Poker & Pop Culture: The Congressman Who Accidentally Wrote a Poker Book

Poker players are well accustomed to legislators’ unending debates over our favorite game. Indeed, laws to forbid, restrict, and/or permit the playing of poker have been part of its history ever since the game’s introduction back in the early 19th century.

It is perhaps surprising to learn, then, that the person often credited with writing one of the earliest rulebooks of poker was in fact a former U.S. Congressman. It was by accident, really, that Robert C. Schenck, once a member of the House of Representatives, came to author a short book explaining how to play five-card draw.

After representing his native Ohio in Congress from 1843-1851, Schenck served as an ambassador in South America, supported Lincoln in the 1860 election, fought with the Union as a general in the Civil War, and served once again in Congress as one of Ohio’s representatives from 1863-1870.

Upon losing a close race for reelection in 1870, Schenck was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant as Minister to the United Kingdom and the following summer he sailed to England where he would remain for the next five years.

It was while he was in London that Schenck would pen his brief primer, Draw. Rules for Playing Poker. Some have suggested he wrote the book in order to introduce the American game to Queen Victoria, although in truth it was following a weekend of card-playing with friends in Somerset that Schenck had been asked to write down the rules by his host. Complying with the request, Schenck was later surprised to see his rules having been reprinted and circulated by his friends as a book.

Schenck’s little “how-to” book appeared some time after editions of the American version of Hoyle’s Games first began including references to poker, with the first mention coming in the 1845 edition of the “American Hoyle.” Schenck’s slim volume nonetheless stands as what many regard the earliest example of a book entirely devoted to poker.

It is tempting to think that an ex-Congressman and U.S. ambassador having authored such a book must indicate that poker — which as we’ve been covering was still a game played in saloons, gaming dens, and on steamboats and rife with cheaters, cardsharps, and various ne’er-do-wells — had become relatively accepted in American popular culture.

That wasn’t quite the case.

Schenck himself explains in “The Author’s Apology” — added when the book was later reprinted in the U.S. in 1880 — that even though the printing of his book had been “intended as a compliment” by his English friends, its appearance had “unwittingly brought down on me the wrath and reprehension of so many good people in America.”

At that point in his life, Schenck had already endured his fair share of public controversy. That’s because by the time Schenck wrote that “Apology,” his reputation had suffered considerably thanks in particular to his involvement in a speculative venture gone wrong — the Emma Mine Company of Utah.

It …

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