In 1829 the English actor Joseph Cowell, touring the American South, described a card game he watched on a steamboat out of New Orleans. Four players each took five cards from a deck of twenty, bet on who held the best hand, and the strongest hand won. There was no draw and no flop. It is one of the earliest written accounts of what became poker, and it already contained the core idea: bet on hidden cards and make others believe what you want.
Poque, brag and the river towns
The name most likely came from poque, a French betting game played in New Orleans when the city was still culturally French. Historians also point to the English game brag, which had bluffing at its center. An older theory linked poker to the Persian game as nas, but most modern researchers treat that link as unproven.
What is clear is where the game spread. Steamboats carried cotton, passengers and professional gamblers up and down the Mississippi, and poker traveled with them. The twenty-card deck gave way to the full 52-card pack, which allowed more players at the table and made the flush and the straight possible. Cheating was common enough that writers of the period, among them the reformed gambler Jonathan H. Green, called it the “cheating game” and published exposés of the tricks used on boats.
Draw, stud and the Wild West
By the middle of the century, five-card draw had appeared, letting players swap cards once. During the Civil War soldiers on both sides played, and stud poker, with some cards dealt face up, became widespread around that time. Stud added information and more betting rounds, and it would dominate American card rooms for roughly the next hundred years.
The game’s most famous Western moment came on August 2, 1876, in Deadwood, in what is now South Dakota. Wild Bill Hickok was shot from behind during a game at Nuttal and Mann’s saloon. The cards he was holding, by tradition black aces and black eights, are still called the dead man’s hand. Poker had become part of frontier life, played in saloons, mining camps and railroad towns, often outside any law.
Texas Hold’em comes to Las Vegas
Texas Hold’em, the game that dominates today, is generally traced to Robstown, Texas, in the early 1900s. In 2007 the Texas Legislature formally recognized the town as the birthplace of the game. For decades, though, it stayed a regional variant played by Texas road gamblers.
That changed in the 1960s, when Texans such as Doyle Brunson, Amarillo Slim Preston and Crandell Addington brought the game to Las Vegas. Hold’em’s four betting rounds and shared cards suited big-bet play, and the Golden Nugget downtown was among the first casinos to spread it.
Binion’s and the first World Series
In 1970 Benny Binion invited a small group of top players to Binion’s Horseshoe on Fremont Street for what he called the World Series of Poker. There was no tournament as we know it. They played a mix of games, and at the end the players voted Johnny Moss the champion. In 1971 the format became a freezeout, which Moss also won, and Amarillo Slim took the title in 1972 before going on a talk-show tour that made the event known far beyond Nevada.
Through the 1970s and 1980s the Main Event grew slowly. Doyle Brunson won it in 1976 and 1977, both times finishing with ten-deuce, a hand still named after him. Stu Ungar won in 1980 and 1981 and again in 1997, a comeback that remains one of the event’s best-known stories. Card rooms in California, which had been limited for decades to draw and lowball under the state’s gaming laws, won the right to deal hold’em in the late 1980s, and the game began its spread from Nevada into the big Los Angeles clubs.
Television, the internet and 2003
Two technologies turned poker into a mass-market game. The first was the hole-card camera. Britain’s Late Night Poker on Channel 4 used under-table cameras from 1999, and the World Poker Tour, which debuted on the Travel Channel in 2003, made seeing every player’s cards the standard for televised poker.
The second was online play. Planet Poker dealt the first real-money online hands in 1998, and PartyPoker and PokerStars both launched in 2001. Then, in May 2003, an accountant from Tennessee named Chris Moneymaker won the WSOP Main Event at Binion’s for $2.5 million after qualifying through a cheap online satellite on PokerStars. ESPN’s coverage of his run aired that summer and sold an idea: anyone with a computer could win the biggest prize in the game.
The numbers that followed are well documented. The Main Event drew 839 entries in 2003, 2,576 in 2004 and 8,773 in 2006, when Jamie Gold won a $12 million first prize. The WSOP left downtown for the Rio in 2005 under Harrah’s ownership. If you want a sense of how many careers this period launched, the list of the richest poker players is full of names who started online in those years, and companies like Isai Scheinberg’s PokerStars grew into global businesses.
UIGEA and Black Friday
The boom met US law twice.
In October 2006 Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which targeted payment processing. Some operators left the American market, while PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker kept serving US players.
On April 15, 2011, known in poker as Black Friday, the Department of Justice unsealed indictments against the founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker. Their domains were seized and US players were locked out overnight. Full Tilt was later found to be unable to repay player balances; PokerStars eventually acquired Full Tilt’s assets as part of its settlement with the government, and former Full Tilt players were repaid through a claims process.
The regulated era
Online poker returned to the US one state at a time. Nevada and Delaware launched regulated sites in 2013, and New Jersey followed late that year. Pennsylvania, Michigan and West Virginia passed their own laws later, and some states now share player pools through interstate agreements.
Live poker, meanwhile, set new records. The WSOP moved to Paris and Horseshoe Las Vegas in 2022, and the 2023 Main Event drew 10,043 entries, a record broken the following year when 10,112 players entered and Jonathan Tamayo won. In 2025 the title went to Michael Mizrachi, a player whose career stretches back to the early boom years. High-roller series such as Triton Poker now play for buy-ins Benny Binion’s first guests would not have recognized, while the twenty-card game Cowell watched on the river survives only in his notes.