Poker history has multiple stories from across the world. An interesting story that tracks back to the beginning of poker in the Mississippi river is illustrated in this article.Once upon a time in the mid 18th century there was a boat sailing in the Mississippi river. The sailors in the boat were playing a card game to kill their time during the travel. 

Of the sailors that were playing in the boat, one sailor was said to be out of the group and he was not of the origin of the country that the other 3 players were from. The three men were trying to make use of their majority in cheating this single handed stranger playing with them.

The three men planned to take all the money from this stranger and so they decided that they are going to let the stranger to win some games to have him play for more. For the first two rounds the stranger happened to win money and in the next round it happened similarly, the 3 players were expressing false surprises about his skill over the game.  Time did pass, with few more rounds where every time the stranger won.  One of them commented that he is a great player, while the stranger was carried away by the way he got praised he placed all his money in the pot hoping to win, but things took a different turn.  The 3 players tricked to win the whole pot by using fake cards.

This is one of the street side stories of the beginning of poker cheating per poker history stories.

Something that differentiates present day poker from the poker history participants is that more and more women are getting to play poker.  There are many women who are professional poker players.  Originally it was played only by the sailors in the boat and other classes of people who were not too rich.  It was also considered to be the game of thieves; however, there is also poker history relating to these games having been played by reputed people in the society.

Royal families in China did play a kind of card game and there are reporting evidences and literatures of poker history supporting 13 card games and 20 card games across Europe.  This game form was said to be compensated to have 52 decks in order to enable more people play these games.

The story of the mutation to the 52 deck card poker game is still unclear from the poker history stories that are widely available.

More about poker history :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poker