History of Poker: Where the Word Comes From, How the Game Spread and the Moneymaker Effect

What does the word “poker” mean?

In modern English poker has two everyday meanings: the card game and a fire poker — the metal rod used to stir coals in a fireplace (from the verb to poke, “to prod”). The two words sound the same, but most historians do not think the game was named after the fireplace tool.

In other languages the game simply kept its English name: poker in German, French, Spanish and Italian, покер in Russian. So if you look up a translation of “poker”, the answer is the same word — the interesting part is where the word came from.

Where poker comes from: theories of the origin

No single document says “this is where poker was invented”. Historians agree that the game grew out of older European betting games with bluffing, and there are several theories about the name itself. Treat them as theories, not facts:

19th century: Mississippi riverboats and the spread across the USA

The first descriptions of poker come from New Orleans and the Mississippi valley. English actor Joseph Cowell described a game played there in 1829: four players, a deck of just 20 cards (aces, kings, queens, jacks and tens), five cards each, and bets on whose hand was best.

From New Orleans the game travelled up the river on steamboats. Riverboats were floating towns with long trips, money and time to kill — and with professional gamblers and card cheats. Writer Jonathan H. Green, a reformed gambler, described poker as a “cheating game” of the riverboats in the 1830s and 1840s.

Then poker moved west with the Gold Rush and the railroads, into saloons and mining towns. The most famous Wild West story is Wild Bill Hickok, shot in Deadwood in 1876 while playing poker; the cards he is said to have held — black aces and eights — have been called the dead man’s hand ever since.

From 20 cards to 52: draw poker, stud and new hands

With 20 cards and four players there was no draw and almost no room for strategy. As the game spread, players switched to the full 52-card deck — more players could sit at the table and new hands appeared, above all the flush.

• Draw poker — each player gets five closed cards and can exchange some of them once. By the middle of the 19th century it was described in game books and became the classic form of the game. See our guide to classic poker.
• Stud poker — some cards are dealt face up and there are several betting rounds. Five-card stud spread around the time of the American Civil War (1860s); seven-card stud later became the main casino game for decades.
• The straight was added as a hand in the same era; wild cards, lowball and split-pot games followed by the end of the century.
• Community card games — where some cards are shared by everyone — appeared in the early 20th century and eventually gave the world Texas Hold’em and Omaha.

Today there are dozens of poker variants. We sorted them in our guide to types of poker.

Texas Hold’em: born in Robstown, Texas

According to the commonly told story, Texas Hold’em was first played in the small town of Robstown, Texas, in the early 1900s. In 2007 the Texas legislature officially recognised Robstown as the birthplace of the game. Each player gets two private cards and shares five community cards — simple to learn and full of decisions.

For decades Hold’em was a Texas road game. In 1967 a group of Texan players — Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim and Crandell Addington among them — brought it to Las Vegas. No-Limit Hold’em turned out to be perfect for tournaments: any hand can put a player’s whole stack at risk.

Las Vegas and the first World Series of Poker (1970)

In 1970 casino owner Benny Binion invited the best players to Binion’s Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas. That gathering became the World Series of Poker (WSOP). The first champion, Johnny Moss, was chosen by a vote of the players; from 1971 the title was decided by a freezeout tournament, and the Main Event later settled on the famous $10,000 buy-in.

WSOP winners receive a gold bracelet, which is still the most famous trophy in poker. In 1979 the Poker Hall of Fame was founded, and the series slowly grew from a gathering of road gamblers into a world championship. The legends of that era — Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Stu Ungar — are in our article about famous poker players.

Television added the last piece. In the late 1990s and early 2000s broadcasts began to use hole-card cameras, so viewers could finally see the players’ cards — and poker became a sport you could watch and understand.

2003: the Moneymaker effect

In 2003 Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Tennessee and an amateur player, won a seat in the WSOP Main Event through an online satellite that cost him a few dozen dollars. He went on to beat a field of 839 players and won $2.5 million — with a surname that sounded made up for television.

His win sent a simple message to millions of viewers: anyone can do this. Online poker sites boomed, the Main Event fields exploded — by 2006 there were 8,773 entrants — and poker turned into a mass hobby. This is what people call the Moneymaker effect.

The online poker boom and what came after

The first online poker game for real money was dealt in 1998. Within a few years online rooms let people play at any hour for any stakes, with dozens of tables at once. After 2003 new players arrived by the million, and an entire generation of professionals learned the game online instead of in casinos.

• 2006 — the United States passed the UIGEA, which restricted payments to online gambling sites; part of the industry left the US market.
• 2011 — on 15 April, “Black Friday”, US authorities shut down the largest online poker sites for American players.
• 2010s — games got much tougher: tracking software, training sites and later solvers raised the level of regular players.
• 2020s — growth of mobile apps and private clubs, where friends and communities run their own tables.

How online poker works today — rooms, apps and clubs — is covered in our guide to poker online.

Poker in the USSR and Russia

In the Soviet Union poker was never a mainstream game. Playing cards for money was illegal, and the classic card game of the Soviet intelligentsia was preference (préférence) — a trick-taking game, not poker. Poker was known mostly from books and foreign films and was played in small private circles.

Things changed at the end of the 1980s, when the first legal casinos opened in Moscow. In the 1990s casinos spread across the country, and the poker played there was often the casino version — Russian poker against the dealer — rather than a game between players. You can read about it in our article on classic poker.

In the 2000s Hold’em arrived through television and the internet, and for a short time poker was even recognised in Russia as a sport — see our article on sports poker. Since 2009 land-based casinos in Russia have been allowed only in special gambling zones, so most Russian-speaking players play online and in apps.

Today: poker apps and clubs

Modern poker lives on the phone. Club apps such as ClubGG and PPPoker let anyone create a private club, invite friends and play Hold’em, Omaha and other formats at a table that fits in your pocket. Clubs vary a lot in quality — which is exactly why we collect reviews in our catalog.

What does “poker face” mean?

Poker face is an English idiom for a face that shows no emotion — a calm, unreadable expression that hides what you really think. It comes from poker, where players try not to give away whether they hold a monster hand or nothing at all.

Outside the card table the phrase means the same thing: you “keep a poker face” in negotiations, during an awkward conversation or when you are trying not to laugh. In Russian it is usually translated as “an impenetrable face” or “a stone face”, or simply borrowed as “покерфейс”.

• How “poker face” is used
• To keep a poker face — to hide your emotions.
• Poker-faced — with a blank, serious expression.
• To have a great poker face — to be very hard to read.

Timeline: the history of poker in one table

Read the history? Try playing yourself

Two hundred years of history are best understood at the table. If you are new, start with how to learn poker, then try a few hands at low stakes. Here are top ClubGG clubs from our catalog, ranked by player reviews:

RatePokerClub catalogTop ClubGG clubs by player reviews

All clubs

#1MOJO 24.51 reviewRakeback 50%Union: Massive Poker UnionOpen club #2MOJO 1No reviews yetRakeback 50%Union: AllinUnionOpen club #3Mr Pink PantherNo reviews yetRakeback 40%Open club #4ZerakeNo reviews yetRakeback Zero RakeOpen club #5POKER VIBE UANo reviews yetRakeback 40%Open club

FAQ