GGPOKER

Some buildings are just buildings. Then there are ones people cross oceans to photograph. The great casinos are cathedrals of chance, and the house, patient as ever, tends to win in the end. Six of them, spread across four centuries and two continents, trace how gambling grew from a single Venetian room into a global […]

Poker keeps its official history in tournament results: bracelets, titles, the champions crowned on television. But there was always another history, unrecorded and far richer, that ran in the cash games. Away from the cameras, in rooms like Bobby’s Room at the Bellagio, a small circle of professionals played the highest-stakes mixed games on earth, […]

There was a stretch, from 1980 to the tail end of the 90s, when the entire poker world could still fit inside one smoky room at Binion’s Horseshoe. A few hundred players entered the World Series Main Event, not a few thousand, and to win it you had to get past everyone who mattered, because […]

Most poker legends are measured in bracelets and tournament wins. The four men here are measured in something else: companies built, industries changed, fortunes made a long way from the felt. Tony G, Andy Beal, Lyle Berman, and Cary Katz are all serious players, but for each of them poker was the smaller game. One […]

By the time poker had a world championship, it had already lived through a whole secret history. Before the bracelets and the television lights, the game belonged to a fraternity of road gamblers and back-room professionals who treated the table not as a career but as a way of life, and often as the only […]

Poker‘s history was written mostly in America, but plenty of its most vivid characters came from well outside it. This group gathers four of them — an Englishman, an Italo-Australian, an Italian, and a Dutchman — who brought as much personality to the table as they did skill. Orange sunglasses, upside-down shades, knuckle-duster rings, a […]

The reading list for serious poker players hasn’t changed much in twenty years. The same handful of books keep appearing on recommended lists because they do the job well enough that nothing has fully displaced them — theory, psychology, math, and game history covered by people who actually played at a high level. This is […]

April 19 is National Poker Day. Here is the real history, the “real” history that we definitely did not make up, and everything you need to celebrate properly. Somewhere in Arlington, Texas, a radio DJ sat down at his computer and changed history. Not world history, just the small, joyful corner of it that involves […]

A tournament is not one game. It is three or four different games stacked on top of each other, and the approach that keeps you alive early is not the one that wins late. The mistake most players make in poker tournaments is playing all of them the same way. What follows is how the […]

Not every great poker player arrives the same way. Some come up through study and cash-game grinding; others were gamblers first and poker players second, drawn to the table by the same instinct that pulled them toward pool halls, sports books, and gin rummy. The five men here belong to that second group — action […]

For a few years in the mid-2000s, poker was television. The poker boom put cards on cable in prime time, and shows like High Stakes Poker and Poker After Dark turned a card game into appointment viewing. What made those broadcasts work was not the strategy — it was the people. The four players here […]

Your memory has limits. Your notes don’t. You’ve played against this player before. You remember something about them: maybe they bluffed big on a river, or maybe they never fold to 3-bets. But what exactly did they do? When? In what position? If you can’t recall the details, you’re missing an edge. That’s where GGPoker’s […]