Poker History

A short history of cards: Playing cards are believed to have been invented in China and/or India sometime around 900 A.D. The Chinese are thought to have originated card games when they began shuffling paper money into various combinations. In China today, the general term for playing cards means "paper tickets".
The contemporary 52-card deck used in the U.S. was originally called the "French Pack" (circa 1600's) which was later adopted by the English and subsequently the Americans. The first records of gambling were in 2300 B.C.

Three games successively dominated Poker during the first century and a half of Poker history: Draw, Seven-Card Stud, and Hold 'Em, with each game cornering over two-thirds of the market during their ascendancy. Draw was far ahead in popularity until sometime in the early 20th century, when Seven-Card Stud took the lead, which it kept until about 1980, thriving in the armed forces during WWII, and then during the rise of the Nevada casino industry in the fifties and sixties.

Five-Card Stud played a role as a major big-bet game from its invention in the 1850's right up until Hold 'Em really took off in the 1970's. It was never as popular as either Draw or Seven-Card Stud, which are both excellent limit-betting games and as such, appealed to a mass-market that Five-Card Stud does not suit.

In the late seventies or early eighties, Hold 'Em overtook Seven-Card Stud in popularity, helped by the huge leap in status it gained as being the world championship game from the early seventies, and also by a surge in player numbers as US gambling laws were liberalized. Unlike Seven-Card Stud and Five-Card Stud, Hold 'Em plays equally well with any form of betting from limit to no-limit. It quickly made Five-Card Stud more or less obsolete, and steadily reduced Seven-Card Stud's share of the market from about 70% in 1971, to less than 20% today.

While Hold 'Em's huge success shows that it was an excellent choice as world championship game, it is interesting to speculate how different things might be today if No-limit Seven-Card Stud had been invented in 1960 instead of 1998.
Like Hold 'Em, Mississippi plays equally well at any limit and it is arguable that if it had been an established game back then, it may well have been selected in 1971 to decide the world championship instead of Hold 'Em. After all, Hold 'Em had been around for thirty or forty years in 1971, but even on it's home ground in the South-West of the United States it remained far less popular than Seven-Card Stud until it was made world championship game.
Hold 'Em enthusiasts may find that hard to swallow, but the case is reasonable. No-limit Hold 'Em was unknown to the vast majority (probably over 95%) of spectators and players in the early 1970's, while Seven-Card Stud was by far the most popular game and was considered by the majority of players to be the best Poker form.

Aside from having a player base that was probably fifty times the size of Hold 'Em's, Seven-Card Stud is a very interesting game to discuss because of the large number of exposed cards in every round of play. The same can be said for No-limit Mississippi, in which there are even more exposed cards. Hold 'Em reveals very little to even a well-informed spectator, and is totally incomprehensible to non-players. If No-limit Seven-Card Stud was more widely understood and more interesting to watch, it would have attracted far more spectators than No-limit Hold 'Em, had it been played at the inaugural WSOP, when no one game was use to decide the championship.

Seeing as drawing spectators to his casino was Benny Binion's aim in running the tournament, No-limit Seven-Card Stud would have had a big edge over No-limit Hold 'Em in the contest for championship status in the following years, if it had been available.

As it was, after a couple of years of experimenting with different multi-game formats, it was decided to use just one game to decide the world championship: No-limit Hold 'Em. While Hold 'Em's success is well deserved, if it hadn't been chosen as the world championship game it is questionable whether it's subsequent rise to the market domination it now enjoys would have occurred. If the tables were turned, and No-limit Seven-Card Stud had been declared the championship game in 1971 and gained all the status which goes with the job, Hold 'Em, with it's then tiny market share, would have had a very difficult task in overtaking Stud as the major form.

Poker has been dominated by games based on seven live cards for most of a century now, and there is no reason to suspect that that will change. How much of the Poker market Hold 'Em and its' variations will surrender to Mississippi and its' variations remains to be seen. It seems reasonable to suggest that the natural division of the market between Stud and communal-card games will become more equal, now that Stud is available in a form which can compete on equal terms as both a limit and a big-bet game.

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