The Slang of Poker

By Tom Dalzell and Peter Donahue

An equal-opportunity pastime, poker is played everywhere from country clubs to penitentiaries and has even developed into a spectator sport. In this entertaining gift book for poker fanatics and students of American vernacular, a cultural historian and slang authority offers a compendium of traditional poker slang, as well as the new vocabulary of online poker and jargon from high-stakes tournaments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Dec 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9780486784649

Book preview

Copyright

Copyright © 2012 by Tom Dalzell

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

The Slang of Poker is a new work, first published by

Dover Publications, Inc., in 2012.

International Standard Book Number

eISBN-13: 978-0-486-78464-9

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

48795401

www.doverpublications.com

Interior design by Peter Donahue

Contents

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

Y

Z

The name of the game—poker—was first recorded in 1832, derived from the French game poque (1752) and, possibly, the German pochen (1741). Poker is not a single game with a single set of rules, but one with many variations, all of which involve successive betting on a hand’s value and won either by having the best hand or by driving all the other players to concede the hand.

Poker is quintessentially American, no less a cultural fixture than baseball. It is small-d democratic, equally at home in the country club locker room or in the down-and-out urban card room, the firehouse or the White House, the college dormitory or the army barracks. It can exist as a weekly game played with buddies, as a friendly game with strangers, as a high-stakes tournament game, or as a casino game. Wherever played, its hallmarks are egalitarian: players play against each other and not against an odds-favored house, and a good bluff can beat a good hand.

Poker has long been among us. When we think of the American West, one iconic image is of the flashy, smooth-talking, riverboat gambler, nicknamed Diamond Jim, working the waters of the Mississippi River in the nineteenth century—early evangelists of the new game: poker. From the movie The Sting (1973), we remember Paul Newman as Henry Shaw Gondorff playing, cheating and winning in the private high-stakes poker game run by Doyle Lonnegan (played by Robert Shaw) on the passenger train 20th Century Limited as it sped in style from Chicago to New York. Since the early 1900s, we have taken guilty pleasure in C. M. Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker paintings, originally commissioned by Brown and Bigelow cigars but eventually found in every nook and cranny of American schlock. When Warren G. Harding was chosen as the Republican presidential nominee in—literally—a smoke-filled backroom at the Blackstone Hotel in 1920, he told us, "We drew to a pair of