Winterblossom, Henry T.:

$2,250 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

THE GAME OF DRAW-POKER, MATHEMATICALLY ILLUSTRATED; BEING A COMPLETE TREATISE ON THE GAME.... The first edition of this mathematical analysis of poker, often cited as the first American book devoted entirely to the game. This book of advice, authored by the certainly fictional "professor of mathematics" Henry T. Winterblossom and framed as a tool to protect poor fools from losing their money at the table, was published the same year as John Blackbridge's The Complete Poker Player, which instead attempted to legitimize poker and situate it among more accepted risk-based professions. While priority between the two works has not been definitively established, a February 1875 New York Times article referencing Winterblossom's book suggest it is the earlier. The book's subtitle explains the scope of the work: "Being a complete treatise on the game, giving the prospective value of each hand before and after the draw, and the true method of discarding and drawing, with a thorough analysis and insight of the game as played at the present day by gentlemen." Winterblossom aims to reduce the risk inherent in poker—a game of chance and skill—by acquainting players with the underlying probabilities. "All games of chance create a morbid appetite in those who indulge in them," he writes in his preface, "in proportion to their ignorance of the mathematical basis upon which those games are constructed." In providing the mathematical basis for poker, then, Winterblossom purports to actually be

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