The Old School: Oswald Jacoby on Poker

I like old poker books. It’s fun to see how people played, and talked about, the game decades ago. In “The Old School”, I share the best and worst from these antiquated tomes. Sometimes the strategy is laughable, sometimes it is surprisingly astute, but it always provides a unique insight into the history of poker.

Oswald Jacoby was a world-renowned bridge author and player who published 17 books and over 10,000 articles on that and other card games. In Oswald Jacoby on Poker, he turned his considerable card skill to “The Great American Game”.

Originally published in 1940, the book discusses primarily Draw and 5-Card Stud, with some attention paid to 7-Card Stud and to variations of these games. There is no mention of Texas Hold ‘Em, and only the briefest mention of any sort of community card game: Cincinnati, in which players have five cards of their own and five community cards from which to make a five-card hand.

There is also no mention of casinos or professional card rooms of any kind. It seems the intended audience are those playing in friendly games with family, co-workers, or fellow soldiers. Indeed, Jacoby explains how to set the stakes for various games so that they do not prove too high for anyone involved and proposes some means of compensating the biggest losers in any given session.

He even offers some advice for Dealer’s Option games that has withstood the test of time: “The dealer’s option should be restricted to not more than seven or eight games. Otherwise the players simply vie with one another in seeing what absurdities they can concoct.” Thus, while Jacoby includes considerable strategic content, his book also functions as a how-to manual for anyone looking to host or play in a regular, friendly game.

The Good: For pre-dating David Sklansky’s seminal text by nearly 50 years, Jacoby understands a fair bit of poker theory. He advises tight play but emphasizes the need for occasional “incorrect” play, which he compares to an advertising budget. Jacoby does seem to think of bluffing exclusively as a metagame consideration, rather than a potential source of innate profitability, but in many very loose friendly games, that’s probably not so far from the truth. Jacoby also cautions about reverse implied odds, though not in so many words.

The Bad: Oddly, while he is quite aware of reverse implied odds, Jacoby rarely considers implied odds. This despite the fact that he apparently played in some fixed limit games where it wasn’t unheard of to see a pot get raised 15-20 times on a given street. There are several instances where he advises folding a draw based on the immediate odds but without any discussion of what might be won if the draw comes in.

There’s also this surprising quote about good and bad “streaks” of luck, reminiscent of some of Doyle Brunson’s less coherent rambling in Super/System: “this liberality occurs only when I am winning and able to be liberal with someone else’s money. In other words, I am not bucking my bad luck but I am pushing my good luck.”

A whole chapter of the book, as well as the inside cover, is devoted to tables of statistics and probability. Most of these are of the “odds of being dealt four-of-a-kind” variety and without particularly much practical use. Another chapter presents some “Problems” in a question and answer format, but these tend to lack important details such as position or pot size.

The Quaint: This, more than anything else, is why I enjoy old poker books. I love the lingo. A lock is an “immortal hand”, possibly a precursor to “the mortal nuts” that we hear about today. No-limit games are “table stakes”, and an all-in bet is “tapping”. The first player to act is “under the guns”, plural, and while Jacoby calls a deuce a deuce, a trey is a “three-spot.”

Though he introduces the idea of an 8 qualifier to make a low hand in Stud High/Low, Oswald treats the unqualified version of the game as standard. His rules for how to handle a side pot in this game were so convoluted that I couldn’t follow them, but they seemed far more complex than is the standard today.

The author mentioned, but does not explain, several “additional combinations of cards which are given rank in various localities”, all of which have colorful names: “the Dog, the Tiger, the Skeet, the Kilter, the Cat-hop, the Mississippi Bearcat, the Blaze, etc.” Of these, the only ones that he defines are the Tiger and the Dog, both of which runs of five closely ranked cards cards that makes neither a straight nor a pair. In common practice, these rank higher than straights but lower than flushes.

Finally, Jacoby includes an optional rule known as the “Impossible Call” that illustrates nicely what friendly games he envisions: “In a Stud game, when the last player to act is beaten in sight but calls by mistake he should be given his money back, since there was no conceivable manner in which he could gain by his call.”