Earliest Details
The expression "dead man's hand" appears to have had some currency in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, although no one connected it to Hickok until the 1920s. The earliest detailed reference to the "dead man's hand" was 1886, where it was described as a "full house consisting of three jacks and a pair of tens". Jacks and sevens are called the 'dead man's hand' in the 1903 "Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences" (partly because in a poker game, it is very unlikely to hold them and win the pot). Edmond Hoyle references the poker hand as "Jacks and eights" in 1907
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