Blog - The Cardroom

Dostoevsky's The Gambler, Pushkin's Queen of Spades, and the Russian Literary Cardroom of the 19th Century

The 19th-century Russian literary tradition treated the cardroom with substantial sustained attention. The major texts of the tradition merit closer reading than…

Eleanor Hartshorne May 15, 2026 7 min read

Mathematical Play

Martin Gardner, John Scarne, Edward Thorp: The Mathematical Writers Who Made the Cardroom a Subject for Serious Recreation

The mid-20th-century recreational-mathematics writers who took card games seriously as objects of mathematical study produced a body of work that shaped how…

Eleanor Hartshorne May 15, 2026 7 min read

Cardroom Social History

The Saloon, the Backroom, and the Working-Class Cardplaying Subculture That the Cultural Memory Has Largely Forgotten

The 19th-century American saloon was a substantial cardplaying setting whose cultural footprint has been largely obscured by the cardroom-folklore tradition. The actual…

Eleanor Hartshorne May 15, 2026 7 min read

Card-Game Culture

The Parlor and the Saloon: Card Games in the 19th-Century American Household

The 19th-century American household was a significant cardplaying setting. The parlor games of the period — bezique, euchre, whist, cribbage, and their…

Eleanor Hartshorne May 15, 2026 7 min read

Game Theory

Von Neumann, Poker, and What the Founding Document of Game Theory Actually Said About the Cardroom

The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, von Neumann and Morgenstern's 1944 foundation of formal game theory, devotes substantial space to poker.…

Eleanor Hartshorne May 15, 2026 7 min read

Poker History

The Mississippi Riverboat and Why Poker's American Origin Story Is More Complicated Than the Standard Account

The standard account of poker's American emergence places the game on the antebellum Mississippi riverboats. The historical record is more textured than…

Eleanor Hartshorne May 15, 2026 6 min read