherwise known as the ‘Mississippi steamers’.

During the period between 1830 and 1845, the game was changed. Playing with 52 rather than 20 cards meant that more than four people could participate and there could be a greater number of card combinations. It was during the mid-nineteenth century that the game also saw the introduction of a ‘draw’ which created a second betting interval and enabled poor hands to be significantly improved.

Other modifications included a new kind of poker called ‘Stud-horse poker’, a cowboy invention introduced in Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, and the ‘Jackpot’, a concept that prevented players from opening the game without holding a pair of jackpots. This was designed to impose discipline on the game by driving out wild players who would bet on anything.

It wasn’t until 1904 that a definitive set of rules to Poker was set out, first in the United States Printing Company and thereafter the New York Sun. Even so, yet another change to the game had occurred in 1903 – a form of ‘highbrow poker’ in which the pot divides equally between highest and lowest hands – and this achieved a new popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. It was this popularity that ought to be seen as symptomatic of a new, international passion for the game, and its subsequent rise into a modern sporting tournament dates from the World Series of Poker, initiated in 1970.

Now, poker has become institutionalised by the internet and players have the modern-day option of playing in the privacy of their own rooms, with a number of online sites now offering online casino games like Riverbelle to play on your PC. It may be without the Sinatra-snaz, but nonetheless; the glamour of the casino means that these sites have faithful players, and poker has kept its cool.