#337 - Andy Bloch Rocks, or Poker – The Jewish Game

One of Andy Bloch’s hobbies is collecting poker books. Over the years, he had read and photocopied some very old poker texts, but David Sklansky inadvertently jump-started his interest at the 2005 World Series. David had offered Howard Lederer several first-edition copies of HOLD ‘EM POKER. This was the book I described in the STRATEGY GUIDE as follows:

This skinny book had a goofy cover, a typeface like a ransom note – and most of the concepts I have learned from the fifty to one hundred poker books I have read since (and the one you are reading now).

It was truly a revolutionary book in the history of games and strategy, pre-dating SUPER/SYSTEM and probably more applicable than Doyle’s treatise to the games most players would be playing in the Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, and even now. It went through numerous revisions and most players swear by his (and Mason Malmuth’s) HOLD ‘EM POKER FOR ADVANCED PLAYERS, which is more recent, more recently updated, and the result of more experience in both playing and publishing. (Of course, the Two Plus Two library is filled with other materials to elbow aside David’s first book.) If you read it today, however, I challenge you to tell me it’s still not extremely valuable, especially for newer players.

BOOKIE

But Sklansky wanted a price that was too high for the copies, so there was no transaction. Andy Bloch, who might bristle at being called cheap but would have trouble completely denying it, heard about this and became interested in what the reasonable price would be for a HOLD ‘EM POKER first edition. He began purchasing copies on eBay, finding out that there were several nearly-identical early versions. He eventually found a first edition at a good price, along with some other good deals on old poker books, and a new fascination.

We’ve periodically discussed the hobby. I remember in particular talking with Andy before the 2006 Series about my surprise that he had taken up a hobby that potentially involved a significant expenditure of money. That’s when he told me about bargain-hunting Sklansky’s first edition and how even some of the oldest poker books weren’t especially expensive.

“What’s the holy grail?” I asked him. “What’s the most valuable, most sought after, most expensive poker book?”

Andy then told me the story of Robert Schenck, a Union general during the Civil War and Ambassador to the United Kingdom under President Ulysses Grant. While attending a party, Schenck explained the rules of poker to a duchess and the game soon became popular at court. Someone privately printed those rules in England and Schenck himself had them published after he returned to the U.S. The game came to be known in England as “Schenck’s Poker” and news of his popularizing the game spread across the Atlantic and may have led to him recall as Ambassador. Those rules weren’t much more than a pamphlet but they constituted the first printed book entirely devoted to poker. A copy occasionally showed up for sale on the internet for about $1,500.

I told him – and I swear this happened – that if he had a great World Series that he should buy himself that book. He didn’t say he agreed but after he finished second in the $50,000 HORSE, I reminded him about it.

The chump. He bought a convertible for his fiancé Jen but, as far as I know, never pulled the trigger on a $1,500 pamphlet for himself.

He continues hunting for bargains among old poker books. One of the reasons he is collecting is for the possibility of photographing the pages of these old books and making them available to the public. This means he also scans Google Books for old poker books, both because of his general interest and to find out what it doesn’t have.

I’ve found a few old books at used book stores that I’ve bought for Andy and donated a couple from my collection; I’m not sure if any were particularly noteworthy. He loaned me John Welcome’s GREAT SCANDALS OF CHEATING AT CARDS, which I’ve neither read nor returned.

I bought one book that I was once excited about, called HOW TO WIN AT POKER by John Moss. Considering how fun and bizarre Johnny Moss’s “biography” was, I figured this would be a treat. In fact, it was originally written in 1950 so I figured maybe there’d be some stuff about the legendary game with Nick the Greek.

The book starts, “It would be well to begin this biographical note by saying there is no such person as ‘John Moss.’” Is there any question why this book was reprinted in 1973, right after “the other John Moss,” the real one, won his third World Series of Poker championship? The World Series wasn’t well known back then, and I’m sure this book didn’t sell much, but I have a feeling Doubleday profited however much they profited from the mistake I made.

NU INFORMATION

Andy sent me an e-mail on Saturday titled “Poker derived from Yiddish?”

Unless you’ve looked into this, you might not recognize that poker is not a very old game. And for not being very old, its origins are pretty uncertain. For example, there are uncertainties about the invention of playing cards, but it concerns tenth-century China vs. the 1370s from several independent European sources. But the U.S. Constitution is older than poker. Abraham Lincoln is older than poker. The Civil War may be older than poker. There are standing houses in the United States older than poker. There are bottles of wine older than poker. There is no definitive answer to the question of where poker came from or even where the word “poker” came from.

Andy sent me a clip from a book on Google Books. The book, edited by Albert Barrere and Charles Leland, was titled A DICTIONARY OF SLANG, JARGON & CANT, written in 1889. In their forward to volume one, “A Brief History of English Slang,” the authors wrote about the increasing influence of Yiddish (the result of German Jews emigrating from Germany and surrounding areas to Great Britain during the previous hundred years) on English. They gave the following example:

It seems not unlikely that the word poker, as a game of cards, is derived from Yiddish, since in it pochger (from pochgen) means a man who in play conceals the state of his winnings or losses, or hides his hand. This is so eminently characteristic of poker that the resemblance seems to be something more than merely accidental. There have always been Jewish card-players enough in the United States to have given the word. The most remarkable and desperate game of poker within the writer’s knowledge (in which not only a fortune but a life were risked) occurred on board a Mississippi steamer, its hero being a Jew.

When fact-checking this entry with Andy, he asked me – rhetorically, I’m sure – if I was aware of the story Barrere & Leland told of the Mississippi steamer. “No, but I’d love to learn about it,” I replied.

That’s the difference between me and Andy Bloch. I LOVE learning. Bloch LEARNS. Within minutes – as if he already had the source and was proctoring an examination at which I failed – he sent me a link to Michael Feldberg’s 2001 BLESSING OF FREEDOM: CHAPTERS IN AMERICFAL JEWISH HISTORY:

A key moment came in 1860 [in Mark Twain’s evolving attitude toward Jews], when a trusted Mississippi River captain, George Newhouse, told Twain a story (the veracity of which cannot be established) about a courageous Jew who had boldly saved a slave girl in a poker dispute between a desperate planter and a cheating, knife-yielding gambler. The Jew killed the cheater in a duel and returned the slave girl to the planter’s daughter, who had been her mistress as well as her friend and companion from birth. Twain later reported hearing other versions of this story from other “eye-witnesses,” indicating that the story may have been apocryphal.

So when someone says poker came from the eighteenth century French game called poque, you can set ‘em straight.