As last week's first hand of 'Poker & Pop Culture' indicated, the focus in this series will primarily be on poker and American pop culture. That is to say, most of the films, paintings, songs, radio and television shows, stories, novels, letters, memoirs, biographies, articles, guide books, and other examples of cultural products and influence we'll be exploring (in a roughly chronologically fashion) will have come from the United States.

It's worth noting here near the beginning, however, that even if America wins the right to claim itself the birthplace of poker, the game — like most of the country's population — was 'parented' elsewhere, having descended from other, earlier games originating in other countries. A French game called poque (which we'll touch on briefly next week) is the most likely candidate for the title of poker's most immediate ancestor, although other games contributed as well (some of which are mentioned below).

See the first chapters of David G. Schwartz's great history of gambling, Roll the Bones, as well as the start of Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker by James McManus for the full backstory on how betting on cards became common to numerous cultures all over the globe, and then to America as well. Both writers explain how evidence of humans' urge to gamble can be found in the earliest historical record. Both also trace the introduction and development of various gambling games, the invention of playing cards, and how early card games of the late medieval and early modern periods eventually evolved into those first variants of poker in the early 1800s.

You will go to hell because of your sin you are a law-breaker, and an enemy of God’s holy perfection and you will go to hell because you have rejected the only means God has provided for salvation - his son Jesus! If you believe God, that. Can One Sin Send You to Hell? By Tim Jordan. Have you ever heard the Gospel presented in that way? Imagine that you were the best person that ever lived. You kept the commandments. You were kind and giving to your neighbor. You obeyed your parents. You went to church. You even gave generously to the poor.

We will, however, step back a bit before picking up poker's story in America next week. We're not going all of the way back to the Garden of Eden, mind you, and a certain gamble once taken there involving forbidden fruit and the resulting loss of paradise.

No, instead we're starting out by going to hell.

Related WordsSynonymsLegend: Switch to new thesaurus Noun 1. Gambling hell - a public building in which a variety of games of chance can be played (operated as a business) gambling den, gambling house, gaming house business enterprise, commercial enterprise, business - the activity of providing goods and services involving financial and commercial and industrial aspects; 'computers are now.
Keep in mind, that hell and heaven are going to be spiritual abodes, not fleshly abodes. So the “fire of hell” is really about as metaphorical as the “streets of gold” and the “gates of pearl” in heaven. But picture the idea of fire and you get what the gospel writer is trying to say. Hell is also going to be a place of pain.

Poker: A Bad Reputation Before the First Hand Is Dealt

It's in the seventh circle of hell that Dante Alighieri places gamblers (or 'wanton spendthrifts') in the Inferno, the first part of his early 14th-century epic The Divine Comedy. He situates them in a region designated for individuals guilty of 'violence against oneself.' One of the damned is a Florentine nobleman who held high offices, Giovanni di Buiamonte. Of this 'sovereign cavalier,' Dante saw his gambling (and loan sharking) as representative of a larger moral decline, and therefore deserving of harsh punishment in the afterlife.

As we can see, the edge of the house for a corner bet is exactly the same as that for a straight-up bet.Someone may ask what the case with even-money outside bets will be. House edge on roulette bets. For a straight-up bet the probability of success is 1/37 (1 chance out of 37), but the player will receive 36 units, while the difference of 1 unit (37 minus 36) represents the house advantage. Or, for winning a bet of 1 unit the casino will pay him/her 35 units plus the initial bet. There are 18 black numbers, which means we have 18 ways to be successful. Let us bet 1 unit on black.

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of god, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto god, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of god.

Dante sets the tone for subsequent literary reflections on gambling and card playing. Such activities may not leave you sitting in hot sand with fire raining down on you as happens to Buiamonte in Dante's poem. But you might still get burned.

There is no card playing in The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio's great collection of 100 tales told by seven women and men seeking to escape the Black Death during the mid-14th century. Nor is there any in Geoffery Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in which pilgrims similarly conduct a kind of storytelling contest to help pass the time as they travel to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. In Chaucer's collection, the Pardoner in his tale does rail against gambling, though, highlighting 'hasardrye' — referring both to gambling in general and Hazard, a popular dice game — as especially harmful and the 'mooder of lesynges' (the mother of lies).

If such works had been written a couple of hundred years later, we could have expected tales about gambling on cards to have appeared among the compilations, given that the stories in Boccaccio and Chaucer provide a comprehensive overview of life in the 14th century. Move a little further down the chronological road and card playing might well have been preferred over storytelling as a means to pass the time.

That's not to say people weren't gambling on cards even then. In fact, during the last quarter-century of the 1300s there would come a number of ordinances and prohibitions outlawing several different card games in Italy, France, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands. The legal proscriptions against cards would keep on appearing in the following century and after, attesting both to the continued popularity of the games and the view of those in power that their spread was like another sort of plague.

By the time Francois Rabelais wrote his great 16th-century satire Gargantua and Pantagruel, the manufacture of cards and development of still more games had expanded significantly. The book includes a chapter describing the giant Gargantua finishing a large meal, then having a green cloth laid out over a table and cards, dice, and game-boards set upon it. Then he's said to play some 200-plus different games, about a third of which appear to be card games. Later translators would expand the list further, so if you pick up the book today you'll find a mix of actual games played in Italy during the 1500s, games fancifully invented by Rabelais, and later ones thrown in as well, depending on the preferences of translators and/or editors.

Rabelais' catalogue is historically significant, as it includes in some cases the very first references to several real card games. In fact, a few among them are listed as early precursors to poker. One is primero, a vying game using a 40-card deck that involved players building hands and comparing them, with opportunities to bet and bluff along the way. Some of these hands resemble poker hands, including a flush (or fluxus) and four of a kind (a chorus).

The game of 'one-and-thirty' is also mentioned, another vying game in which players build hands worth 31 points. That's an element found in other European card games often thought of as having contributed to poker as well, including the Spanish game of 'mus' and the German game of 'poch' (or 'pochspiel' or 'pochen'). 'Post and pair' shows up in the list, too, a three-card game resembling English 'brag.'

Rabelais doesn't really offer an opinion on whether gambling games are good or bad, making him different from most other cultural commentators who bring up the subject. His contemporary Thomas More, for instance, described the inhabitants of his Utopia shunning gambling a

Will Gambling Send You To Hell