Meanings of the Suits
The 4 suits we use today probably came from France, and their meanings were inspired by the social structure of their day…
Spades represent the Royalty
Diamonds represent the merchant class
Clubs represent the peasants
Hearts represent the clergy
Richard M. Nixon
President Nixon was an avid poker player. He is said to have won $6,000 in the first few months of his time in the US Navy during WWII, which was a lot of money in those days. By the end of his service, he had accumulated $10,000 playing poker, and he used that money to fund his campaign to win a seat in the US Congress.
Mikey The Chimp
In 2006, a site called PokerShare entered a poker playing chimpanzee into the WSOP Main Event. This rather obvious publicity stunt had the human players up in arms. After all, who wants to be beaten by a chimpanzee whose favorite move was allin?
The site tried to calm everyone by saying they would pay the following year’s entry for anyone Mikey eliminated, but that didn’t help. After all, if you get felted by a monkey, your friends will never let you live it down. Really… never.
The tournament directors got together and scoured the rulebook, looking for a way to disqualify the chimp, but finally decided that there was no rule saying you had to be human. It looked like Mikey was going to get his shot at the big time!
Finally, someone thought to ask, “How old is this chimpanzee?” As it turns out, Mikey wasn’t 21, so he was disqualified. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
Poker Chips
Poker chips are now almost always plastic with ridges in them to allow them to be stacked easily on top of each other. However, that wasn’t always the most popular material.
In the 19th century, poker games weren’t always played with chips. Stakes were raised often with material that had some intrinsic value like gold and so represented a certain amount of money. However, the need for standardisation in a game that was getting more and more popular was obvious. Hence the arrival of the commercially made poker chip whose value people could recognise from town to town.
The first poker chips used in Louisiana in the 19th century though were made of various materials and they were made from a mixture of all sorts of different things – like ivory, bone, wood for example – and a clay that held it together. Later on in the 19th century, those former materials were got rid of, leaving chips that were made purely from clay. That was the case until half way through the last century. From after the Second World War, you began to see other things mixed in with the clay to make the chips more durable. Nowadays you only see clay as part of a chip in casinos, and even then casinos often use a ceramic material for them. It is easier to print words and designs on a ceramic chip than it is on a clay one, so you can understand why they are popular. Clay composite chips are much more expensive and labour intensive to make than the plastic chips that are found everywhere else outside of casinos. This of course does not hold for people who play poker online! But for the purists and lovers of tradition – a clay chip is still the only way to go!
To put that in perspective, in 1944 an entry-level private or sailor was being paid $50 per month–AFTER the pay raise approved in late 1943. An average working civilian was earning about $3,000 per YEAR in the middle 40s, before taxes, of course. So what Nixon won in the first few months was the equivalent of several years’ pay for an average person.
Buried within the vast hobby of coin collecting and the study of numismatics is the sub-branch called “exo-numia.” These are the things that look sort of like coins and usually have some sort of value in money, labor, or services. Early ones were often made of bronze or other metals. Casino chips, especially from casinos now out of business, are frequently collected. Other commonly collected exo-numia include merchant tokens (often sold by local civic or merchants’ associations as a fund raiser that can be exchanged for goods in local stores instead of using cash), political tokens (sold as fund raisers for the candidate/cause they promote), and from the older West, bawdy-house tokens (to be exchanged for “human services to be rendered later”). Many of these are truly beautiful, few are expensive, and most are easily available from dealers like Spinetti’s in Las Vegas. Note that the US government takes a dim view of “substitute currencies,” which is why you can no longer take chips from Caesar’s Palace and spend them at the Mirage as was customary until the 1960s…
Running A Little Bad
Texas billionaire Andy Beal thought his vast fortune would intimidate anyone, but top pros don’t intimidate easily. When his 2 day session with Phil Ivey saw Beal over $6 million in the red, he suggested they raise the stakes to $50,000/$100,000.
Ivey came out swinging, and by the end of the 3rd day, was up another $10 million. At that point, Beal quit, got on his private jet, and flew back to Dallas. I guess his $16 million loss could be called a “valuable lesson learned.”
The Most Exciting Form Of Poker
Probably the most exciting form of poker is called “Convict Poker.” As far as I know, it’s only played at the annual Angola Prison Rodeo, and yes, it’s played by actual convicts. What makes it so exciting?
Well, the 4 convicts sit at a table playing poker, but the table is in the middle of the rodeo arena. Once the game is underway, they release an angry bull. The winner is the last person still seated. Words alone can’t describe it, so…
Shuffle Up
There are 52! ( 52 Factorial) possible shuffles with a standard deck. That’s 52 x 51 x 50… x 2 x 1. So if we work out the number, what is it? How about…
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000
LOL, are there that many grains of sand in all the deserts and beaches combined? Who would count them? It would take a multi-generational effort even at two per second. We don’t even have a name for a number that large. I suppose we could add a Joker just to increase the confusion.
actually there is.
funny enough big number names differ according to the continent you live in. american numbers have increased by 3 when it get from million, billion trillion etc. but european numbers increase by 6. since we have it increased by 3 like this: million, milliard, bilion, billiard, trillion, trilliard etc.
so to get back at this number. of course, i’m not typing it out completely, but i can explain 
.
in european it’s called 80 undecillion (undecillion holds 66 zero’s) (in america undecillion would hold 36 zero’s).
as for the american name, it’s probably called 80658 vigintillion. this one is more difficult since after vigintillion you get trigintillion, but the zero’s start expanding by far more then just 3, in europe it starts expaning by 60 zero’s. however vigintillion still gets another 3 when it gets to vigintilliard. (the european equivalent of vigintillion would hold 120 zero’s [trigintillion howevers holds 180 zero’s] )
That’s neat. I’ll write it down somewhere–and immediately lose it, of course–for future reference.
Easy Gold
4 time bracelet winner Bill Boyd holds an unusual record that could stand forever. He has cashed exactly 4 times in the WSOP, and won all 4 of the tournies in which he cashed. Keep in mind, however, that these were in the early days of the WSOP, when there weren’t many entrants.
As a matter of fact, his 1972 5 card stud win saw him face off against only 1 other player. Even stranger: he won his 1973 bracelet in the same event by default… he was the only person to enter!
as the saying goes… “When a man with money meets a man with experience, the man with experience leaves with money and the man with money leaves with experience.”
Sam Farha’s Cigarette
Sam Farha is often seen with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, but it’s well known that he doesn’t smoke. What’s up with that?
Legend has it that he was once way down in a losing poker session, and someone offered him a cigarette. He took it despite the fact that he is a non-smoker, and his luck immediately turned around. He has considered it a “lucky charm” ever since.
Ace of Spades
Card playing was so popular in 17th century France that the nobility saw it as a way to make additional tax revenue. They only taxed 1 card… the ace of spades, and its design was changed to include the tax stamp. The look became tradition, which is why the ace of spaces remains embellished to this day.
By the way, some people tried to get around the tax by making 51 card decks. This is probably the origin of the phrase, “not playing with a full deck.”
Jackpot
The earliest form of poker played in America was played 4 handed with a 20 card deck, and there was no such thing as straights or flushes. This changed with the acceptance of the now-standard 52 card deck.
Using a 52 card deck allowed more players, and also lead to the invention of 5 card draw poker. One popular variation of 5 card draw, probably invented in Toledo, required jacks or better to open, Many of the old players hated this game because it cut down on bluffing opportunities, but “Jackpots,” as it was called, became a popular game.
So the next time you “hit the jackpot” in any game, give a nod to poker, where the term originated.
Groucho Marx
“Groucho” Marx loved to play poker. In fact, that’s how he got his nickname. When going to and from poker games, he carried his money in what he called his “grouch bag.” People started calling him “Groucho,” and the name stuck.
Mike Sexton
Many of you have seen Mike Sexton as a poker commentator on some of the more popular televised poker shows, but he’s also a Poker Hall of Fame player and holds an amazing record. He has cashed in at least 1 WSOP event every year for the last 31 years straight! That’s quite a streak.
On a personal note… I met and talked to Mike at a party he hosted during the 2006 WSOP, and he is one of the nicest guys you will ever meet. It’s no wonder he’s called, “The Ambassador of Poker.”
Women and Poker
Gone are the days when poker was strictly “for the guys.” The ladies have arrived, and these female poker players are amazing!
Take, for example, Barbara Enright. Enright was the first woman inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame, in 2007, right alongside “Poker Brat” Phil Hellmuth. Impressively, Enright is the only woman to have made a World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event final table, ultimately finishing in fifth place . Enright was also the first woman to win three WSOP bracelets, and only Linda Johnson (2011) and Jennifer Harman (2015) have managed to win that many since.
In every poker room and in every major poker event you can see the changing tide. Many more women have taken up the game since the poker boom of the 2000’s during which time poker became more accessible both online and live.
Not only are more women playing poker, the best of them rival the best male players. In fact, for the first time in a dozen years, two women, France’s Gaelle Baumann and Norway’s Elisabeth Hille, cracked the top-20 in the WSOP Main Event. Baumann finished on the bubble in 10th place, while Hille finished just behind in 11th. Unsurprisingly, their prowess and WSOP success led to huge sponsorship deals.
And let’s not forget female celebrities like Jennifer Tilly, Shannon Elizabeth, and Mimi Rogers, who are very public about their enthusiasm for poker and are skillful players in their own right.