The History of Poker: From As Nas to Online Megasites

Poker Guides · History

Poker's rise from a regional card game to a global, billion-dollar industry spans roughly two centuries - and understanding that arc gives real context to the game you're learning today. Here's how it happened, era by era.

Uncertain Origins: 16th-19th Century

Poker doesn't have a single clean origin story. Most historians trace influences to As Nas, a 16th-century Persian game played with a 25-card deck that featured betting rounds and hand rankings surprisingly similar to poker. European games likely contributed too: the French poque and German pochspiel both involved bluffing and betting mechanics that could plausibly have crossed the Atlantic with French settlers into Louisiana.

What's clearer is where the game took the shape we'd recognize today: early 19th-century America, particularly around New Orleans. Early versions used a 20-card deck among four players, betting on who held the best hand. By the 1830s and 1840s, the full 52-card deck had become standard, and the draw - replacing unwanted cards - was added not long after.

Riverboats and the Frontier: Mid-to-Late 1800s

The Mississippi River steamboat trade became poker's great distribution engine. Professional gamblers worked the boats traveling between New Orleans and the Midwest, spreading the game to every port town along the way. As settlement pushed westward, poker followed - becoming a fixture of saloons, mining camps, and frontier trading posts throughout the Wild West era. The flush was added to the game around this period, and by the Civil War, most of the hand-ranking system used today was firmly established.

Stud poker emerged during this era as a popular alternative to draw poker, eventually giving rise to variants like the Seven-Card Stud still played today.

Early-to-Mid 20th Century: Formalization

Through the early 1900s, poker remained popular but largely informal - home games, private clubs, and illegal backroom card rooms, since gambling laws varied widely and often restricted the game. Nevada's legalization of gambling in 1931 gave poker its first major legal home, and Texas Hold'em itself is believed to have emerged in Texas in the early 20th century, though it didn't reach Nevada until the 1960s.

1970: The World Series of Poker Is Born

Everything changed in 1970, when Texas casino owner Benny Binion invited a small group of the country's best poker players to Binion's Horseshoe in Las Vegas for what became the first World Series of Poker. The inaugural event wasn't even a tournament in the modern sense - the champion, Johnny Moss, was voted the winner by his fellow competitors after a series of cash games. The tournament format we recognize today began the following year, and the WSOP has run every year since, becoming poker's defining annual championship. See our full WSOP History guide for the complete story.

1970s-1990s: Satellites, Television, and Slow Growth

The 1980s saw the introduction of satellite tournaments - smaller, cheaper buy-in events offering a seat into bigger tournaments as the prize - which gradually democratized access to major events. Legendary players including Doyle Brunson, Stu Ungar, and Johnny Chan built their reputations during this era, elevating poker's public profile even as it remained a relatively niche pursuit compared to other gambling games. Early TV coverage existed but lacked the innovation that would later transform poker into genuine spectator entertainment - that came with the hole-card camera, introduced more widely in the late 1990s, which let television audiences see players' hidden cards and understand the drama of a bluff in real time.

1998-2003: Online Poker's Quiet Beginning

Real-money online poker began around 1998 with Planet Poker, widely credited as the first online room to deal real-money hands. Early software was primitive by today's standards, and adoption grew gradually rather than explosively - until one hand in 2003 changed everything.

2003: The Moneymaker Effect

Chris Moneymaker, an amateur accountant from Tennessee, won his WSOP Main Event seat through a low-cost online satellite tournament and went on to win the entire event, along with $2.5 million. Televised on ESPN, his victory proved that an ordinary online player could beat seasoned professionals on poker's biggest stage - triggering what's now called the Moneymaker Effect, a surge of new players joining online rooms hoping to replicate his path. We cover this moment in full in our dedicated Moneymaker Effect guide.

2006-2011: UIGEA and Black Friday

The poker boom's momentum ran into a major obstacle in 2006, when the U.S. passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), restricting how banks could process payments to online gambling sites. Many major poker sites continued operating in the U.S. market despite the law's ambiguity, until April 15, 2011 - remembered in the poker world as Black Friday - when the U.S. Department of Justice seized the domains of several major poker sites, including PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, and indicted their founders. The U.S. online poker market fractured overnight, and it took years, along with state-by-state legalization efforts, to rebuild any regulated domestic market.

2011-Present: Regulation, Recovery, and a New Generation

Since Black Friday, online poker in the U.S. has rebuilt gradually through state-level regulation - Nevada, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and others have each built their own licensed frameworks, sometimes linked through shared player pools. Globally, platforms like PokerStars and GGPoker rebuilt and expanded into dominant international rooms, while newer entrants have brought innovations like cryptocurrency payments and short-deck formats to the table. Today's online poker landscape blends the game's saloon-era roots with software, security, and global reach that would have been unimaginable to the players at that first 1970 WSOP.

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