When was rummy invented

The game of rummy is undoubtedly the king of all traditional skill games. It is one of the most popular card games of all time and it has many different variants across the globe. Though the game has many versions, the basics of the game remain the same. The game requires all players to arrange cards, dealt at the beginning of the game, in required combinations to make a valid declaration.

Players need to strategize constantly to pick and discard the right cards. Almost everyone has played rummy at least once in their lifetime. With the advent of technology, the game is now available to play online. There are many rummy apps available on Play Store as well and one that always tops the charts in the card game category is the Junglee Rummy app. You can play free rummy games on Junglee Rummy app , its smooth gameplay and unique features make it the most trusted rummy site in the country.

If you've ever wondered where all the rummy madness began, you're at the right place. Read on to learn the history of this classic card game. Rummy is believed to have multiple origins across geographical regions. According to the most widely cited theory, rummy originated in Spain.

It had some popularity in that time, but it was during the s that it really got big. It was the Roaring 20s, New York nightlife was swinging, and every lounge, saloon, and Hotel parlor had a Gin Rummy game playing. The game went quiet after From until the mids it was called Gin Poker. Why Gin Poker? So, they had to have fun on their own.

It was easy to learn and fun for the whole family. It became popular with stars and celebrities backstage in Hollywood and on Broadway too. Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex even played it. Ingrid Bergman and I used to play it between takes back when we were filming Casablanca What about now?

My personal favorite is Grand Gin Rummy. You now only need an Ace to win. Seeing this, your opponent might discard the spade King and force you to meld it. You are then obliged to discard an Ace, and can now only win by drawing spades to complete your sequence. If either of these has already gone, you can't possibly do it. If neither is out when the last available card has been declined, the game is drawn and the stake carried forward.

Almost every reference to Gin Rummy on the internet says it was invented in by Elwood T. Baker, a Brooklyn Whist teacher. The nearest I can find to a source for this information is this comment by Albert H Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith in their introduction to the game in Culbertson's Card Games Complete , which they compiled under that author's more marketable name in It would be nice if they had said where they got their own information from - the bit about Baker's son makes it sound like a folksy newspaper article or interview.

Dale Armstrong, in Gin explained More usefully, he suggests that Baker's contribution to the evolution of Rummy lay specifically in prohibiting either player from laying out any melds until he was able to go out with the total value of any unmelded cards deadwood being 10 or less. This does sound plausible, as it is in this significant respect that Gin differs from other draw-and-discard games of its time.

What somebody certainly produced - and it might as well have been Baker as anyone else - was a neat and tidied-up version of a cross between Conquian and what was then called Rum now called Knock Rummy , of which the earliest description I know of dates from An item in the New York Sun dated 10 September remarks "The leader this season seems to be a new round game that is called rum.

Some persons have it rhum, rhummy and even rhumston". Whether or not Baker actually called it Gin Rummy is another question. Why it should suggest any reference to Poker is unclear, except perhaps in so far as there was a vaguely similar game called Whiskey Poker, in which the aim was to form your hand into a Poker combination by a method of play deriving from the game of Commerce.

John Scarne's theory deriving Rummy from Poker through the medium of Whiskey Poker is highly implausible, like most of Scarne's histories, and what Wykes has to say on the subject in his book Gambling is totally misleading.

No doubt there was an intended play on the "alcoholic affinity" of Gin and Whiskey. This at least provides the most plausible explanation for the name of the game, though "gin" has plenty of other and entirely teetotal meanings.

A glance through the Oxford English Dictionary will show that it can also mean:. One of the reasons why the history of Gin Rummy remains tantalisingly obscure is that it didn't really come into its own until the s, for as late as the edition of Official Rules of Card Games it was still being recorded under its older title Poker Gin or Gin Poker.

One circumstance that helped it was the Depression, when more and more people had less and less to spend on going out and enjoying themselves and had to rediscover the art of amusing themselves at home. Gin was much simpler to learn than Contract Bridge, and more congenial in the family circle than Poker. But perhaps what really helped it on its way was its popularity with actors, stars and the celebrity-seeking riff-raff of Broadway and Hollywood, and the consequent publicity the game attracted to itself.

Hardly a film of that period fails to mention it somewhere, or at least get it on screen. Dale Armstrong reports:. Two features of the game made it attractive to those hanging about in the wings waiting for their cue, or in the studio waiting for the greens man to revive the pot plants.

One was that it was very fast to play but could, if necessary be left off at a moment's notice and easily picked up again as soon as the players were free. The other was the introduction of an ingenious scoring device - the so-called Hollywood Gin variety - whereby you could in effect play three games simultaneously, or even an endless series of them. To say that Gin became a craze of that period would be to put it almost literally.