The French Game of “Poque”

Of all the European card games that preceded poker, the French game of poque is probably the closest relative. The game initially surfaces during the 16th century, and for a few reasons is usually held up as the immediate precursor to poker.

For one, poque was actually brought to America by French settlers, including in areas of the Louisiana Territory where poker would first emerge in the early 1800s. Like the German game of poch, the name also resembles the name for poker, and many have speculated an Englished pronunciation of the word incorrectly emphasizing the second syllable provided a basis for the name.

Poque itself has a few precursors, among them glic (dating from the 15th century), brélan (first turning up around the 17th century), and bouillotte (from the 18th century). While glic is a lot more like the German game of poch and other similar games -- that was the three-phase game with the round board and nine cups -- both brélan and bouillotte are simpler, mainly just versions of the second “vying” phase of those other games.

Variations of brélan and bouillotte exist, including being played with differently-sized decks (increased sometimes to accommodate more players). For example, a game of bouillotte might have been played by four players with a 20-card deck, using just the aces, kings, queens, nines, and eights, and if there were a fifth player the jacks would be included, too, to make a 24-card deck. (Or if just three were playing, queens would be tossed and they’d use just 16 cards.) Chips (or some equivalent) were used as well for betting purposes.

Before the game began players drew cards to decide where to sit. I’ve seen some references to the game being played clockwise and others counter-clockwise -- I think the latter more likely.

Prior to the deal players would ante, then the player to the right of the dealer would have the option to raise the stakes by putting in an additional bet called a “carre” -- kind of a like a straddle, as no one has any cards yet. If that player does make a bet, the next player can fold, call, or raise and so on, meaning players can drop out of hands even before cards are dealt, if they wish.

Next comes the deal -- three cards to each player, plus one more card set face up in the middle. This last card, called the “retourné” essentially functions like a “community card” in that each player is making a four-card hand that includes the face-up card. Another round of betting follows that again somewhat resembles the betting in poker (there are some differences, but I’m glossing over them here). Once the betting is completed, players left in the hand show their cards.

When it comes to hand rankings in bouillotte, there are basically just three hand types:

brélan carré (highest) = four of a kind (including the retourné, of course)

brélan = three of a kind, all in the player’s hand (i.e., not using the retourné)

brélan favori = three of a kind, two in the player’s hand plus the retourné

After that, whoever has the most points in their hand wins, with aces worth 11 points, court cards 10, and nines and eights their numerical value. In the case of ties, suits come into play, with the suit of the retourné functioning like a trump suit and the player with the highest card in that suit winning.

That’s the game that would eventually become poque, as I understand it, although poque also existed as that three-phase game, too, apparently. Eventually only the middle “vying” game would be played, though, and bouillotte started getting called poque thanks to players using the verb “poque” to describe their betting action (“Je poque” = “I bet”).

In any case, this is the game that certainly most resembles the earliest “Old Poker” games that involved smaller deck, a single deal and round of betting, and no draw (yet).

Image: “Peasants Playing Cards” (1700s), Norbert van Bloemen, public domain

Perusing Poker’s Precursors

Recently I’ve been spending time learning more about several games often referred to as “precursors” to poker. I’m talking about various card games -- most European -- that appeared just before poker emerged in the early 19th century and that have a lot of the same elements including using a similar deck, incorporating betting and (in some cases) bluffing, and having other common characteristics.

A couple of prompts caused me to go down this road. One has to do with a larger project I’ve begun -- one dovetailing on my “Poker in American Film and Culture” course -- that’s requiring me to do such research. The other came during a conversation from last month while at European Poker Tour Dublin with Howard Swains and Stephen Bartley regarding an idea they once had for the EPT.

Those who follow the EPT know they’ve been pretty open to adding all sorts of out-of-the-ordinary events to the festival schedules, especially since they began expanding those schedules in recent years. You know, events like those “Deuces Wild” or “Win the Button” tourneys and the like. At EPT Dublin they had both of those, plus a “Chess and NL” event, a “Quadruple Stud” (involving four different stud variants), a 5-Card PLO tourney, and other non-NLHE offerings.

Anyhow, the idea involved each EPT stop also featuring an event in which players would play one of these “precursor” games that had originated in the host country.

For example, at EPT Barcelona they could have a mus event, the 18th-century vying game that first turns up in the Basque country up in the northern part of Spain. At EPT Deauville (when the tour still went there) they could have a poque event, the French game often regarded as a direct antecedent to poker. At EPT Berlin they could play poch, at EPT Sanremo there could be a primiera event, EPT London could feature a brag tournament, and so on.

I thought it was a very cool idea, although the more I think about it the more I start to realize some the challenges that would cause it to be difficult to pull off. In some cases I assume local regulations might make it hard to introduce a game that otherwise wasn’t already played (and allowed). It also might be difficult simply to get players to play such events, or to find the appropriate buy-in level that would attract more than just a small handful of curiosity seekers.

Looking more closely at the rules for some of these games makes me realize another significant obstacle to such an idea. At least a couple of the games are so friggin’ complicated it would probably be too arduous for most to figure out how to play them, let alone for the EPT staff to figure out how to deal them and build tournaments around them.

Just for fun (and since I’ve involved myself in this stuff already), I’m going to use the next several posts to discuss some of these games one at a time. I’ll start tomorrow with the Spanish game of mus, for no other reason than that’s the one that seems the most complicated to me at first glance.

Image: “The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds” (1635), Georges de la Tour, public domain.

Prelapsarian Poker

Have been engaged pretty deeply of late in some study of poker history, including reading through one of the first extensive discussions of the game in print authored by a self-described “reformed gambler” named Jonathan Harrington Green.

Green would write a number of anti-gambling books during the mid-19th century, all kind of straddling that line between education and exploitation that is typical of heavy-handed works of moral instruction that dwell a little too indulgently in describing the vices being warned against. This first one, not-so-humbly titled An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling, Designed Especially as a Warning to the Youthful and Inexperienced Against the Evils of That Odious and Destructive Vice, is of particular interest to students of poker’s history thanks to a 30-page excursion to introduce poker to an audience perhaps not yet familiar with the game.

Green is mostly dealing with the earlier 20-card version of poker -- later sometimes called “Old Poker” -- that bore affinities to the French game of poque. He runs through the rules, doing so almost in spite of himself as he says he’d rather not teach his readers how to play this “immensely destructive” game he regards as but one step down a long “road to ruin” including other gambling games like faro and roulette, not to mention “the race-course and cock-fightings.”

“I would that all were ignorant of it,” says Green of poker, the game being doubly destructive thanks both to the general debilitating effects of all gambling games and to the frequency of cheating in poker which Green says ensures “the uninitiated need never expect to win any thing.” Really, today’s opponents of gambling and/or poker have nothing on Jonathan Harrington Green, who for the entire discussion of poker relentlessly hammers away at his thesis “that the greatest villainy and rascality attend not only this, but every other game, when played for a wager.”

Anyhow, I mainly just wanted to share one passage of Green’s that interestingly evokes a strange idea of an earlier era in which poker was free of such negative influences, a kind of idealized “prelapsarian” age in which there was no cheating, people didn’t wager inordinate sums, and everyone just seemed to have a jolly good time.

“There was a time when this game was not so dangerous as it has come to be of late years,” writes Green. “It was then common to see men of almost all classes amuse themselves at this game; and landlords would join their guests for social amusement. Captains and other officers of packets and steamboats, generally, would engage freely in a game with their passengers for recreation. And little if anything was wagered or lost at the game, and all got up pleased, and seldom had any cause of dissatisfaction.”

Green’s book was first published in 1843 and most of his references to the “bad” poker (marked by cheating and high-stakes gambles) seem to refer to games occurring during the 1830s, so one might presume he is speaking of the earliest days of the game when it was just being introduced and played for the first time in the American south and west.

That said, there’s something obviously disingenuous about Green’s suggestion of things being better “back in the day” (so to speak) -- i.e., that there ever existed an earlier, “innocent” age for poker free from the various vices that would come later. Almost Rousseau-like, you might say, of him to posit the existence of an earlier “primitive” poker player free of selfish motives against whom to contrast the hopeless, “fallen” players among his contemporaries (a group to which he once belonged).

Human nature, I guess, to believe things used to be better than they are now, in all respects, and thus to trick ourselves into remembering the past differently than it actually was.