In many ways, the overall game epitomizes the raw bone tenacity of the American spirit that drove the western movement from the Mississippi River in the 1800’s. Life on the frontier was harsh, hazardous and filled with risks – the pioneers were literally gambling on their lives each day. To both survive in the untamed west and to win at draw poker a guy needed to be skillful at what he did and count on lady luck to smile on him. He had to closely watch his adversaries and at times bluff his way out of a situation. The outcomes of his actions could prove very profitable or he could lose everything, sometimes even his life. Draw playking88 was a natural choice for the men of the American west who have been used to risking everything.

The game was the consequence of an evolutionary process that started when poker was initially took shape in the us early in the nineteenth-century. Just when and where it had been first played is subject to a continuing debate among historians, as is the game’s origins. Several postulations attribute the game’s lineage to a French game called “poque” or possibly to a German game referred to as “pochspiel.” British historians declare that the game was a primary descendent of the English card game of “brag.” Still other researchers claim that poker evolved from the sixteen-century Persian card game called “as nas” that was played with a twenty-five-card deck containing five suites and has rules similar to five-card stud poker. Since exact documentation of poker’s early history is impossible to find out its inception will most likely remain a mystery.

Poker is considered to have started in America sometime in the first 1800’s, possibly in saloons of New Orleans. From there it spread up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers by way of the commercial steam boat traffic. Then as the wagon trains and railroads pushed the frontier west, poker continued to gain popularity with the early adventurers. An English actor, Joseph Crowell, recorded seeing poker being played on the riverboats in his diary of 1829 and later in his 1844 book, Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America. A reformed gambler by the name of Jonathan H. Green wrote about early poker in his book, Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling that has been published in 1843. Both men described an early version of poker that has been used a twenty-card deck (A-K-Q-J-10). All of four players was dealt five cards and bets were positioned on these five original cards without discards or draws. Once the betting was on the owner of the greatest hand won the pot – in the order of one pair, two pair, triplets, full house (one pair and a triple), and four of a sort. As a result of limits of a twenty-card deck there was only a single round of betting prior to the winning hand was declared and this made bluffing a more difficult maneuver.

As the game evolved it moved to a thirty-two card deck and eventually to the standard “French deck” of fifty-two cards. Sometime in the mid-1830’s straights and flushes were introduced as winning hands. A few years later draw poker was born and started making the rounds of gambling halls in the west. The initial reference to draw poker appeared in the American edition of Bohn’s New Handbook of Games in 1850. In that same year, wild cards were introduced to poker play.