May 13, 2005
Blind raise
Because Bojan's recent comment about Magic: The Gathering in Belgrade tickled my memory.
Somewhere, and for no very good reason, I have a Xerox of a monograph on Apache playing cards. The Apaches were not originally French street toughs; no, at first they were a Canadian Stone Age dog-sledding people who inexplicably moved far to the south, picked up the use of the gun and the horse from the rather surprised Spanish, and became an extremely mobile nation of badasses. They got along with the other peoples of the region about as well as you'd expect. This included the Spanish.
Given their mutual unfriendliness, it's a little unusual that the Apache also picked up from the Spanish their use of playing cards. (Or maybe not, since many native North American peoples were avid gamblers.) The Apache made their own, out of rawhide, but copied the Spanish designs -- different from the Anglo suits, with coins and cups -- and kept some of the Spanish names for the cards.
Some decks still survive. They're collectors' items now, and museums will bid for them.
I should note that they were not made from human skin. Apparently there's an urban legend about that.
Upshot: playing cards will diffuse through some of the toughest cultural barriers imaginable.
Playing cards themselves are derived from medieval Chinese paper money. This is not common knowledge, although the broad outlines have been known for over a hundred years. Gamblers would bet based on the bank notes they held in their hand, a little like modern Liar's Poker. I wonder if the early Chinese hyperinflations helped? The monetary value of the bills might have dropped, but their utility as game markers would have remained.
That bane of comment boards everywhere, poker, seems to have a Persian origin, in the game Ās Nas. The problem is, no one has ever been able to confirm a Persian connection to New Orleans in the early nineteenth century, where poker was first reliably recorded. On the other hand, if there ever was a place for a Persian card game to enter the early US, it would have been New Orleans.
And just for the hell of it, here's the origin of that mysterious casino game, Keno, or as it was originally known, the White Pigeon Ticket. Betting on randomly chosen words from the Thousand Character Classic? I usually only say this when contemplating Wisconsin or the Philippines, but: "Oh, my people."
Posted by coyu at May 13, 2005 02:31 AMI'm a bit surprised that Tim Powers never picked up on that.
IMS, some Communist regimes developed ideologically suitable playing cards, i.e. with Workers, Peasants and Soldiers instead of Jacks, Kings and Queens. Didn't catch on.
Must it have been Persia? Poker, in its simplest form, is admirably suited for separating fools from their money. It seems like something some clever fellow might have come up with on a long trip down the Mississippi. Lots of clever young fellows with lots of time on their hands, and small stakes gambling must have been a constant background noise.
Don't underestimate the game-geek's ability to develop completely new gaming systems very quickly. Not to flog the D&D horse, but we can trace every step of the evolution from wargames through miniatures to tabletop RPG, and the whole thing only took a little over a decade. And if it had happened in 1790s Louisiana instead of 1970s Wisconsin, it might easily have gone completely unrecorded.
Tangent: Collectible and "combat" card games seem like an obvious step that took a strangely long time to develop. I wonder why.
Anyway, that's very cool about the Apaches.
Doug M.
When compared to the other candidate ancestors, Ās Nas really is far and away the most similar to early poker. Five cards, the same ranking system, et cetera.
Incidentally, the Persian hypothesis has the possibility of additional confirmation, like the way baseball has been shown to have rather early roots in New England. A diary entry from a French adventurer, perhaps, in the same way that the current earliest known record of poker comes from a wandering English actor. The 'clever unknown kid on the Mississippi' hypothesis, on the other hand, is much less amenable to confirmation (and forget about falsification). I should also note that card game evolution was terribly slow by modern standards.
But Tim Powers knew about the Thousand Character Classic and Keno! See, each character in the Classic is different, so you can use the numbers one through 1000 as a code. I forget which of his novels used that.
Carlos
Posted by: Carlos at May 14, 2005 02:31 AMI'll have tell my mother about Keno. She bets on it every time she goes to a club, and once won quite a lot of money.
My "Oh, my people" moment. New South Wales, with something like 0.08% of the world's population, has 25% of the world's poker machines. I choose to be proud of this achievement...
Posted by: Graeme at May 14, 2005 09:38 AM
When compared to the other candidate ancestors, Ās Nas really is far and away the most similar to early poker. Five cards, the same ranking system, et cetera.
I agree it looks pretty plausible. But some of that may be convergent evolution. Frex, if you're going to have a game of ranked patterns out of five cards, then pair - two pair - three of a kind and so forth emerge pretty naturally from the laws of probability.
the Persian hypothesis has the possibility of additional confirmation... The 'clever unknown kid on the Mississippi' hypothesis, on the other hand, is much less amenable to confirmation (and forget about falsification).
History's not a science.
Doug M.
Um. History may not be a science, but an alternate hypothesis that's harder to check and based on a projection of modern attitudes where they don't really hold... well, it doesn't make for a very strong alternate hypothesis in any field.
Games were conservative towards innovation for a very long time -- especially gambling games. And the level of gamesmanship was in general low. I don't think you could find a true "game geek" until the late nineteenth century. (My candidate for paterfamilias would be Sam Loyd.)
As for appealing to the historical knowledge of the laws of probability, um. I'm not going to be pedantic here and point out the dates. I'll just note that my knowledge of teaching probability to contemporary young people who have grown up playing poker, blackjack, craps, etc. suggests strongly that most people internalize precious few elementary concepts of probability from play, even within the games they play often.
(If I were Kahneman or Tversky, I could win the Nobel Prize for this insight! Or be dead.)
Posted by: Carlos at May 16, 2005 03:13 AMI know more than a few people who would be extremely astounded by the claim that history isn't a science. As I've once said, my local university does not have a "Department of History", but instead it has a "Department of Historical Science".
The research of history is subject to scientific requirements and standards, just like any other research. Although I suspect that there might be a semantic difference at work here; the Anglo-Saxon "science" carries a rather different weight than the German "wissenschaft" and its various Continental European derivatives.
"Falsifiability" in the sense that it's usually understood certainly doesn't enter to it, but on balance, the argument that Carlos is making would still seem to be more credible.
Cheers,
Jalonen
Jussi, this is a variant of an argument that Carlos and I have had before... enough times that it may reflect a deep difference of philosophy or (more likely) temperament.
I'd agree that Carlos' explanation is more plausible. That doesn't mean that the bright-kid-on-a-flatboat explanation is impossible, or even profoundly unlikely.
-- I'm not so sure about card gamers being conservative to innovation. Consider the steady evolution from various trump-and-misere card games in the late 18th century to modern bridge. If you look at the history of these games from, say, the late 18th century to the late 19th, "conservative" is not the adjective that will come to mind. More like a Cambrian explosion.
Bridge, in particular, seems to have appeared rather suddenly and obscurely from a tangle of related games stretching from Persia and the Ottoman Empire through Russia and Continental Europe to Britain. There are pieces of that puzzle that we have (modern bidding, frex, was invented by British expats in India around 1900). There are other pieces that remain completely obscure (what does "bridge" mean? The Russian _biritch_ explanation has been strongly challenged in recent years, so we're actually less sure than we were.)
But we /know/ that some key elements of the game were invented by a small group of people or a single innovator.
Anyway. To paraphrase and parody, Carlos and I seem to have a conversational attractor that goes something like this:
C + D: We agree that A is more likely than B.
D: But B is possible.
C: Bah! A is far more likely. Indeed it's the only sensible way to think. B is, really, absurd.
D: Ridiculous! B is certainly and reasonably possible. I'm going to take B's side now, just to be difficult. B, B, B.
C: Niggling and carping!
D: Absolutist arrogance!
The significance of it all is left as an exercise for the student.
Doug M.
Yeah, but sometimes you go straight to the niggling. Shame on you!
Posted by: Carlos at May 16, 2005 04:37 PM