They say poker, in any other name, is still poker. Probably. But there are major poker components that essentially make poker the popular poker the world has come to know. It is the poker that has been birthed for the world to enjoy.
One of the things that make poker the most popular poker known the world over is its vying aspect. Vying is when poker players try to guess who has the best cards in hand and base their bets on that. Before they decide who has the winning poker hand, they make a show of pretending each one has it.
But then, there emerges the best pretender among the poker players, and the rest give up and acknowledge that that player has the best poker hand. The pretender wins. Or, the poker players may decide to have everyone reveal their cards to see who really has the best poker hand. Vying is the best part of poker, and it’s what makes poker the poker the world has come to know and love.
But there are so-called poker variants that some say cannot really be identified with poker in any way because they lack some major components, like vying. Some allow that they can be. Whiskey poker is an example. It is sometimes called La Viuda, or The Widow in Mexico. It uses orthodox online poker winning combinations, but not the mechanism or procedures. Definitely not the vying. Whiskey poker is really a commerce game. It is basically exchanging cards to better hands to get cards complying with a winning combination.
Chinese poker is a “poker” in Hongkong and other countries. In Cantonese it is Sap Sam Cheung, and in Vietnam, Xap Xam Choung. In the Philippines, it is called Pusoy Dos. In Hawaii it’s Pepito. Chinese poker has 13 cards that must be arranged into several poker combinations. It is also known as a partition game.
The British card game “brag” is somewhat similar to poker. It is also a vying game, but it uses only three cards and is said to date back to the 18th century—actually older than poker. It is similar to India’s Teen Pathi which also uses three cards. Primero is an old Italian card game that also uses a little vying and a showdown. Poker is basically a vying card game popularized in America and now enjoyed in the world. The main ingredient of this Italian-American card game is its vying aspect.