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
Read more about this topic: Dead Man's Hand
Famous quotes containing the words earliest and/or details:
“I perceive that in these woods the earliest settlements are, for various reasons, clustering about the lakes, but partly, I think, for the sake of the neighborhood as the oldest clearings. They are forest schools already established,great centres of light.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Then he told the news media
the strange details of his death
and they hammered him up in the marketplace
and sold him and sold him and sold him.
My death the same.”
—Anne Sexton (19281974)