Poker

Poker is a family of card games in which players bet on the value of their hand, combining chance, mathematical probability and psychological bluffing. Its exact origin is genuinely disputed among game historians. Candidate ancestors include the sixteenth century German bluffing game Pochen, its French derivative Poque, played in New Orleans by the early nineteenth century, and the English game Brag. A once common theory tracing poker to the Persian card game As Nas is now regarded by several modern game historians, including James McManus in Cowboys Full, as unsupported by solid evidence, a claim repeated for years without a documented chain connecting the two games. The game now recognizably called poker developed in the United States in the early nineteenth century around New Orleans and Mississippi riverboat gambling; the writer Jonathan H. Green 1834 account of Mississippi riverboat gambling is among the earliest surviving descriptions of a game recognizable as poker, though undocumented earlier play is often claimed for the 1820s.