POKER

6 Interesting Facts About the Game of Poker

By Marcus Harmon
August 02, 2023

Who doesn’t love poker? Poker is a fascinating game that has captivated many players for centuries, and its history surely is full of intriguing facts and stories. In this article, we will dive deeper into this topic and bring you six interesting facts about poker to enhance your knowledge of this game and give you a broader perspective of its origins and developments.

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The Longest Poker Tournament Ever

The longest poker tournament in history lasted for an incredible timespan of eight years. Believe it or not, this odyssey of a tournament happened in Arizona’s Bird Cage Theatre, and poker was played continuously for 24 hours every day, seven days a week, from 1881 to 1889. During that amount of time, a sum of $10 million was exchanged.

The First Real Money Online Poker Game

Today online gaming is a rather common phenomenon, and many players enjoy challenging themselves with an online game. If you are one of them, you can play live blackjack here, and have fun meeting people from all around the globe. Online poker changed everything, and this revolution started in 1998 when the first online game of poker was played. This signed the beginning of a new era, and it allowed players to compete with people from any place on the planet, creating an unprecedented online community that is still growing today.

Black Friday

This event is widely known in the poker community, as on the 15th of April 2011, the US Department of Justice shut down several extremely well-established online poker sites. This fact impacted the industry of online poker like no other event and started a sequence of changes in the world of online poker, and in the poker industry overall.

The Origin of the Game of Poker

Many people love poker, but do all these people know about its origins? Poker’s exact origin is a mystery, but many think that it originated in China a very long time ago. The game evolved, and it spread to different parts of the world, and it became one of the most beloved and famous games ever.

The Largest Poker Event Ever

Without a doubt, the World Series of Poker Main Event, is the biggest, most important poker tournament on the annual calendar. This past summer, the WSOP Main Event broke the record for most participants in its illustrious history with 10,043. The previous record of 8,773 had stood for 17 years. It is great to see more and more players learning how to play poker and taking their shot in the biggest poker event of the year. Of course, there are tons of other poker tournaments taking place every day, week, and month of the year, most of which feature a buy-in far lower than the $10,000 cost of the WSOP Main Event, and thus giving even those with more meager bankrolls the chance to play and win.

Only 20 Cards

In the early days of poker, the game was played with only 20 cards. Can you believe it? Nowadays, the game has evolved, and it is played with the standard 52-card decks. Of course there are plenty of poker variants, but the most popular one is Texas Hold’em. But back then, at the beginning of the game, only 20 cards were needed to play what would become one of the most popular games ever created.

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Marcus Harmon poker author
Written By.

Marcus Harmon

Marcus Harmon is a poker writer and editor of Sunshine Poker Rooms, a poker news and information source. With a decade of experience in the online gaming industry, Marcus has been lucky enough to have met and indeed been beaten by some of the great players. His other passions are soccer and travel.

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