History Of Poker
Playing-cards initially reached Europe in 1360, not from China but from the Islamic Mamluk Empire of Egypt through the trading harbors of Venice. Mamluk cards themselves also do not draw from Chinese cards but bear vague associations to the geographically dominant cards of India and Persia. Surviving samples of Mamluk cards come from a unique 52-card pack consisting of four suits the swords, the polo sticks, the goblets, and the coins each with 13 ranks. The only identified Chinese card games of that era were of the trick-taking sort; and, while we have no modern record of games played with the Mamluk pack, it too was obviously designed for trick-taking.
Playing cards in the 14th Century
14th century Europe saw an explosion in the diversity of designs, structures and suit-systems of playing cards, culminating before 15th century in the organization of the primary European suit systems and a also wide variety of supplementary games. A chief European input to the land of card play was the notion of a trump suit, first come to life in the Italian invention of tarot cards in the 1420s, although also prefigured in the German game of Karnöffel. As well developed during the similar period were numerous gambling games based on acquiring or gambling on card combinations such as flushes, sequences, matches like quartets, triplets, pairs, and numeration, as in Thirty-One, known as the ancestor of Twenty-One and maybe Cribbage. Numerical and melding games were almost certainly a derivative from, or modeled on, cube games of the age, though we lack adequate information to be able to rebuild the real forms of dice play.
Not a dice game!
It is difficult to envision a procedure of Poker-style contest in use in dice games of the time, as the contest originally depended completely on being able to conceal the identity of the cards you grasp or draw by revealing only their plain sides to the other competitors, whereas the result of dice throws is essentially open and able to be seen by all. As Cardano eminently noted in 1564, there is a distinction form play with dice, since the latter is open, but play with cards happen from ambush, because they are hidden. All the same, whether derived in Europe or imported from somewhere else, there can be no uncertainty that contest card games were in play by 1500. This should not be used to mean Poker-style contest, however, which may be a very late growth. The most primitive style of contest may more closely have looked like that conventionally followed in the English game of Brag.
Vague Card Game Descriptions
A problem common in card-game history is that modern descriptions of contest are never unmistakable, partially because they it is easier to give an instance of a round of contest without detailing the rules on which it is based, therefore giving rise to irresolvable vagueness, and partly because it on no account cropped up to them that there could be more than one potential way of doing it. Two essentially different types of contest may be classified as the Equalization technique or the Poker style and the Matching method or the English Brag style.