Poker (or its equivalent) has been popular among the political classes right from the beginning of American history. George Washington furnished Mount Vernon with a card table, multiple decks of playing cards, and two sets of “counters.” With military precision, he also kept careful track of his successes and failures, noting that he won slightly more than £72 during the years 1772–74, while losing about £78 during the same period, for a net loss of £6.

Many modern Presidents have been regular poker players, with table styles that seem to match their personalities. Richard Nixon financed his first congressional campaign with his relentlessly acquired winnings, while Dwight Eisenhower quit playing when he realized that he was taking in too much money from junior officers who could ill afford to lose it.

Part of the game’s attraction for politicians must surely be the permissibility of deception, as important in politics, alas, as it is in poker. Another part of it has to be the opportunity to practice bluffing, also a crucial political skill.

A classic—and particularly revealing—poker game took place between Daniel Webster (1782–1852) and Henry Clay (1777–1852), two of the foremost American politicians of the nineteenth century. Clay represented Kentucky in Congress for many years, serving six terms as Speaker of the House, and he was sent five times to the Senate. Webster was sent to the House of Representatives from his native New Hampshire before he moved to Massachusetts, where he was again elected to the House. He also represented Massachusetts for three terms in the Senate. Both men served as Secretary of State.

Contemporaries for many years in Washington as legislators and colleagues in the Whig party and also as prominent lawyers, Clay and Webster probably played cards together frequently, although only one extraordinary hand of Five-Card Draw is remembered today. Here is how David Spanier relates it in his 1977 book Total Poker :

“With Webster dealing, Clay drew one card on the draw and Webster stood pat. The two went on raising each other until each had $2,000 on the table. At this stage Clay stopped re-raising and called. According to this account Webster laughed sheepishly and threw down his cards. ‘I only have a pair of deuces,’ he said. Clay laughed too. ‘The pot is yours,’ he said. ‘I only have an ace high.’”

The usual point of this story is that both great men were steely-nerved risk takers, each willing to bet a small fortune ($2,000 was a phenomenal amount in the early nineteenth century) in the belief that he could outbluff the other. The poet and poker writer A. Alvarez observed that “Clay and Webster were hard, ambitious men as well as fearless gamblers, and when they faced each other head-to-head their pride was on the line. Each smelled the other’s weakness and was determined not to blink.”

But there is a more important lesson than that. Henry Clay badly misplayed his hand. Having set out to bluff with worthless cards, he was foolish to call