History of No Limit poker

I think there was a fairly good history of NLHE in Super System (or maybe it was Super System 2?).

Doyle Brunson's autobiography The Godfather of Poker is effectively the history of modern poker given he was at all the relevant historical events including the birth of modern poker in Texas roadhouses, its introduction to Vegas and then California, then of course the modern TV and online boom.

I had mistakenly believed that LHE was more popular for cash and NLHE for tournaments until the boom. But after reading Doyle's book, it was really NLHE 6 or 7-max cash that really blew up in Texas and was the preferred game of the roadhouse gamblers.

They brought it to Vegas. Vegas had some poker, Nick the Greek and Johnny Moss had their famous battle around 1949 playing a few games with no-limit 5 card stud being the most prominent.

Limit A-5 triple draw, ,7 card stud , and classic 5 card draw were also played but poker was still very niche overall.

Then Binion and Doyle etc started the WSOP and they picked their favorite game as the Main Event which gave hold'em more attention.

The rise of limit hold'em and it taking the prominence from no-limit for a while coincided with the rise of California cardrooms. When they started, no-limit has an image problem of "breaking" people and having amateurs lost their money too fast, so it wasn't allowed. Even to this day, California is home to the most limit hold'em games in the world, and we also see many other states express concern over "no limit" and only allowing "spread limit". I do wonder if they had branded, no-limit "stack limit", whether that would be better or worse for the game overall (certainly "stack limit" is more accurate).

Then television + online boom and NLHE captured everyone's imagination. And even if the mixed game hipsters are bored of it, 6-max NLHE is simply one of the best overall variants so that's why it blew up again. It was the game that really sparked the initial seed in the 1940s , the WSOP in the 1970s, and the boom of the 2000s. Most attempts to push towards other variants came down to the word "no limit" sounding scary.

Doyle's biography is really great because he's basically the Forrest Gump of poker having been at so many events formative to the history of poker and Las Vegas.

What I know offhand is that NL was the original way. In "Cincinnati Kid" they were playing HU NL or PL 5-card-draw. 2-7 NL SD has been a WSOP event pretty much from the beginning. NLHE was played in unofficial games in Texas and Oklahoma. For Omaha, it was originally limit and NL, but they went to pot limit because people could go allin in NL Omaha with AAxx preflop or top set on flop, etc. In most parts of Europe, certainly the British Isles, France, and eastern Europe, they mostly played pot limit everything, sometimes pot limit mixed or dealers choice. Cardrooms in the US preferred limit so that fish would lose slowly and not disappear causing the games to dry up. NLHE was the main game for tournaments before the poker boom, so it was mostly what was televised and took off. For a while after Moneymaker, it was still mostly limit holdem and limit stud in cardrooms. Limit mixed or limit and big bet mixed were most of the big games before the boom, and still are the biggest games. Before the boom, NLHE and PLO, like mixed games, were mostly high stakes games.

Thank you so much. This helps a great deal.

Get "Ghosts at the Table" by Des Wilson - a 2008 book available on Amazon.

A well written history of how poker developed including stories about the guys who were main players in growing big bet poker over the years.

"Cowboys Full" by James McManus is another good poker history book, especially if you want to know about going all the way back. The NLHE parts overlap a bit with Doyle's book, which probably coves NLHE specifically in a bit more detail.

how popular was no limit 2-7 single draw? was it played in cash games (in rotation with other mixed game?) or only at the wsop?

To give all of you some perspective and context, I have been in casino management for over three decades.

The place that I managed (until Covid) was primarily a limit holdem cardroom. We had 25 tables going regularly on the weekends. When the city made no-limit legal, it destroyed all our players and we dropped to about 8 tables within six months. And then Covid hit a few years after that.

I have been offered two cardrooms recently, one to manage and another with partial ownership. I am tempted to try to bring back limit poker but I am not sure if the market wants it yet.

My point of my post was to see the historical rise and fall of poker and why limit poker ebbs and flows as it does.

Anyway, the replies have helped a great deal and I appreciate it!

Second this. I have a copy if you want to borrow it, although the $12 price for the Kindle version is probably easier than any old-school, snail-mail exchange you and I might make. :p

I think it was played as a cash game by itself in the 60s and later. There was a question or whether to make it the game of the WSOP ME rather than NLHE.

My understanding was that most games were played NL originally and in Europe they mostly went to PL. In cardrooms preferred limit so as not to bust out the fish who were making the games.

wow... i would have really enjoyed a NL 2-7 Main Event, perhaps the single draw aspect really pushes it down the list of complexity in comparison to NLHE...two or three draws would really help make it a less broken game in my opinion

Here is a link to the schedule at the 2001 WSOP, the first time I played in it. As you can see, it is a lot more limit poker than big bet. https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/festiva...

And my recollection of other tourney series at that time and before is similar. The main event of most series was NLH, and another NLH at a lower price point, plus a pot limit game or two, but all the rest limit poker. And all the cash games everywhere were 99% limit poker in the 90s up until the poker boom.

In 1973-74 there were 6 events at the WSOP, limit holdem, limit stud, nl 5-card-draw, nl 2-7 lowball (which I think was single draw), and 2 NLHE events.

When I played like 2004 in AC, it was mostly limit holdem, limit stud, and limit Omaha 8. There was some high stakes mixed games and occasional high stakes PLO8, some stud 8. NLHE cash started coming in after that.

Definitely earlier on, NL 2-7 single draw and NL 5-card stud were played stand alone. In the old days, in was mostly NL. At some point the US cash games went to limit, probably because the cardrooms and the fish were more comfortable with it.

Yes I was playing live before the boom in the UK and this is completely correct. It was mostly pot-limit, both cash and tournament.

There were a lot of Omaha cash games (still is of course) but also quite a lot of 7 card stud pot limit cash. You dont see that much anymore over here.

"Pot Limit & No Limit Poker" by Stewart Reuben & Bob Ciaffone is a good book about the main big games that were played in the UK & Europe in the 70s and 80s

Hold ‘em in any form wasn’t legal in anyplace in CA until 1987. And when it first became legal in the LA area in1987, the only games that were spread were limit. I know because I was there.

This is what I think is correct. If you go back to the middle 1800s the main game was no-limit draw poker. Then during the Civil War seven-card stud (limit) began to gain popularity (with the word stud referring to additional horses sometimes needed to pull the cannons).

In the early 1900s hold ‘em appeared, most likely in Texas, with pot-limit being the preferred form. Also, in CA, because of a misunderstanding of the gambling law forms of draw poker became legal with the preferred form being limit. Then in 1987 a lawsuit was successfully won which legalized forms of seven card poker (including hold em) but at this time virtually no one played no-limit.

I believe people like Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, and Doc Holliday played mostly no-limit draw poker.

Mason

That is my understanding, that no limit was the original form of poker, and that is partly why pot limit was mostly played in Europe before televised NLHE. In the US, it was mostly no limit or limit, until Omaha high came along, which plays much better PL than NL or limit. In the early WSOPs, they had no limit 5-card-stud and no limit 2-7 single draw, implying there were high stakes cash games with those games. Limit became much more common than NL in the 1980s and 1990s.

Brunson, Moss, most of the other early southerners in the WSOP ME, and Cloutier, etc. played mid stakes NLHE in games not in legal cardrooms. Doyle wrote "Super System" in the 1970s, discussing NLHE games in Texas, legal ones in Vegas, private games he was invited to because he played loose, etc., so they definitely existed, despite the situation in casino cardrooms in the 1990s.

Even when the low to mid stakes games in cardrooms were mostly limit holdem and stud, the high stakes games may have often been NLHE, PLO, and mixed games.

I don’t think you have this quite right. The only time no-limit cash games appeared was around the WSOP. Otherwise virtually all the games were limit with the big game being seven-card stud. So, I believe the no-limit chapter in Super/System was an attempt to get people interested in playing no-limit as a cash game instead of just as a tournament game. It took poker getting on TV starting in 2003 to create an interest in no-limit hold ‘em plus the release of our book Harrington on Hold ‘em in late 2004 which gave people some idea how the game should be played even though this was a tournament book.

A couple of other things. Moss was a long time poker room manager in Las Vegas, and while he may have played no-limit as a young man, he was mainly playing seven-card stud in Vegas. Also, based on conversations I’ve had with some old timers, Doyle didn’t play as loose as you indicate.

Mason

Doyle played fairly tight on TV NLHE games and pokergo mixed games. He implied in his book that he got invited to private NLHE games because he played looser than most pros. Presumably, he played small pps, suited connectors, and Axs, when a lot of them would just play top 10% hands.

Just curious, what room was that? Was it the only, or at least the biggest, room in the city?

Though he was famous for winning with Ten-Deuce!

He did but on those shows most people were playing too loose, 3 and 4 betting with garbage too often etc.
He could get away with playing tight and still keep getting invites bc he was a legend.