Poker

Five-card stud—the first card face down, all others face up. No game has lost popularity so rapidly as this one. Thirty years ago two-thirds of the professional games were five-card stud; today not one-tenth of the games are. Five-card stud, the original and basic form of open poker, is a game for serious and conservative players. It was created to provide more rounds of betting (there can be only two in draw poker, before and after the draw; in stud poker there are four). But five-card stud does not fulfill the player’s emotional desire for good hands (the average winning hand is no better than a pair of kings) and except for die-hards the game has no advantage over seven-card stud and several disadvantages—in seven-card stud the average hand seems better, there are five betting intervals instead of four, and the scope for skill is if anything even greater.

Seven-card stud—the first two cards down, the next four up, the last card down, with each player selecting five of his seven cards to use as his poker hand in the showdown. This is the pet game of rich men, celebrities, socialites (who usually play it high-low), and men’s clubs where the players happen to like stud better than the usual blind-opening draw game. The true professional dotes on seven-card stud, because in no other form of the game does observation or close figuring play so big a part. Nevertheless, it is not a widely played form of poker.

Poker is called the American national game. (It shares this distinction with baseball.) Actually, poker comes as close to being international as any card game possibly could. It probably originated in Persia; it developed in Europe; it did attain its present form in the United States—probably in the 1830s—but today it is played in every country in which playing cards are known. Nevertheless, since poker reached those countries from the United States and since it is internationally known as our national game, every American as a point of patriotic pride should know how to play an acceptable game of poker.

No one knows surely where poker originated, when it originated, or how it got its name. The basic principle of poker is that the most unusual combination of cards is the winning hand. This is such an obvious basis for a game that there may have been ancestors of poker stretching back to the year 894 A.D., when playing cards were invented. (They were invented by the Chinese.) At least four hundred years ago the Persians had a game called As Nas in which there was a twenty-card deck, four players, five cards dealt to each, and betting on which player had the best hand. Since no cards were left over, there could be no draw; and the idea of stud poker had not yet been thought of. As early as the late 1600s, the Germans had a game that they called pochen, their word meaning to “bluff,” or “to brag,” and from this game developed the early English game brag and the French game poque. It cannot be proved but it is irresistibly plausible that our name poker derived from this French name poque.

Until the Louisiana Purchase, in the year 1803, New Orleans and the entire Mississippi River and its valley were French territory. The people spoke French and if they played card games they played French card games. After the Louisiana Purchase thousands of English-speaking citizens of the new United States poured into the territory and took over the city of New Orleans and the Mississippi Valley, but they could not help being influenced by the French customs and terms that they found there. So they adopted the French game poque but changed its name to the familiar English word poker. That, at least, is the logical assumption; and while no one can prove it, all poker historians have accepted it.

There are currently over 60 million individuals who play Texas Holdem online, and yet only a hand full of poker players know these secrets - why is that? 

First off, if every online poker player had this poker knowledge, the competition online would be too strong. 

Second, if the fish (the weak players of which professionals make their money off of) attained this information, their will be no longer any “fish in the sea.” 

And last, online poker pros are just too embarrassed to admit they are using these secrets because it makes them look weak…  No one wants to be known to have secret aids helping them win at online poker – it’s too humiliating!

This is what you have been waiting for so let’s get right to it.  Good luck on your journey to profits and fun at poker!