Jon Pill

The growing popularity of poker in India does pose an interesting problem though: where do all these players go to play?

Blind man’s bluff in this context is not the Dickensian parlour game. Instead, it is a version of texas hold’em where you can see everyone’s hand but your own. A single card version has served for decades as a university drinking game.

Chow Yun-Fat plays Ko Chun, the black tie wearing God of Gamblers: a man who is either an extraordinary cheat or possessed of genuine gambling related supernatural abilities. Or both.

​For anyone who uses Twitter, you may have noticed that a lot of your favorite pros tweet less about chip counts and more about the upcoming US election.

Maverick was adapted by William Goldman from the '50s TV series about a family of charming gamblers created by Roy Huggins as a kind of cash-in-cum-antidote to the tough-man Westerns which were hugely popular off the back of John Wayne and John Ford’s myth making.

How do you run a casual poker night and chill that will allow everyone to get the thrills and spills that they want at the level that they want it?

The plot centres around Bored Burt Reynolds – an old school poker player who quit the game – and the story of how he meets and mentors an up and coming young poker player called Alex Stillman.

Drawmaha is a glorious monster made from the reanimated body parts of five-card Omaha, split-pot games, and draw poker, and it is hella fun.

There is an implicit trust in the greed of the people who own the establishments, because their business would suffer if anyone were to cheat within their brick and mortar walls.

Wired magazine’s Jason Tanz, even went so far as to dust off his copy of Phil Hellmuth’s book Play Poker Like The Pros and see what light it shed on the strange happenings at the Republican National Convention.

The story is a meandering look at the relationships and world of Eric ‘The Kid’ Stoner in the run up to a big money game against Lancey ‘The Man’ Howard, a big time gambler, and the man to beat.

The reasoning behind this is that deep pocketed entrepreneurs are just looking for high stakes fun, not be hawkishly exploited by the dead eyed sharks who grind the percentages for a living.

The young gambler takes a thorough drubbing and goes off on a sort of mini-bildungsroman to lick his wounds and learn what it was that beat him the first time round.

The history of card games is long large, spanning multiple continents and more than 1000 years.