Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (54 page)

P
LACE YOUR BETS

If anyone tells you they know the true origin of poker, they’re not playing with a full deck. People have been betting on cards for more than 1,000 years, about as long as cards have been around—and that makes it hard to trace poker back to any one particular game. For that matter, poker may have descended from several different games which were mixed and matched over centuries to create the game played today. Some likely candidates:

•
Domino Cards,
a game played in China as early as 900 A.D. As the name suggests, these playing cards were marked like dominos, with each card representing the scores thrown by a pair of dice—a one and a six, for example.

•
Tali,
a dice game played in the Roman Empire. In Tali throws of the dice are ranked in much the same way as poker: Three of a kind beat a pair, and high numbers are worth more than low ones.

•
As Nas,
a four-player Persian game that used a deck of 20 cards divided into four different suits. (According to some sources, there was also a five-player, 25-card version.) There were five types of cards in the deck: lions, kings, ladies, soldiers, and dancing girls; when played with a modern deck of cards, aces, kings, queens, jacks, and tens are used instead. Each player is dealt five cards, one at a time, per hand.

•
Primero,
an Italian card game played from the 16th century on. Thanks to the Napoleonic Wars (when soldiers weren’t fighting, they liked to sit around and play cards), in the early 19th century, Primero spread across much of Europe and evolved into a number of different regional versions: Brag in England, Pochen in Germany, and Poque in France.

America once issued a 5-cent bill. (Bills worth less than $1 are called “fractional currency.”)

BORN ON THE BAYOU

Modern poker is all-American—it evolved from card games that were played in New Orleans in the early 19th century. Exactly how it developed isn’t entirely clear, but it’s possible that poker came about when the French colonists, already familiar with Poque, learned to play As Nas from Persian sailors visiting the port city. In Poque the only hands that counted were pairs, three of a kind, and four of a kind; but As Nas recognized two pairs and the full house. At some point, card historians speculate, players dumped many of Poque’s rules and replaced them with those from
as nas
to make the game more interesting.

The name Poque may have been combined with As (from As Nas) to get
poqas
, which when spoken with a Southern accent sounded like “pokah.” Steamboats took pokah up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to the north, where people pronounced it “poker.” From there, poker spread by wagon train and railroad across the continent.

NOT PLAYING WITH A FULL DECK

Have you ever taken notes during a poker game? Hardly anyone ever does—that’s one reason why the history of poker is so difficult to trace. Luckily, in 1829 an English actor named Joseph Crowell saw poker being played on a steamboat bound for New Orleans and recorded what he saw, providing a rare glimpse of what poker was like in its earliest form.

Like today, each player was dealt five cards and then placed bets; whoever had the best cards won all the money that was bet. But at that time the deck still had only 20 cards (four suits of aces, kings, queens, jacks, and tens)—it wasn’t until the 1840s that the full 52-card deck came into use.

Why were so many cards added? There were two main reasons:

• When the concept of the draw—replacing some of the cards in your hand with new cards taken from the deck—was introduced in the 1840s, a 20-card deck wasn’t big enough anymore.

• People who’d been cheated by card sharks playing a crooked game called three-card monte thought a game with 52 cards instead of just 3 would be a lot harder to rig.

The 52-card version of poker (and other games) became so popular that the 20-card deck eventually died out altogether.

The average spider web weighs 1/27,000th of a pound.

WAR GAME

The Civil War was a period of great innovation in poker, thanks to the fact that millions of soldiers learned the game during the war and played it whenever they had a chance. Draw poker became very popular, and a newer variation,
stud-horse
poker (stud poker for short), in which some cards in a hand are dealt face up, and others dealt face down, also became widespread. The straight (five cards of sequential rank, such as 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7) also became a recognized poker hand during the war.

PLAY CONTINUED

When the Civil War ended and the soldiers went home, they brought poker with them, and the innovations continued:

• The wild card was introduced in about 1875.

• Low ball (the
worst
hand, not the best, wins the pot) followed in about 1900.

• Why settle for playing only one type of poker per game? “Dealer’s choice” games—in which the dealer gets to pick any version of poker they want for that hand—also became popular at the turn of the century.

YOUR GOVERNMENT AT WORK

Were it not for this period of innovation, poker might have faded into obscurity or disappeared altogether. All forms of gambling fell out of favor in many parts of the country at the turn of the 20th century, and many states passed antigambling laws. These laws naturally applied to poker, too…or did they?

In 1911 California’s attorney general had to decide whether poker was a form of gambling and thus should be outlawed. His conclusion: standard poker and stud poker, in which you had to play the cards you were dealt, were purely games of chance. That made them a form of gambling, he reasoned, and that made them illegal.
Draw
poker was another story. Drawing new cards from the deck—or deciding not to—made it a game of skill, and games of skill were not illegal under California law. So draw poker not only survived, it thrived—and today hundreds of different variations of draw poker are played all over the world.

Survey results: The average Nevadan gambles $846 annually in casinos ($2.31 per day).

I’LL SEE YOU AND RAISE YOU

Here’s a look at some of the most popular forms of poker. How many have you played?

•
Seven-Card Stud.
Two down cards (face down) and one up card (face up) are dealt to each player. They bet, and then four more cards are dealt one at a time—three up and the last one down—and bets are placed after each of these cards is dealt.

•
Razz.
Like Seven-Card Stud, except that the lowest hand wins, not the highest.

•
Texas Hold ’em.
Each player gets two down cards, then they place their bets. Three
common
cards are dealt face up to the center of the table, then the players place their bets again. Two more common cards are dealt, with bets being placed after each one. The best combination of five cards you can make from your two cards and the five on the board constitutes your hand; the highest hand is the winner.

•
Omaha High.
Each player gets
four
down cards; then bets are placed.

•
Omaha High-Low.
The same as Omaha High, except that the high hand and the low hand split the pot (the winnings).

•
Five-Card Stud.
Each player is dealt one down card and one up card, then bets are placed. Each player is dealt a second up card, and bets are placed again. A third and then a fourth up card are dealt to each player, each one followed by a round of betting.

•
Five-Card Draw.
Each player is dealt five cards down. Bets are placed, then each player may discard one or more cards and replace them with new cards from the deck, then bets are placed again.

•
Lowball.
The same as Five-Card Draw, except that the lowest hand, not the highest, wins.

•
Indian Poker.
Each player is dealt one card only, which they are not allowed to see. They hold it up against their forehead—supposedly like an Indian feather—so that everyone else can see it, then bets are placed. High card wins. The idea is that this game is the opposite of all the others—you know what everyone else’s cards are, but you don’t know your own.

The British Isles have no mountains higher than 5,000 feet.

HURRICANES 101

On
page 222
we told you how hurricanes are formed. Here are some more basic facts about one of nature’s deadliest creations
.

H
OW HURRICANES ARE NAMED

Hurricane names are chosen years in advance. Here’s how meteorologists pick them.

In the Atlantic Ocean.
Until the 1940s, hurricanes went mostly unnamed. But during WWII long range airplanes began encountering two or more hurricanes in a single flight. So in 1953, to simplify storm tracking, American meteorologists started giving them names—alphabetically to help aviators keep track of whether they were encountering a new storm or one that was dying. As a further refinement, male names were given to hurricanes south of the equator and female names were used for storms north of the equator.

Hurricanes, however, rarely occur in the South Atlantic because the water is too cold for them to form. And because they always move away from the equator, there was no way for a hurricane with a female name to move south and become a him-icane. So, for four decades all the hurricanes that passed over North America had female names. By the 1970s charges of sexism prompted American meteorologists to reconsider the system and in 1979 they began to use male and female names alternatively.

Pacific Politics.
The Pacific Ocean is so huge and bordered by so many nations that meteorologists divide it into several regions. How a typhoon (in the Pacific, hurricanes are called “typhoons”) is named depends on where it was born.

•
The central Pacific
uses Polynesian names: Akoni, Lo, Oke, Peke, and Walaka.

•
Australia
uses English names, such as Fiona, Vance, Graham, and Harriet.

•
The southwest Indian Ocean
uses names an Indian influence plus a few holdovers from the British Raj: Atang, Boura, Kalunde, and Winston.

•
The northwest Indian Ocean
region doesn’t use names—typhoons are numbered.

Father of his country: The name Attila means “little father.”

•
The northeast Pacific
uses names from the Americas: Andres, Carlos, and Kevin.

•
In the northwest Pacific
, there were so many different countries demanding to be included in the naming process that the United Nations had to step in. Names were submitted by Japan, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Micronesia, North and South Korea, the Philippines, and the United States. The current list of 141 names includes: Longwang (a mythological Chinese dragon); Damrey (Cambodian for “elephant”); Kodo (“cloud” in the Marshall Islands); and Higos (“fig” in the Marianas).

HOW HURRICANES ARE RATED

Hurricanes are classed by wind speed: a category 1 has speeds of 74–95 mph; a category 2 has speeds of 96–110 mph; a category 3 has speeds of 111–130 mph; a category 4 has speeds of 131–155 mph; and the rare category 5 storms have speeds of 156 and up.

The highest known sustained wind speed from a cyclone was Typhoon Tip, located in the northwest Pacific Ocean. Tip’s sustained surface wind on October 12, 1979, was estimated at 190 mph. In the Atlantic region, Hurricane Camille in 1969 and Hurricane Allen in 1980 registered winds also estimated at 190 mph. But these are only estimates—category 5 winds are so strong that the instruments used for measuring them are often destroyed, leaving scientists to guess at how fast the wind really was.

THE FIRST RECORDED HURRICANE

In 1495, while anchored in Hispaniola, Christopher Columbus noted on his ship’s log: “When the storm reached the harbor, it whirled the ships round as they lay at anchor, snapped their cables, and sank three of them with all who were on board.”

Does this mean that Europeans had never heard of hurricanes before 1495? Actually, it does. Hurricanes can’t reach Europe because the Earth’s rotation always sends them west and north. Typhoons don’t make it because they would have to cross Asia. The spent remains of Atlantic hurricanes
have
struck Europe (from the Arctic circle) but before modern meteorology, the Europeans just thought they were big rain storms.

No yolk: Hens can lay eggs without a rooster…but they’ll never hatch into chicks.

THE WAY OF THE HOBO

Have you ever dreamed of hopping on a freight train and living off the land? Trust Uncle John, it’s not as glamorous as it sounds. But just in case you do, here’s a starter course
.

H
OBO HIERARCHY

What’s the difference between a hobo, a tramp, and a bum?
Hobo:
A migratory worker (the most respected of the three). Hoboes are resourceful, self-reliant vagabonds who take on temporary work to earn a few dollars before moving on. Some experts think the word
hobo
comes from
hoe boys
, which is what farmers in the 1880s called their seasonal migrant workers. Others say it’s shorthand for the phrase
homeward bound
, used to describe destitute Civil War veterans who took years to work their way home.

Tramp:
A migratory nonworker. A tramp simply likes the vagabond life—he’s never looking for a job.

Bum:
The lowest of the low; a worthless loafer who stays in one place and would rather beg than work for goods or services.