When/why did Texas Hold'em become synonymous with poker?

The Game Room
1

Back when I was a kid we would play 5 card draw for pebbles and then eventually graduated to 7-card stud, and then all sorts of other variations, baseball, criss-cross, lowball etc. But it wasn’t I was in my mid 20’s in the 90’s that I learned about Hold’m. Now hold’em is all there is. If you are looking for a poker computer game, you have to struggle to find anything but hold’em with an occasional instance of Omaha (Hold’em second cousin). Now if you say you play poker people assume you mean Hold’em and may even be surprised to learn that there are other versions.

When did this happen? Was it always around but I just never heard of it, or was there at some point a Hold’em revolution. If the latter what was it that started it. Also as an aside can anyone recommend a good play vs computer poker game that out there that has variants other than Hold’em and Omaha?

2

Probably because that’s what they were playing on Celebrity Poker Showdown, United States Poker Championship, World Series of Poker and I assume plenty of others.
I’m willing to bet the vast majority of non-poker players and probably most of the people that randomly play poker with their friends once every few years had never heard of Texas Hold’em until those shows, specifically the ones with celebrities, got really popular in the early 2000’s.

3

I think the primary blame falls on Rounders and The World Series of Poker. Texas Hold ‘Em and other community card games have more appeal to viewers because there is competition over the community cards versus various forms of stud or draw where each player has their own pool of hole and/or face up cards, the rules are fairly straightforward, and the betting strategy in such a game is particularly prone to reversals of fortune. I made some friends watch The Cincinnati Kid after hearing them rave about Rounders, and while the former is arguably a better movie (nothing wrong with Rounders but Matt Damon is not Steve McQueen and John Malkovich should stick to comedies when attempting an accent) I have to admit that the poker scenes in the latter are much more engaging by the nature of the game.

Stranger

4

I also blame late 1990s TV coverage of the World Series of Poker and other TV tournaments.

Much like the OP, I learned 5 card draw as a kid, and slowly picked up other variations at neighborhood or friends games. Poker night was always “dealer’s choice”, which meant a combination of serious and goofy games like Spit In the Ocean, Follow the Queen, Pass the Trash, 7 card stud. Sometimes we’d even grab a deck of Uno cards - add up your points at the end, round up to the next nickel, and pay the winner. That was the standard for neighborhood games from the 70s to the mid-90s.

I first learned Hold 'em in the late 90s at poker night with work buddies, when one guy called for “this game I saw on TV”. He couldn’t even remember the name. We just called it the “TV game” and we worked it into the rotation.

Jump ahead to 2001 or so and a new job. Every single poker discussion is flop this, river that. Poker night meant Hold 'em tournament. At the time all I could think was responsible was the ubiquitous TV coverage of Hold 'em.

I remember my old feature phone from around 2003 or so had a built in 5-card draw game. That may be the last non-Hold 'em computerized poker game I played.

5

World Class Poker with TJ Cloutier is a fun little diversion, that has 7 Stud and 5 Draw games in it. In addition to the usual Hold 'Em and Omaha. Not super difficult to beat, but better than most that I played. The AI players will do bizarre stuff, but they do in every computer game.

6

As others have said, the major reason was poker on TV.

Another reason was that TV programs showed the hole cards.
This meant newbies could see follow the hand easily and in particular spot if a player was bluffing.

Texas Hold’em has several advantages over 5 card draw:

  • you can have more players round a table (as cards are shared)
  • there’s more information about possible hands
  • having the two blinds puts money into every pot, encouraging more exciting play
7

Where’s the fun in that? Isn’t the whole point, for viewers, to increase dramatic tension by *not *knowing if they’re bluffing or not?

8

2003 was when ESPN really started covering the WSOP like other sports which is when it really took off.:

Celebrity Poker showdown also started in 2003. And then you had Casino Royale (which changed Baccarat to Texas Hold 'Em) in 2006.

9

No. A couple of years ago they had the WSOP Final Table and the hole cards were not shown to the viewers. Damn was it boring.

10

I think it was Hitchcock who said “Surprise is when the bomb blows up unexpectedly - suspense is when the audience know the bomb will go off in 5 minutes, and the characters don’t” - the same applies here, probably (the fun is not guessing whether player X is bluffing; it’s guessing whether player A will realize X is bluffing).

11

Around about the time that strippers became pole dancers. Part of the homogenization of society, sadly.

12

While it’s easy to say that televised poker and Rounders are what did this, I’m sorry, guys, but that’s not fully correct.

Those two things - along with the key third factor, Internet poker - popularized poker in general. They made it way, way more widespread, but they obviously aren’t the reason hold 'em became the dominant kind of poker. It already was winning the poker wars. Texas Hold 'Em was the king of poker varieties - that’s why movies and televised poker were about Texas Hold 'Em. There’s a reason Matt Damon and Edward Norton aren’t playing Razz. It’s not like everyone was playing seven card stud until they put poker on TV and they all switched. TV and movie poker might have made hold 'em even more dominant, but it was already the majority of games spread in casinos; it surpassed seven card stud before Rounders. It has since blown seven card totally out of most venues, but it was winning before that.

Texas Hold 'Em, in fact, was the game played to win the World Series of Poker Main Event literally since there was a Main Event, starting in 1971. Since this variety was pretty obscure until the 1960s that was a fascinating choice, but by the 1980s it was the most popular type in professional and casino settings. Brunson’s “Super System,” which came out in 1978, was largely about hold 'em. Also released for the first time in 1978 was Sklansky’s “The Theory of Poker,” although I think it had a different title then but it, too, was heavily about hold 'em. Those guys didn’t start out with books about five card draw.

Okay, so why did Hold 'Em suddenly take over the poker world in the 1970s and 1980s? I think it’s really kind of simple; it’s the best poker variety. Consider the two halves of Mike Sexton’s line about hold 'em:

  1. “Thirty minutes to learn…” Texas Hold 'Em is very, very easy to learn. Even as varieties of poker go it’s pretty simple in terms of the rules and is incredibly well designed.

I taught a bunch of people at work last year how to play. All of them had the game basically figured out very quickly. I taught my wife to play. I taught my kids to play. Everyone has it down in no time. What I tell anyone I teach, if they get concerned it might be too hard to learn, is “just watch; every rule makes perfect sense. Every rule totally helps the next rule. Once you see a rule happen you will instantly understand why it’s a rule.” It’s true.

  1. “…A lifetime to master.” Despite its simplicity and logic, the strategy just keeps unfolding. You never get good enough. This very simple game can cause people to debate strategy for hours. My wife and I have played poker for an afternoon and then had just as much fun talking about critical hands while driving home.

Because the game largely uses community cards but has four rounds of betting, it has a tremendous ratio of decisions to rules. You can learn the game really quickly and just get on to learning the strategy, and that’s the fun part. You can be put to an interesting test several times in every hand. It’s just a fabulous game. I like other poker types too, don’t get me wrong; Omaha, draw, razz, they’re all great, but Hold 'Em is the best.

13

I’ve come to believe that Hold Em gives bad players the illusion that they can beat good players consistently. You ask 10 amateurs that play a regular game every Friday night to rate themselves from 1 to 10, and at least 8 will give themselves a 7 or higher. I admit that I suck at the game due to not having patience, but I walked away with large pots on a couple of poker nights last year. I remember the lure of the confirmation bias convincing me that I was actually a good player. My friend later reminded me of my very poor decisions that turned into lucky wins. So maybe the game isn’t as immediately meritocratic as other pokers games, and thus draws in more players.

14

You’ve given reasons why Texas Hold ‘Em is the best game of poker (which, IMHO, are largely true, especially for people watching the game) but not why it suddenly became synonymous with poker in the minds of the general public in the late 90s and early 2000s, which has to do with how it was popularized to the non-playing public.

Hold ‘Em games in general have a lot of ‘cinematic appeal’ because of how quickly reversals can occur and because of the ramping blind betting structure in tournament play they aren’t the kind of grind that stud can be, but it took the promotion of the game to generate the awareness of guys playing weekend garage games. Relatively few non-professional poker players have ever read Doyle Brunson’s books cover to cover, but I can pretty much guarantee that 95% of even casual poker enthusiasts have watched Rounders multiple time; which is not surprising because Rounders is basically a perfect execution of narrative structure for the classic “Hero’s Journey” in film.

Stranger

15

I had learned 5-card draw from a Hoyle book when I was a kid. Against my friends, I was pretty good at it (at least I knew the hands). Later, when my little brother had gown enough to hold cards, my dad decided on one boring afternoon that he would play poker with us for toothpicks. He taught us Texas hold-em. I’m not certain where he had picked that particular game up, possibly working grain elevators or being in the military. This was probably the late 70’s or early 80’s. He owned us, of course. But, I do think even my little brother understood the rules before he ran out of toothpicks.

16

Yeah, I know, and I said that in my post; TV poker and Rounders were reasons why poker in general became more popular. But the question asked by the OP isn’t why poker became more popular back then, it’s why Hold 'Em specifically took over from other forms of poker. **That process started before Rounders and TV poker. ** The dominance of hold 'em was something that happened before the poker boom.

Now, let’s play hypotheticals; what if Texas Hold 'Em in the late 1990s wasn’t popular? It already was, before Rounders and whatever network it was first starting showing poker games started doing that. They wouldn’t have had hold 'em in Rounders; hell, I’m not sure the movie gets made. It’s hold 'em that made that movie as cinematic as it was (thought I don’t think it really was all that good a movie) and that made poker work on TV. Hold 'em made those things, not the other way around.

I do think internet poker, which of course led to the Chris Moneymaker thing, might really have been the biggest factor. Rounders is overstated - it didn’t do well on release and became popular after the fact.

17

I don’t know about Vegas but in Atlantic City there were at least 10 7 card stud tables to every Hold ‘em table. I never once played it, I only ever played stud. The change came after the TV coverage when every frat boy thought he was a poker genius by being obnoxious and going all in every other hand.

18

In the early days of Hold ‘em it was played No Limit; it was an ugly game, designed to (very quickly) take large sums money from rich Texans in backroom games where cheating was often rampant.

Las Vegas card rooms ran a wide variety of games. Hold ‘em started becoming popular in Vegas in the mid 1970s but it was played Limit; when the old school Texas sharpies came to town the game of No Limit Texas Hold ‘em completely died. It was only played during the World Series tournaments.

In California, Draw was the only game until 1987 when Stud and Hold ‘em were legalized. That was when Hold ‘em really exploded. Sklansky and Malmuth taught people to play well, but the game was still “fair” – a game where the poor players could occasionally get lucky and have a winning night but the pros had a long term advantage.

In Las Vegas Stud retained some popularity because it is still a pretty fair game, well balanced skill factor. Draw was too slow and didn’t really have enough of a skill factor to make the pros shine. Razz also had a pretty low skill factor, complicated by a poor reputation for cheating.

Then came TV and the huge drama of the World Series of Poker. Everybody wanted to play the game they saw on television. No Limit was reborn.

It’s still a horrible game – boring as hell except for the instant where somebody loses all his money in one shot. Skill factor is all messed up. Is it very easy to become skilled enough to become a winning player but most players never do actually bother to learn. The skill factor is huge once small winners learn to become bigger winners. It’s not a well balanced game at all, but it’s the one people see on TV.

19

I also agree, but mainly from ESPN’s early WSOP coverage. I think it really took off when Chris Moneymaker won - the number of entries the following year tripled, and from that point on, Hold’em (and usually No Limit Hold’em at that) was pretty much the only game in town.

I remember when ABC would air it on Wide World of Sports - especially back when it was winner take all. Keep in mind that the entry fee has always been $10,000 - and (a) $10,000 in the early 1970s is much different than $10,000 in the early 2000s, and (b) they didn’t have cheaper “satellite qualifiers” in the early days.

20

I would agree that TV probably is responsible for pushing No Limit ahead of Limit. It’s hard to find limit tables. I am very lucky, when there isn’t a plague, to live near a casino where all kind of limit games are spread every day, from 4/8 to 20/40 and even 50/100 on weekends. It’s the only place I know of that does that.

I disagree that no limit’s a horrible game. It’s a terrific game. I love limit, of course. Maybe even more so, but no limit is a fabulous game. I enjoy going back and forth; they require entirely different disciplines, and tournament play adds even more nuances.

I’m not certain that’s a fair criticism. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing, but around here the great majority of players have some level of skill; there are few outright fish, unless someone is genuinely new to the game (and there really aren’t many of those.) There aren’t any Phil Iveys playing at Casino Niagara’s Tuesday tournaments, but almost all players I see have clearly learned the fundamentals and play solid, if unspectacular, poker.

Of course, we can still play online, enabling people to play huge numbers of hands of practice at affordable levels.