Can you have something similar to poker in a TL 1 setting

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

I thought that professional gamblers more often ran banks in games like faro, railroad, and keno than they played poker. I read that a study in 1882 reported that more money was wagered in the USA on faro than on all other games of chance combined.

Somewhat later, there is Feynman's friend in Vegas who made a living by being famous as a gambler, and getting people to make silly bets with him so they could say that they had won/lost a bet to so-and-so.

[mr beer]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

And since the necessary mathematics is a product of the nineteenth century, with the very idea of mathematical probability being unknown before Pascal in the seventeenth, the ... algorithmic side of poker would be much less important in such a setting than it is in movies.

It's true that mathematically rigorous analysis would be far less advanced and in fact largely absent but observing the way that people play their cards in given situations * is absolutely timeless and far more important to master than memorising an array of physical tells.

* By which I mean what actions they take i.e. the combination of bet/check/fold and bet sizing.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by mr beer

It's true that mathematically rigorous analysis would be far less advanced and in fact largely absent but observing the way that people play their cards in given situations * is absolutely timeless and far more important to master than memorising an array of physical tells.

* By which I mean what actions they take i.e. the combination of bet/check/fold and bet sizing.

Yes ... I was saying that nobody in the Bronze Age could think “they have a 6.4% chance of beating my hand” because as far as we can tell nobody had the idea that you could calculate the probability of an event until much later. But they could definitely think “my hand is very strong and will probably win” or “he only raises big when he is bluffing.”

[RGTraynor]

I was in a fantasy boffer LARP for many years, and there came the point where Magic: The Gathering exploded in popularity. For a year or so, decks were frequent occurrences at our events. The howling anachronism drove some folks crazy, so they invented a Magic-like game called "Goblin Rocks," which involved playing with small painted pieces of slate scavenged from an area mountain.

While the attempt never really caught on, it strikes me that something like that would easily work in the Stone Age, let alone TL 1.