Poker & Pop Culture: Card-Playing Characters in Early Poker Clubs

Moving through poker’s first century, we’ve encountered the game being played in saloons, on steamboats, in gaming dens, and in military encampments. Many cultural representations of poker as it was played in the 1800s — both contemporary and those produced later on — highlight those settings for poker as well, as shown in various stories (true and fictional), in paintings, and (later on) in films.

Another popular context for poker that emerged during the latter decades of the 19th century and continuing into the 20th was the private club or salon. As different states established a variety of legal prohibitions and/or restrictions on the game, such clubs became popular among those wanting to find a regular game among known parties where the risk of being cheated, physically harmed, or subject to being raided and shut down was reduced (if not entirely removed).

Poker clubs were also inviting to those who would liked to have played at home but for whatever reason — say, a disapproving spouse — could not.

In fact, a favored literary form inspired by these clubs would emerge late in the century, one echoing a tradition of coffee-house reporting made famous during the earlier age of satire — the “club report.”

A Glimpse Inside a Hidden World

Poker clubs have always been a great generator of characters and stories, both back in the 19th century and still today. You might have noticed just last week there appeared in The New York Post yet another peek “Inside the seedy world of underground NY poker clubs.”

The feature shared anecdotes from several New York clubs including the ones that helped inspire the 1998 film Rounders. Among those covered, of course, was the famous Mayfair Club frequented by Dan Harrington, Erik Seidel, Mickey Appleman, Stu Ungar, and many other poker players whose fame would extend well beyond the Empire state.

Perhaps the best of the early “club reports” emanated from the same part of the country — David A. Curtis’s 1899 collection Queer Luck that shares stories of New York poker games played in “one of those up-town club-rooms that are so quietly kept as to be entirely unknown to the police and general public.”

The 13 stories were originally published in The New York Sun, one of three big NYC newspapers during the late 19th century along with the Times and Herald. Most are presented as though told to Curtis by an unnamed “gray-haired young-looking man” with knowledge of the games.

Not all of the stories in Queer Luck are about the New York club, but rather concern other games the storyteller either experienced or heard about elsewhere. In one story titled “For a Senate Seat,” he shares an anecdote of “a United States Senate seat lost on four queens.” Set just after the Civil War in Minnesota, the story tells of the primary financial backers for two senatorial candidates playing a high-stakes game of five-card draw, with a showdown of four kings versus four queens essentially ensuring the election of one candidate over the other. Another story tells of lawmakers in Washington playing poker, with the outcome of another poker game influencing the passage of a particular bill.

Most of the stories, though, concern characters who frequent the uptown club in NYC, ultimately providing the reader a taste of what the games might have been like. That is to say, not unlike the recent New York Post feature, one gets the sense of having obtained a peek “inside” a closed world known only to those who inhabit it.

Big Hands, Big Stakes

One of the better tales is the one that kicks off the book, titled “Why He Quit the Game.” The story focuses on a wild session of five-card draw jacks-or-better in the club involving five players, all of whom are referred to generically by their professions — the Editor, the Congressman, the Colonel, the Doctor, and the Lawyer.

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