Primero

Primero is a sixteenth-century gambling card game whose earliest known reference dates to 1526, in a work by the Italian writer Francesco Berni published in Rome, which has led some scholars to argue for an Italian origin while others argue the game began in Spain. It was played with a forty-card Italian or Spanish pattern deck, seated two to six players though it is described as working best with four to six, and moved counter-clockwise around the table with games typically lasting around twenty minutes. Primero is widely regarded as one of the direct ancestors of the modern game of poker, sharing hand-ranking and bluffing concepts that are strikingly similar to poker's own, which makes it one of the more historically significant gambling card games of the early modern period even though it fell out of common play centuries ago.