I follow your analogy, but I don’t think it’s a very good one. Your past salary is in no way as critical a piece of information to your “opponent” as seeing your whole hand would be in poker.
This is really an IMHO thing.
Hate to revive a dead thread, but I just have to chime in.
I hired several people within the last year. We asked salary histories of all. My experience was that it pushed salaries up.
Each position had a range of acceptable salaries, based on market evaluation and gut feel. The range wasn’t very big (though the salaries were high). The low side of is essentially set because if a lower salary was offered (and accepted), the employee would immediately start looking for another higher-paying job.
In fact, one person we hired had a much lower previous salary than other applicants and lower than what we had allocated for the position. We offered him the same as we would have if he’d made much more. Why? If we paid him less, he’d look for another job.
So why did we ask if it wasn’t going to affect the salary? One, it raised a red flag, something we inquired about – why was he paid so little? It turns out that he was living in an area that does pay significantly less for people with his skills.
The other reason is that the person may have been paid more than has been allocated. In that case you either have to explain to the person upfront that he won’t make as much (so as to not waste both of your times if he’s not interested in a lower salary) or have to go up the chain of command to get the range expanded, which we did for another candidate.
And as for history instead of just current salary, we found out one guy had gotten a pay cut at his last job (it was across the board at his company), so we made sure to base his offered salary off his pre-cut salary.
By this example, in two cases salary history increased the person’s offer, and in the case where the person was making less, it had no influence.
As a side note, I was talking with a recruiting manager of a mega-corporation I was working at, and she told me that if they asked salary expectations and the person refused to give an answer, they tossed their resume, and that was the recruting departments standard procedure. A lot of interview books tell you to be coy about this until late in the interviewing process, but it won’t always work.