"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.
15 days ago
By the mid-1970s, poker had two distinct capitals. The Texas road gamblers' no-limit hold'em sanctuary in Downtown Las Vegas was active mainly during the World Series in April, while Gardena, a working-class suburb of Los Angeles, had hundreds of five-card draw players in action every day except Christmas. While poker remained for the most part an underground national pastime, its legal status in these far-western towns was a double blast of oxygen for high-stakes professionals and recreational players alike.
15 days ago
During the 1960s, with his Horseshoe Casino on Fremont Street dominating Glitter Gulch in Downtown Las Vegas, Benny Binion still had to compete with the Rat Pack, the Folies Bergere, Elvis Presley, and all of the Jetsons-esque architecture going up a few miles south on the Strip.
42 days ago
American soldiers certainly played poker in Vietnam -- in jungle hooches, Hanoi prison cells, air-conditioned offices in Saigon -- as they have in every conflict since the Civil War. A more interesting story, perhaps, is how one of the cards in their poker decks came to be used as a weapon.
84 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.
84 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.
