Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
THE HISTORY OF POKER
THE HISTORY OF POKER It is impossible to say that any specific earlier card game is the direct ancestor of Poker; it seems to have borrowed elements from many games. The basic principle of Poker is such an obvious one that its use must be very old. I once gave my three-year-old son John (Teeko) twenty shuffled cards, all the aces, kings, queens, jacks and tens, and without any prompting on my part he separated them into those five groups. The first Poker in this country was played with just such a deck, and one could say that Teeko had discovered its basic principle.
The first reference in print to Poker
The first reference in print to Poker which I have found is one by Jonathan H. Green published in 1834. He gives the rules for what he calls a "cheating game" which was then being played on the Mississippi riverboats. He stated that this was the first time the rules had been published, he noted that the American Hoyle then current did not mention the game, and he called it Poker. The game he described was played with twenty cards—aces, kings, queens, jacks and tens. Two, three or four players could play, and each was dealt five cards.