"Poker: The Story of America's National Pastime" is a special
Card Player feature written by James McManus focusing on
the origins and evolution of the game.
James McManus is the author of the classic bestseller Positively
Fifth Street and seven other books. His work appears in The New
York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Harpers, The Best American
Sports Writing and many other anthologies. He also teaches a course
on the literature and history of poker at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago. These historical columns are part of McManus's
next book, which is scheduled to be published by Farrar, Straus and
Giroux in 2009.
8 days ago
In the middle decades of the 20th century, while presidents, generals, and scientific geniuses were playing poker to unwind after earthshaking workdays, reporter Allen Dowling and his newspaper cronies were doing much the same thing. The stakes of their jobs may not have involved the survival of civilization, but the dollars and bragging rights they competed for were just as important to them, as they were to the millions of other folks playing in kitchens and basements, fire stations, and VFW cardrooms.
8 days ago
What Michael Craig says about the celebrated match between Johnny Moss and Nick "The Greek" Dandalos can serve as the epigraph to nearly any account of a card game, whether it took place in 1827, 1951, or last weekend. The leveraged uncertainty at the heart of good poker extends to most reports of how the long money changed hands. Unless he was an eyewitness, and sometimes not even then, all a historian can do is sift through what's been written and said about a game, trying to get a feel for which version of the lore sounds the least out of tune or, if he's lucky, has the actual ring of truth.
22 days ago
To unwind after his days managing a depression and then a world war, Franklin Roosevelt hosted a nightly cocktail hour in his second-floor study. "How about another sippy?" he would ask from his wheelchair before splashing together old-fashioneds and martinis amid the clutter of his desk. Though he seldom had more than one drink, he relished this down-time for the chance it gave him and his staff to recharge their batteries, the better to face the mind-bending decisions the next day would certainly bring. A simple dinner would often be served, followed a few times a week by a game of low-stakes poker.
41 days ago
Unlike Truman, Roosevelt, Harding, and the other White House residents who played poker to relax with advisors and friends, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon seldom if ever competed for even minimal stakes while in office. And the men who shared the Republican ticket in 1952 and 1956 certainly never mentioned the game while campaigning, even though both of them had played for life-changing stakes while serving in their country's armed forces.
51 days ago
George Orwell first used the term "cold war" in his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb" in October 1945, 10 weeks after Nagasaki and a year before publishing Animal Farm. The essay described a totalitarian state much like the USSR "in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbours." As usual, Orwell foresaw what was coming before nearly everyone else did. The Soviets wouldn't test an atomic device until August 1949, but when their hydrogen bombs, designed by Andrei Sakharov, were deployed in the early '50s, the nuclear arms race heated up quickly. The Cold War got colder and almost infinitely more perilous.
