Last week when the primary connection with poker in print — the primary "hand report," because it were — we noticed it contained most of the same details that regularly ensue in later cultural representations of poker. It described a game played in secret, within the dead of night, culminating in an unbelievable four-aces-versus-four-kings showdown that suggested cheating may need occurred. Cursing and violence then punctuated the scene, spicing things up even further.
Other early references to poker similarly present the cardboard game as unsafe for newcomers, helping further establish its dangerous reputation while it first started to make its way up the Mississippi and around the still young, still developing country.
Speaking of being young, another writer who described one of the most first actual poker games specifically took it upon himself to shield the youth particularly from this sort of harmful activity. He knew what he was writing about, too, having inflicting a variety of harm himself as some of the first generation of card sharps.
An Early Warning In regards to the Perils of Poker
In 1843 there appeared a book with an ominous title page — An Exposure of the humanities and Miseries of Gambling; Designed Especially as a Warning to the Youthful and Inexperienced Against the Evils of That Odious and Destructive Vice.
Such an opener needed to function just a little like those "Viewer Discretion Advised" warnings in the beginning of a television show — you know, the sort that make the shows irresistible to the very audience for whom the content is described as "unsuitable." More or less an early version of "click bait" designed to get book buyers to forestall and take a better look.
The book was written by Jonathan Harrington Green, a self-described "reformed gambler" who had previously spent a dozen years on the gaming tables cheating at cards by a lot of means, including using marked decks and "shiners" or small mirrors to peer cards as they were being dealt. Unlike the ambivalent author of the Dragoon Campaigns whom we were discussing last week, Green's unsubtle title tells us very quickly his intention — namely, to check out to do everything he can along with his book to dissuade readers from carrying out gambling games of all kinds, including poker.
Jonathan H. Green's warning to America's youth
Such a purpose if truth be told partially prevents Green from sharing certain particulars of the way this relatively new game of poker is definitely played. After all, he doesn't need to encourage his readers to be told it!
"I would that every one were unaware of it," Green claims amid wide-eyed exhortations to bypass poker in any respect costs, a game he believes to be an early step along a fateful "road to ruin" that starts with innocent pursuits like dominoes, checkers, and whist, then ends up in faro, roulette, horse racing, cock-fighting, and worse.
Even so, Green does flesh out for his reader basic rules for Old Poker — the 20-card game derived from the French game poque featuring only a single care for no draw, and one round of betting. He additionally explains how "there are not any limits to the bets" and so the sport "frequently... begins as little as 1 / 4 of a dollar, and runs as much as thousands in a single or two minutes." He explains in addition how as within the English game brag, poker can involve bluffing, insofar because the" man who has probably the most money will frequently bet so high on a poor hand, as to run his adversary off and win," a tactic he calls "a run off."
Green identifies the "southern and western portions of our country" because the possibly areas to come across poker — including on steamboats — mentioning particularly a game played in New Orleans in 1835 (midway through his own tenure as a card sharp). He also notably describes "a game of full deck poker, that is played with the entire pack of fifty-two cards," a transformation that may allow for greater than four players to be dealt right into a hand.
Green's own background fleecing travelers at the Mississippi (a part of a more extensive criminal past) forces him to cast his narrative because the production of a now-rehabilitated sinner. As he explains, his experience uniquely qualifies him to warn us about poker and other similarly dangerous games, writing as he does from his new perspective of getting" separated himself (and he trusts in God, forever) from that class of persons called gamblers."
Take a Seat, Someone Will Cheat
When it involves poker, Green's warning to readers is twofold. Not just does playing the sport mean risking the overall moral degradation due to all sorts of gambling. Also problematic is the truth that the preponderance of cheaters in poker ensures "the uninitiated need never expect to win anything."
Furthermore, the then-more popular 20-card game affords more opportunities for cheaters than does "full deck poker," believes Green, because the reduced collection of cards makes "it really easy to maintain the attention on particular cards, and to stock them, and deal off particular hands."
Reading Green explain the cheater's approach to "frequently giving out hands which can be seldom got within the common process fair play, and are seldom dealt out but by design," it's hard to not entertain the concept that he is given us an evidence for the Captain's luck versus the most important in that quad aces versus quad kings hand back in old Rodger's cabin in Dragoon Campaigns.
Even so, there is something disingenuous about Green's sensational handling of his subject, which like similar examples of heavy-handed moral instruction tends to be more exploitative than educational. Further encouraging our cynicism, Green's mercenary intentions can be more obviously signaled by his rapid production of greater than a half-dozen other anti-gambling titles over the following two decades, a few which also discuss with other poker games including one occurring as early as 1833.
Those books sold well, too, dealing with numerous editions and helped by Green's touring the rustic to advertise them. "What he reaped on the gaming tables was probably small compared to what he made later from his staggering popularity as a lecturer and from [his] books," writes Henry Chafetz in a chapter on Green in his history of gambling within the U.S., Play the Devil.
Partly riding the wave of alternative reform movements of his era (including a burgeoning temperance movement, women's rights campaigns, and the abolitionist cause), Green's personal reform was especially well-timed — immediately saving his soul and earning him riches.
"There was a time when this game was not so dangerous"
Even if we would not take the reformed gambler's warnings about cards as seriously as he'd like us to, Green's accounts of early poker games are nonetheless valuable for helping us attempt to pinpoint when and where poker first started to be played, in addition to to assist us gauge early cultural responses to the game.
Green establishes poker to has been an already popular pastime by the 1830s. In fact, he even means that by then the sport had undergone a generation's worth of change to provide one of those nostalgia for its earlier form.
"There was a time when this game was not so dangerous because it has become of late years," claims Green of this earliest version of poker.
"It was then common to look men of virtually all classes amuse themselves at this game; and landlords would join their guests for social amusement," he continues. "Captains and other officers of packets and steamboats, generally, would engage freely in a game with their passengers for recreation. And little if anything was wagered or lost on the game, and all got up pleased, and rarely had any reason for dissatisfaction."
Ah, back within the day. Aren't we always talking about poker — and as regards to everything else — this way?
It's not an overly convincing memory Green describes here, positing because it does the existence of a type of "before-the-fall" version of poker through which players somehow competed without self-interest. (Imagine a global during which after every poker game "all got up pleased.") Against that idyllic backdrop Green contrasts the later corrupt player of "a game that may be immensely destructive — perhaps more so than any another short game at cards now in use."
Then again, perhaps it's not that outrageous to consider the earliest poker games being relatively free from later troubles due to greed, dishonesty, and opportunism. Games often do start off that way, don't they? Until something happens to damage the happy spell, anyway, a moment usually signaled by someone saying "Hey, I BELIEVED this was a friendly game!"
In any case, it's clear that by the point poker first started to be written about in the course of the 1830s and 1840s, the sport have been around long enough already to have developed a temporary history with a subculture having already grown up around it — and with sides already being taken over even if poker need to be considered an "odious and destructive vice."
From the forthcoming "Poker & Popular culture: Telling the tale of America’s Favorite Card Game." Martin Harris teaches a course in "Poker in American Film and Culture" within the American Studies program at UNC-Charlotte.
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