The 19th-century Russian literary tradition treated the cardroom with substantial sustained attention. The major texts of the tradition merit closer reading than the broader cardroom-literature conversation typically provides.
The 19th-century Russian literary tradition treated the cardroom with substantial sustained attention. The major texts of the tradition merit closer reading than the broader cardroom-literature conversation typically provides. Dostoevsky's The Gambler, Pushkin's Queen of Spades, and the Russian Literary Cardroom of the 19th Century The Cardroom
The standard account of poker's American emergence places the game on the antebellum Mississippi riverboats. The historical record is more…
The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, von Neumann and Morgenstern's 1944 foundation of formal game theory, devotes substantial space…
The 19th-century American household was a significant cardplaying setting. The parlor games of the period — bezique, euchre, whist,…
7 min
The 19th-century American saloon was a substantial cardplaying setting whose cultural footprint has been largely obscured by the…
7 min
The 19th-century American household was a significant cardplaying setting. The parlor games of the period — bezique, euchre,…
7 min
The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, von Neumann and Morgenstern's 1944 foundation of formal game theory, devotes…
6 min
The standard account of poker's American emergence places the game on the antebellum Mississippi riverboats. The historical…
The standard account of poker's American emergence places the game on the antebellum Mississippi riverboats. The historical record is more textured than the standard account allows, and the complications are interesting in their own right.
Providence, Rhode Island
The Cardroom — *long-form cultural writing on poker, card games, and the mathematics and social history that underlies them*.
Most writing about card games is competitive. The strategy guides treat the games as optimization problems. The operator-facing trade press treats them as consumer products. The popular coverage treats the players as personalities. None of those approaches engages the games as the cultural objects they actually are — products of specific historical moments, played in specific social settings, structured by mathematics that is interesting in its own right and that has produced cultural artifacts well beyond the cardroom.
The essays here treat poker, blackjack, baccarat, the historical card games of the European and American parlors, and the mathematics that underlies all of them as subjects for cultural and literary writing. The cardroom is a setting. The players are cultural figures. The games are objects of mathematical study. The writing follows the conventions of literary essay rather than the conventions of strategy guide or operator promotion. The aim is to take the subject as seriously as any other cultural subject deserves to be taken.
One essay, one editor's note, sent the morning it is filed. No promotional placements, no operator partnerships, no strategy guides. Long-form cultural writing on the cardroom only.
Unsubscribe in every issue. The cardroom respects your inbox.