Bragging In the second phase, players passed or vied. The game phases are:īest Card In the first phase the player with the highest face-up card won the stakes, cards ranking in their natural order from Ace downwards, except that the ♦A outranked the other Aces. Eldest hand deals 3 cards to each player in turn, turning the last card dealt to each player face up. Ĭlassic Brag is a three-stake game and players ante 3 stakes, one for each phase of the game. The following is based on Seymour, supplemented by The New Pocket Hoyle (1810). They are less than complete, but with the aid of later descriptions, can be reconstructed.

The earliest published rules for any form of Brag appear in Richard Seymour's 1721 revision of Charles Cotton's The Compleat Gamester. In 1992, Parlett stated that the classic three-stake variant (see Classic Brag below) was defunct nevertheless, its rules were still being published in 2001.

In a 1981 survey by Waddingtons, Brag was the fourth most popular card game in Britain. Not until 1860 are rules for both variants published in one compendium, whereby 'Three Stake Brag' is virtually unchanged from the earliest rules and the version of 'Single Brag' described is less complicated than its American cousin. In 1825, an early American account of Brag describes a much more elaborate single-stake game with a complex vying procedure. In parallel with this early three-stake game, in 1751 Hoyle describes a version of Brag with a shortened pack that only had a single phase – the vying or 'bragging' round – with special powers for certain Jacks and Nines, thus anticipating the modern single-stake game. Initially there was just one, the Knave of Clubs later the Nine of Diamonds was added. However, Brag introduced a key innovation over Post and Pair: the concept of wild cards known as 'braggers'. The rules of Brag first appear in 1721 in The Compleat Gamester where it is referred to as 'The Ingenious and Pleasant Game of Bragg', but in fact, it originates in an almost identical game called Post and Pair which is recorded as far back as 1528 (as Post) and which, in turn, was descended from Primero.

It has been described as the 'longest-standing British representative of the Poker family.' History

It is a descendant of the Elizabethan game of Primero and one of the several ancestors to poker, the modern version just varying in betting style and hand rankings. The highest hand in Three-Card Brag: a prial of 3sīrag is an 18th century British card game, and the British national representative of the vying or 'bluffing' family of gambling games.

Rules of card game casino hoyles