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Poker History
The birth of Poker has been convincingly dated to the first or second decade of the 19th century. It appeared in former French territory centred on New Orleans which was ceded to the infant United States by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Its cradle was the gambling saloon in general and, in particular, those famous or notorious floating saloons, the Mississippi steamers, which began to ply their trade from about 1811.
Three games successively dominated poker, particularly as limit-betting games in the USA, during the first century and a half of poker history: draw, seven-card stud, and holdem, with each game cornering over 2/3 of the market during their ascendancy. Draw was far ahead in popularity until sometime in the early 20th century, when seven-card stud took the lead, which it kept until about 1980, thriving in the armed forces during WWII, and then during the rise of the Nevada casino industry in the fifties and sixties.
Five-card stud played a role as a major big-bet game from it's invention in the 1850's right up until holdem really took off in the 1970's, but it was never as popular as either draw or seven-card stud, which are both excellent limit-betting games and as such appealed to a mass market which five-card stud does not suit.
In the late-seventies or early eighties sometime, holdem overtook seven-card stud in popularity, helped on it's way to the top by the huge leap in status it gained through being used as the world championship game from the early seventies, and also by a surge in player numbers as US gambling laws were liberalised. Unlike seven-card stud and five-card stud, holdem plays equally well with any form of betting from limit to no-limit. It quickly made five-card stud more or less obsolete, and steadily reduced seven-card stud's share of the market from about 70% in 1971, to less than 20% today.
Poker has been dominated by games based on seven live cards for most of a century now, and there is no reason to suspect that that will change. How much of the poker market holdem and it's variations will surrender to mississippi and it's variations remains to be seen. It seems reasonable to suggest that the natural division of the market between stud and communal-card games will become more equal, now that stud is available in a form which can compete on equal terms as both a limit and a big-bet game.
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