A short history of poker

The earliest accounts come from New Orleans. In 1829 the English actor Joseph Cowell described a game played there with a 20-card deck, each player betting on whose hand was best. In 1843 the writer Jonathan H. Green described how it spread up the Mississippi on the riverboats. Over the next decades it took on the draw, where players exchange cards, and around the Civil War both stud and the straight.

Games with shared cards in the middle came later, around 1925. Texas hold'em, the version with two private cards and five shared ones, is said to have started in Robstown, Texas, early in the 20th century; the Texas Legislature recognised the town as its birthplace in 2007. It reached Las Vegas in 1963, when Corky McCorquodale introduced it at the California Club.

In 1970 Benny and Jack Binion held the first World Series of Poker at Binion's Horseshoe in Las Vegas. There was no final table: the players elected Johnny Moss champion. The next year the title was decided by a freezeout, played until one player had every chip, and from 1972 the main event cost $10,000 to enter. Strategy began to be written down soon after, most famously in Doyle Brunson's Super/System in the late 1970s.

The best-known hand from that era is the end of the 1988 main event. Johnny Chan held a jack and a nine, Erik Seidel a queen and a seven, and the flop came Q-10-8. Seidel had top pair; Chan had flopped a straight. Chan slow-played it, and Seidel moved all in on the river. Accounts of the suits differ, so averaged over every suit combination, Chan was 95% to win once the flop was down. The 1998 film Rounders features the video of the hand.

The 2000 main event was the first with more than 500 players. Heads up, Chris Ferguson started with a ten-to-one chip lead over T. J. Cloutier. On the 93rd hand of their match, both went all in before the flop.

Ferguson's ace-nine was a 26% shot against ace-queen, with a worse kicker to the shared ace, a hand dominated by Cloutier's. A nine was his clearest way to overtake ace-queen, though other runouts could produce a win or a tie. He stayed behind through the turn; the nine of hearts on the river won it.

By 2003 two things had changed. Online poker had arrived, with the first real-money game dealt by Planet Poker in 1998, and television had found a way to make poker watchable. The British show Late Night Poker began in 1999, and with cameras showing viewers the players' hidden cards, televised tours such as the World Poker Tour followed.

That year Chris Moneymaker won his main event seat in an $86 online satellite, in his first live tournament. He beat 838 other players for the $2.5 million first prize. On the final hand he held five-four against Sam Farha's jack-ten:

Moneymaker started as the 36% underdog, flopped two pair and made a full house on the river. The main event field tripled the next year and kept growing:

2003 main event

839

players

2004 main event

2,576

players

2006 main event

8,773

players

The growth slowed after 2006, when the United States passed a law restricting payments to online gambling sites, but the game had already spread worldwide. Computers later changed how players studied. Programs that compute game-theory strategies, called solvers, changed how strong players study, and the charts and flop solutions in this trainer come from the same kind of computation, as how the charts are made explains.

To follow any of these hold'em hands, you need to compare the best five-card hand each player can make. The trainer's lesson seven cards, best five covers it in two minutes.