Annotated Bibliography

HISTORY AND MEANING OF POKER

The earliest published references to poker date to 1829 (the published diary of English actor Joseph Cowell), 1837 (Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains by James Hildreth), and 1842 (Gambling Unmasked by Jonathan Green). Standards of nonfiction reliability were quite different than they are today. Few people were literate enough to write a book, so publishers relied on professional hacks to supply popular literature. These people mostly lived in cities near publishers and were unlikely to have any firsthand experience with poker.

Green is the least reliable of the three-he clearly had no idea how poker was played and his accounts of life on the Mississippi are so unconvincing that I don't think he ever left Philadelphia. Hildreth didn't write the book attributed to him; he left the regiment long before the events described and may well have been illiterate. Several candidates have been put forward, all of whom imply that the author would not have been present at the poker scenes described. In any event, the game in question is so sketchily described, it could have been anything. Read Hildreth's book for geography and military tactics, not for poker.

Cowell is the only one of the three who is a real person and who was definitely present at the events he describes. However, the stories he tells are standard gambling anecdotes, clumsily re-created for a Mississippi riverboat setting. He probably did see poker played, unlike Green and Hildreth, but he probably didn't describe it.

What is interesting about all three accounts is what they don't say. All three authors are writing about strange and barbarous places (from the standpoint of their probable readers) and often introduce new words with comments about pronunciation. All of them use the word poker as if it would be familiar to their readers, and none suggest that it had a foreign or unusual pronunciation. That seems to contradict silly accounts of the origin of the name as being French or Persian words. None confuse it with other, similar games. All mention that the game was played throughout a large region. All assume their readers know general principles such as that players put money into a pot that one player wins, that players can fold and thereby lose any interest in the pot, and that hands with aces beat hands with kings. So even by the 1830s, poker was a well-known regional game, and people on the East Coast of the United States and in Europe knew the type of game but not the specific rules. It has its own identity; it was not considered a variant of poque or bragg.

All of this places the origin of poker much earlier than most histories state, given the slow spread of games without written rules. Not only was it established throughout the American Southwest, but it was known (if not played) more broadly by 1830. There was no hint of any ancestral relationship to any other game, meaning either that it had separated long ago and completely from its roots or that it was a new invention (of course, it borrowed from other card games, but that's not the same as being descended from them). This is typical of the way card games evolve-not through gradual rule changes.

There are much better sources about the development of poker. I start with the wonderful stories collected in G. Frank Lydston's 1906 Poker Jim. Lydston was a new medical school graduate who joined the California gold rush and chronicled the life of miners, with an emphasis on poker, from the 1850s to the 1890s. This is real life, real poker. The other good source for this period is Hutchings' California Magazine. The Complete Poker Player by John Blackbridge (1880) gives a lot of color about the East Coast version of the game at that time, as well as theoretical thinking. Among modern books, Seeking Pleasure in the Old West by David Dary (University Press of Kansas, 1995) has a lot of useful and entertaining information.

Foster on Poker by R.F. Foster (1904) is similarly useful. Its other virtue is that it draws on both an extensive library of poker texts and the results of efforts to find old poker players and learn about the early days of the game. A more recent book, The Oxford Guide to Card Games by David Parlett (Oxford University Press, 1990) is the most professional history of poker available-and a wonderful book to read.

Seattle newspaperman Kenneth Gilbert picks up where Poker Jim left off. I read his stories as a kid in reprinted newspaper columns; they were collected as Alaskan Poker Stories in 1958. He covers poker in the Alaska gold rush from 1898 to 1916.

Herbert Yardley is a crucial transitional figure. He learned poker around 1900 from an authentic Old West gambler, but went on to a career in cryptography and international espionage. So he links the roots of poker to modern mathematics and political thinking. His 1956 work, The Education of a Poker Player (reprinted by Orloff Press in 1998), is a classic.

Allen Dowling handled public relations for Louisiana political boss Huey Long in the 1930s. As a newspaperman and publicist in New Orleans from the 1920s to the 1960s, he provides invaluable accounts of that time and place in Confessions of a Poker Player (1940), Under the Round Table (1960), and The Great American Pastime (A.S. Barnes, 1970). The first two were written under the pseudonym Jack King, and are now out of print. A different view of the period is presented in Alfred Lewis's great biography, Man of the World: Herbert Bayard Swopes: A Charmed Life of Pulitzer Prizes, Poker and Politics (Bobbs-Merrill, 1978). The Complete Card Player by Albert Ostrow (McGraw-Hill, 1945) and Common Sense in Poker by Irwin Steig (Galahad, 1963) cover poker from the 1930s to the 1950s.

A couple of wonderfully literate English authors next picked up the poker nonfiction mantle. Anthony Alvarez's The Biggest Game in Town (1982; new paperback edition from Chronicle, 2002) and David Spanier's Total Poker (High Stakes, 1977) and Easy Money (Trafalgar, 1987) should not be missed. Anthony Holden wrote Big Deal in 1990. More recently, Poker Nation by Andy Bellin (HarperCollins, 2002) and Positively Fifth Street by James McManus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) are the most recent proud additions to the line of great poker nonfiction.

John Stravinsky has collected lots of great excerpts in Read 'Em and Weep (HarperCollins, 2004). Another fun collection is Aces and Kings by Michael Kaplan and Brad Reagan (Wenner Books, 2005).

HISTORY AND MEANING OF GAMBLING

We have to start with Gerolamo Cardano's 1520 classic, The Book on Games of Chance (translated by Sydney Gould, Princeton University Press, 1953), followed 154 years later by The Compleat Gamester by Charles Cotton (1674) and then Lives of the Gamesters by Theophilus Lucas (1714). All of these describe early modern gambling in theory and practice.

Getting a little closer to the present, there are important surveys: The Gambling World, by Rouge et Noir (1898); Suckers Progress: An Informal History of Gambling in America from the Colonies to Canfield, by Herbert Asbury (Dodd, Mead, 1938); and Play the Devil: A History of Gambling in the United States from 1492-1955 by Henry Chafetz (Bonanza Books, 1961). Oscar Lewis's 1953 book Sagebrush Casinos (Doubleday) is essential for information about early Nevada (Reno more than Las Vegas).

On the meaning of gambling and attitudes toward it, Something for Nothing by Clyde Davis (Lippincott, 1956) is an excellent early work. Charlotte Olmsted's 1962 book Heads I Win, Tails You Lose (Macmillan) appears unfavorably in my book, but it has lots of great parts.

The explosion of gambling in America from 1970 to 2000 has stimulated work. Gambling and Speculation by Reuven Brenner and Gabrielle Brenner (Cambridge University Press, 1990), the bestselling Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein (Wiley, 1996), Gambling in America by William Thompson (ABC-CLIO, 2001), Wheels of Fortune by Charles Geisst (Wiley, 2002) and Something for Nothing by Jackson Lears (Viking, 2003) are redefining the way people think about gambling.

FINANCE AND GAMBLING

There is some literature combining finance and gambling, beginning with Dickson Watts's 1878 work Speculation as a Fine Art (available in reprint from Fraser Publishing, 1965). John McDonald did a lot to popularize game theory with Strategy in Poker, Business and War (Norton, 1950). Ed Thorp and Sheen Kassouf (who died on August 10, as this book was going to press) wrote Beat the Market (Random House) in 1967. Ed's 1962 Beat the Dealer (Vintage) fits squarely into this intellectual tradition. An interesting recent entry is The Poker MBA by Greg Dinkin and Jeffrey Gitomer (Crown, 2002). I'd also put Marty O'Connell's wonderful The Business of Options (Wiley, 2001) and the masterpiece Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance (Wiley, 2000) in this category, but do not think on that account that they are less than superlative financial texts.

For pure poker, you cannot miss books by Mason Malmuth and David Sklansky. I list only one from each, Gambling Theory and Other Topics by Mason Malmuth (Two Plus Two, 2004) and The Theory of Poker by David Sklansky (third edition, Two Plus Two, 1994), but both authors are prolific. Poker for Dummies by Richard D. Harroch and Lou Krieger (For Dummies, 2000) covers the basics for absolute beginners and has good intermediate material as well.

Some important pure finance works for understanding the ideas in this book are Money and Trade Considered by John Law (1705), The Economic Function of Futures Markets by Jeffrey Williams (Cambridge University Press, 1986), Futures Trading by Robert Fink and Robert Feduniak (New York Institute of Finance, 1988), Exploring General Equilibrium by Fischer Black (MIT, 1995), Dynamic Hedging by Nassim Taleb (Wiley, 1996), Iceberg Risk by Kent Osband (Texere, 2002), and Trading and Exchanges by Larry Harris (Oxford University Press, 2003).

My Life as a Quant (Wiley, 2004) is the autobiography of Emanuel Derman, physicist and financial quant. It's a tremendous book that gets inside the quant part of Wall Street. William Falloon's biography of supertrader Charles DiFrancesca, Charlie D. (Wiley, 1997), Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone (Hill & Wang, 2005), Timothy Middleton's biography of superinvestor Bill Gross, Bond King (Wiley, 2004), and Perry Mehrling's biography of superthinker Fischer Black, Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance (Wiley, 2005) also offer important behind-the-scenes views of these principles in action.

Three wonderful books that are hard to categorize but deal with many of the ideas in this book in different ways are Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness (Norton, 2001), James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds (Doubleday, 2004), and Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (Little, Brown, 2005).

There are some excellent books on the history of futures trading including A Deal in Wheat by Frank Norris (1903), The Plunger: A Tale of the Wheat Pit by Edward Dies (1929-both of these are fiction, but reliable nonetheless), The Chicago Board of Trade by Jonathan Lurie (University of Illinois, 1979), Brokers, Bagmen and Moles by David Greising and Laurie Morse (Wiley, 1991), The Merc, by Bob Tamarkin (HarperCollins, 1993), Pride in the Past, Faith in the Future: A History of the Michigan Livestock Exchange by Carl Kramer (Michigan Livestock Exchange, 1997), and Market Maker: A Sesquicentennial Look at the Chicago Board of Trade edited by Patrick Catania (Chicago Board of Trade, 1998). I'm going to toss in a great book on Chicago, City of the Century by Donald Miller (Simon & Schuster, 1996), because it covers much of the same material, and other aspects as well.

SPECIFIC SOURCES

Leonard Savage's The Foundation of Statistics (Wiley, 1950) is the best account of both utility theory and the philosophy behind probability. Savage Money by Chris Gregory (Harwood, 1997) will change the way you think about change. Daniel Usner's 1992 classic, Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (University of North Carolina), is a fascinating, pathbreaking look at a fascinating, pathbreaking period.

Janet Gleeson's Millionaire (Simon & Schuster, 1999) is an entertaining popular biography of John Law.

Two useful books about the economics of poker are Games, Sport and Power edited by Gregory Stone (Transaction, 1972) and Poker Faces by David Hayano (University of California, 1982).

Two of the best books on social networks are Harrison White's Markets from Networks (Princeton University, 2002) and his student Duncan Watt's Six Degrees (Norton, 2003).

Index

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