Poker as a game has been gaining more and more popularity both in casinos and on the net. While this card game used to be seen as something played in dark back rooms by men drinking beer and smoking cigars or by cowboys in a saloon drinking whiskey and shooting each other over cheating the game of poker is now being seen in a whole new light. The game of poker has come a very long way and it’s still looking as young and spry as ever considering it’s almost 200 years old. Poker is even beginning to make its way off the net and the sports networks into a mainstream public view. As with everything to really appreciate where things are at the moment there is a need to know and understand where it all began.

Poker as far as it is understood made its debut to the world somewhere in the first one or two decades of the pokerstar.it 19th century. Its widely believed that its birthplace may well be New Orleans soon after that portion was ceded to the United States from France. It has been cited that it was very popular on the floating gambling houses of the Mississippi; the steamboats.

The original game of Poker was played with a twenty card deck, not 52. The 52 card deck would challenge the twenty in years to come. The twenty card deck consisted of the Ace, King, Queen, Jack and ten. These cards were evenly distributed amongst only four players. Unlike the Poker we understand today there was no draw at all and betting was all made on whatever limited combinations could be made. There were one pair, two pair and triplets was the term for three of a kind. There was a “full” hand, what we now know as a full house, this was the term used because in this style of poker it was the only time all five cards came into play, and then of course there was the four of a kind. Unlike today with the royal flush as the top hand, the poker of the early years had four aces as the top hand, or at times four Kings and an Ace.

It would be just a scant decade or so before the twenty card pack would be challenged by the 52 card pack. This was for a few reasons chief among them was that more players could then be included in the game. Another reason was a new twist players were throwing into the game; the draw. This changed everything dramatically. The old style was a total gamble. There were only so many players at one time, a fixed number, there were only so many cards available, a fixed number and you played what you were dealt. With the advent of the introduction of a 52 card deck this more the doubled the amount of cards used, it enabled a few more players to sit in and coupling this with the newly added draw feature turned this simple game of chance into a superior game of skill.