The history of Texas Holdem

As short a time as fifty years ago, Poker was illegal everywhere in America other than two places. Nevada and California. Irrespective of this, it was Texas where most of the high stakes cash games were played. This was in the days before poker tournaments.

It was during this era in Texas that a group of gamblers including some well known poker legends such as Jesse Alto and Jack ‘treetop’ Strans, used to regularly travel from town to town playing poker. These road gamblers specialised in a type of poker called Kansas City Lowball Draw, and a new form of poker called Texas Hold’em.

At this time, there was only one legal poker room in Nevada which was in the Golden Nugget Casino and was run by a Five-Card Stud player named Bill Boyd. It was nothing like the glamorous casinos of today. More like a backstreet décor wise. But it attracted all the top poker players from Nevada and California, who came to play Five-Card Stud, Razz and California Lowball Draw.

This soon changed though, when a group of Texans including legends Doyle Brunson, Sailor Roberts, Johnny Moss, Amarillo Slim, Jack Straus and Crandell Addinton introduced No-Limit Hold’em. This new game became very popular in the Golden Nugget, but as this was the only card room around at the time, there was no real chance for it to spread. It wasn’t until some years later in 1969, that the boss of the Dunes, a large casino on the Las Vegas strip, invited the poker players to start a high stakes game just outside the entrance to the Dunes main showroom, where they were able to attract a lot of passing trade from wealthy casino gamblers. This game was primarily Texas Hold’em. As the games became more popular in the late 60′s and early 70′s, it was normal for buy-in’s to range from $10,000 to $100,000 ($60,000 to $600,000 in today’s money).

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Also in 1969, the owners of the Holiday Hotel in Reno staged a high stakes poker game, for all the best players and biggest bookies in America. This is known as the first ever major poker tournament and it drew around thirty participants, ranging from bookies to pool hustlers, as well as poker players. All of the Texas legends played, as did Charles Harrelson, the father of actor Woody Harrelson, who is now serving life imprisonment for killing a judge in 1979. It wasn’t a true tournament as we know them today, as the players could re-buy in as many times as they wanted. The games consistently changed between Texas Hold’em, Kansas City Lowball Draw, Razz, Stud and Ace to Five Lowball.

Benny and Jack Binion, the owners of the Horseshoe Casino in Vegas, liked the tournament so much that when the Holiday Hotel was sold the following year, they bought the rights to it, and renamed it the World Series of Poker. The first year that the World Series of Poker was held at the Horseshoe, it attracted a lot of press attention.

The following year, a journalist from the Los Angeles Times told Benny Binion that if he were to change the format to a Texas Hold’em only, winner takes all tournament, it would be given nationwide publicity. This was music to Benny Binion’s ears, and is how the current World Series of Poker was formed.

Poker, in particular Texas Hold’em, continued to grow and prosper to the point that by the middle 80′s there were poker rooms in a lot of the major casinos and at World Series of Poker time, satellites to the tournaments were running twenty four hours per day and taking up most of the floor space in the Horseshoe.

Texas Hold’em has continued to be the game played during the World Series of Poker’s main event, which reached a peak of 8,773 participants in 2006. This has since dropped off a bit, due to legislation which has stopped a lot of online poker sites accepting American players and therefore lessened the amount of online qualifiers quite considerably.

Pokers popularity has seen it being shown regularly on television in many countries, as well as dedicated poker channels being broadcast by many satellite television providers. The game played on these television shows is almost always No-Limit Texas Hold’em and the coverage given a lot of professional poker player’s celebrity status.

Texas Hold’em’s popularity is such that a very popular film based on the game was made in the late 1990′s and the film, ‘Rounders’, starred Hollywood actors Matt Damon and Edward Norton. Texas Hold’em also featured heavily in the recent James Bond film ‘Casino Royale’.

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The future of Texas Hold’em will now certainly depend a lot on the American legislation which has tried to ban online gambling by forbidding financial institutions from making and monetary transactions with online gambling sites. The situation as it stands now, is that although a lot of poker sites have stopped allowing American players to have accounts on their sites, the two biggest poker sites, pokerstars and fulltiltpoker, as well as some smaller sites, have allowed Americans to keep on playing on their sites, and have been left alone to do so.

There are currently many campaigners, including members of the United States Congress, who are actively campaigning to have the ban lifted, and believe that they are close to doing so.

On the other hand, the American state of Minnesota, have just announced that they have instructed eleven national and regional telephone and internet service providers to prohibit access of all Minnesota based computers to online gambling sites.

The American government will no doubt have a large say in the future of Texas Hold’em Poker, but whatever happens, if you’d have told those original Texas road gamblers that Texas Hold’em would, within such a short space of time, become the worldwide phenomenon that it is today, with people winning $12 million in a single tournament, they’d have no doubt thought that you’d been drinking far too much.