online poker games

IntroductionPoker is a five-card vying game played with standard playing-cards.
A vying game is one where, instead of playing their cards out, the players bet as to who holds the best card combination by progressively raising the stakes until either -
there is a showdown, when the best hand wins all the stakes (‘the pot’), or all but one player have given up betting and dropped out of play, when the last person to raise wins the pot without a showdown.
It is therefore possible for the pot to be won by a hand that is not in fact the best, everyone else having been bluffed out of play. One of Poker's earliest names was, in fact, ‘Bluff’. Bluffing is as essential to vying as finessing is to trick-play.
A five-card vying game is one where, no matter how many cards may be dealt to each player, the only valid combinations are those of five cards. In orthodox Poker these are, from highest to lowest:
straight flush (five cards in suit and sequence, Ace high or low, as AKQJ10 or 5432A) four of a kind, fours (four cards of the same rank and one idler, as K-K-K-K-x) full house (three of one rank and two of another, as Q-Q-Q-4-4) flush (five cards in suit but not in sequence, as J-9-8-7-3) straight (five cards in sequence but not in suit, as 10-9-8-7-6) three of a kind, threes, triplet, trips (three of the same rank plus two of two different ranks, as 7-7-7-x-y) two pair (as Q-Q-9-9-x) one pair (as 3-3-x-y-z) high card (no combination: as between two such hands the one with the highest card wins)
(The highest possible straight flush, consisting of A-K-Q-J-10 of a suit and known as a royal flush, is sometimes added to the list in order to bring the number of combinations up to the more desirable ten, but of course it is not different in kind from a straight flush. Other five-card combinations, known as freak hands, are recognized in unorthodox Poker variants.)
Any vying game based on these five-card hands is a form of Poker, and any game lacking either or both of them is not, even if it contains Poker as part of its title. For example, so-called Whisk(e)y Poker and Chinese Poker are gambling games played with Poker combinations, but both lack the element of vying, the former being a commerce game and the latter a partition game. Other games or game components are sometimes drafted into the form of Poker known as Dealer’s Choice, but this does not make them forms or Poker. On the other hand, it does not prevent Dealer’s Choice from being classed as a form of Poker so long as it also includes genuine Poker components.
Poker is of French-American origin and is the national vying game of the United States, though it has come to have a world-wide following in many different forms. Other vying games include Brag (British, a three-card game), Primiera (Italian, a four-card game), and Mus (Spanish, also with four-card hands).
Birth and growthThe birth of Poker has been convincingly dated to the first or second decade of the 19th century. It appeared in former French territory centred on New Orleans which was ceded to the infant United States by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Its cradle was the gambling saloon in general and, in particular, those famous or notorious floating saloons, the Mississippi steamers, which began to ply their trade from about 1811.
The earliest contemporary reference to Poker occurs in J. Hildreth’s Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains, published in 1836; but two slightly later publications independently show it to have been well in use by 1829. Both are found in the published reminiscences of two unconnected witnesses: Jonathan H. Green, in Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling (1843), and Joe Cowell, an English comedian, in Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America (1844).
Green and Cowell describe the earliest known form of Poker, played with a 20-card pack (A-K-Q-J-10) evenly dealt amongst four players. There is no draw, and bets are made on a narrow range of combinations: one pair, two pair, triplets, ‘full’ - so called because it is the only combination in which all five cards are active - and four of a kind. Unlike classic Poker, in which the top hand (royal flush) can be tied in another suit, the original top hand consisting of four Aces, or four Kings and an Ace, was absolutely unbeatable.
Twenty-card Poker is well attested. In 1847 Jonathan Green mentions a game of 20-card Poker played on a Mississippi steamboat bound for New Orleans in February 1833, and in The Reformed Gambler (1858), a new edition of his earlier book, another session played at a Louisville house in 1834. A vivid account of a Poker game played on a Mississippi river boat in 1835 appears in Sol Smith’s Theatrical Management in the West and South for Thirty Years (New York, 1868), with an anecdote hinging on the two players’ switching from ‘low’ cards to ‘large cards’, i.e. Tens and over.
This provides evidence that the 20-card game was being challenged by the 52-card game in the mid-1830s. The gradual adoption of a 52-card pack was made partly to accommodate more players, perhaps partly to give more scope to the recently introduced flush (the straight was as yet unknown), but chiefly to ensure there were enough cards for the draw - another relative novelty, and one that was to turn Poker from a gamble to a game of skill. These novelties were regular features of Poker’s English relative Brag as played in its early 19th-century American form. (Brag is no longer played in America, and modern British Brag differs substantially from 19th century American Brag.)
It was in this form, but as yet without the draw, that Poker first reached the pages of American ‘Hoyles’. The earliest mention occurs in the 1845 edition of Hoyle’s Games by Henry F. Anners, who refers to Poker or Bluff, 20-deck Poker, and 20-deck Poke. In a Boston Hoyle of 1857 Thomas Frere describes ‘The Game of "Bluff", or "Poker"’, with a reference to the 20-card game so brief as to suggest it was becoming obsolete. Dowling, however, points out that it was apparently still played as late as 1857 in New York, for "In that year the author of a guidebook to the metropolis issued a warning against playing 20-card poker, which was described as one of the most dangerous pitfalls to be found in the city".
Between about 1830 and 1845 Poker was increasingly played with all 52 cards, enabling more than four to participate and giving rise to the flush as an additional combination. The end of this phase saw the introduction of the draw, already familiar from contemporary Brag. This increased the excitement of the game by adding a second betting interval and enabling poor hands to be significantly improved, especially the worthless but potentially promising fourflush. The first printed mention of Draw Poker occurs in the 1850 American edition of Bohn’s New Handbook of Games, p.384.