Poker is easily one of the most popular card games of all time, with millions of people in every continent playing some form of the game.

It exists in casinos, online, in movies, and as a basis for a variety of other games.

In fact, you can even play Ten Play Draw Poker, a poker variety game, online!

Even if you play poker all the time and think you know everything there is to know about the game, we’re pretty sure some of these interesting facts will leave you pleasantly surprised.

In the beginning…

The best place to begin our list is probably at the very beginning!

Poker is believed to have first been played in 1829 by French settlers in New Orleans and was immediately recognized as being similar to a Persian card game known as As-Nas.

Poker was fairly primitive at this point in history and only used a deck made up of 20 cards, with five being dealt to each player.

There wasn’t really a concept of bluffing at this point and it took many decades of developments and inclusions from other games to form the poker games we play today.

Biggest ever poker win

For a long time, Antonio Esfandiari held this title for his win at the 2012 WSOP One Drop event.

Placing first in this tournament earned him a massive $18.3 million!

However, the 2019 Triton Million for Charity tournament, which saw players buy-in for £1 million ($1.3 million) managed to beat the record.

Bryn Kenney took home the biggest prize, winning a total of £16.9 million ($20.5 million)!

Crazily, Kenney didn’t even finish first in the tournament. A prize deal was made when only two players remained in the tournament and, while Kenney had a 5:1 chip lead at the time, Aaron Zang came back to take first place for a smaller payout.

Most WSOP bracelets

The winner of any World Series of Poker (WSOP) event is awarded a shiny bracelet along with the prize money for that tournament.

Winning any bracelet is considered to be one of the greatest achievements in poker but for the elite players, bragging rights go to the player with the most bracelets.

That title currently belongs to Phil Hellmuth, who has won a total of 16 bracelets during his illustrious poker career.

Known by many as ‘the poker brat’ for his outrageous outbursts at the table, nobody can deny Hellmuth’s expertise at the game.

Biggest tournament winner of all time

Another prestigious title fought for among the elite poker players is the biggest tournament winner.

This is calculated by the total amount of prize money won from tournaments, excluding the cost of buy-ins.

Bryn Kenney, the guy who won the biggest ever tournament, sat at the top of this list after his 2019 Triton win.

However, he has since been dethroned by Justin Bonomo who has amassed $57,194,649 in his career!

It is worth mentioning that Bonomo and Kenney sit less than $100,000 apart on this list so the biggest winner could even have changed since writing this!

Biggest poker tournament of all time

How do you classify the biggest poker tournament of all time? The most entries? The biggest entry fee?

Well, we’re going by the biggest total prize pool, which was amassed in the 2006 WSOP main event.

The ‘Moneymaker effect’, which prompted millions of people to take up poker, was in full swing in 2006 and saw 8773 players participate.

Jamie Gold took home the title and a massive $12 million prize!

The ‘Black Friday’ controversy

As many people know, online poker is illegal in most parts of the US because of a law passed on April 15th, 2011.

Poker players refer to this day as ‘Black Friday’ because of how devastating the law was for online players.

Some of the more elite players, who made a living off of playing online, even decided to move out of the United States to be able to continue their career at the online felt.

Longest poker game of all time

Anyone who’s played a slow-structured tournament knows how much of a drag it can be to play poker sometimes.

However, nothing comes close to the game that was played at The Bird Cage Theatre in Arizona.

This game started in 1881 and was constantly running, 24/7, until 1889!

The game is thought to have seen around $10 million exchanged across the table and saw some famous faces like George Hearst and Diamond Jim Brady get involved.

Conclusion

Those were some of the most surprising and interesting facts about the game of poker.

Of course, because it’s such a crazy and interesting game, there are probably thousands of other outrageous stories we could have included but we simply didn’t have space for them all.

Even if you’re looking at some of the numbers we’ve mentioned in this article in awe, there’s nothing stopping you from breaking those records.

Besides, anyone can get lucky!