Old School Poker

[Saddlepoint]

Cincinnati Kid Rules: A call must meet your opponent's wager exactly; if you can't afford to call the entirety of his bet, you must fold and forfeit anything you've already put into the pot.

1) Did people actually play this way? For real?

2) Can anybody explain to me how anybody starting with a lesser net worth than his opponent stands any chance whatsoever of winning in a game with an ante?

3) Can anybody explain to me how two thinking players could possibly reach a result other than breaking even in a game without an ante?

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2) Can anybody explain to me how anybody starting with a lesser net worth than his opponent stands any chance whatsoever of winning in a game with an ante?


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Net worths are not public information, so the richer guy doesn't know that you cannot call his total net worth.

[Kaeser]

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2) Can anybody explain to me how anybody starting with a lesser net worth than his opponent stands any chance whatsoever of winning in a game with an ante?


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Net worths are not public information, so the richer guy doesn't know that you cannot call his total net worth.

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Actually I think taking someones marker was a friendly gesture. If you were really playing with this rule you would have to have the cash on you.

Roy Cooke has an article about this in cardplayer. cardplayer magazine
in the movie 'shade', they don't use table stakes either. sly stallone threatens to bet them out of a pot at one point,(because they ran out of money) but says he'll go easy on them and just check. (something along the lines of this)

[AaronBrown]

This is what used to be called "no-limit" Poker. What we now call no-limit was then called "table stakes." The standard rule was you had 24 hours to raise the money to call. Hands were sealed and held by a third party.

While the system appears in many stories, I've yet to find what I consider a reliable account of a real hand like this (by that I mean an account from a generally trustworthy source with named eyewitnesses who corroborated the account). The Cincinati Kid is absurdly inaccurate, it's hard to believe Richard Jessup (the author) ever played a hand of Poker. I think he was trying to cash in on the success of The Hustler and just translated stuff from pool to Poker.

My guess is no limit was used as a formal rule at times, but that you could argue about the enforcement. For example, if you bet me $1 million, I might insist you take a marker or that my ranch was worth $1 million, and if the majority of on-lookers (or the majority of firepower or social status or whatever) backed me, you wouldn't have a choice. This ethic antedates Poker, gambling was not supposed to be something you did with sensible amounts of money, a real man was supposed to be willing to back his judgment with everything including his life.

For most most the history of Poker, people were unlikely to be playing for hard cash anyway. There wasn't a lot of gold and silver available, and you needed an expert to assess value anyway. The value of banknotes depending on how solid and how close the issuing bank was. So even deciding what constituted a call was a matter of potential argument.