The History of Gin Rummy

Gin rummy is usually traced to New York around 1909, and in the early 1940s it became the leading fad game in the United States. The story of its invention rests on accounts written decades later, so this history keeps apart what the record shows and what tradition says.

Who Invented Gin Rummy?

Tradition credits Elwood T. Baker, with his son C. Graham Baker, around 1909. The fullest early account is in Culbertson's Card Games Complete (1952), compiled by Albert H. Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith: Baker was a whist teacher of Brooklyn, and the name, suggested by his son, played on the pairing of rum and gin. When C. Graham Baker died in 1950, the New York Times headed his obituary with the line that he had helped devise gin rummy.

The details differ from book to book. Dale Armstrong, in Win at Gin and Poker, sets the scene at the Knickerbocker Whist Club in New York; some later accounts call Baker a bridge player and date the game to about 1911. The card historian David Parlett found no source older than these books, and notes that the naming story reads like a newspaper anecdote.

Armstrong also suggests what Baker added: no melds go on the table until a player can end the hand with 10 points or less of unmatched cards. That rule is the knock, and every hand under the modern gin rummy rules still turns on it.

Conquian, Rum, and the Rummy Family

Gin descends from two older draw-and-discard games. The first is Conquian, printed briefly as Coon Can in The Standard Hoyle of 1887 and described in full in R. F. Foster's Complete Hoyle of 1897, which called it a favorite in Mexico and the border states, especially Texas. Conquian was already a two-player game with ten cards each, played with a 40-card Spanish pack, and a player had to meld eleven cards to go out.

The second is Rum, the game now called Knock Rummy. Parlett's earliest description of it dates from 1905, and on 10 September 1910 the New York Sun reported that the leading round game of the season was something called rum, also spelled rhum or rhummy. In Parlett's view, gin joins Conquian's two-player, ten-card deal to the knock from Rum.

The magician and gambling writer John Scarne argued instead that gin grew out of Whiskey Poker, a 19th-century game of forming poker hands. Parlett calls that theory highly implausible. Basic rummy, with melds laid on the table as you go, is a cousin from the same family.

From Gin Poker to Gin Rummy

The name took decades to settle. The 1913 Official Rules of Card Games, edited by Foster for the United States Playing Card Company, printed the game as Gin Poker or Poker Gin, and the 1926 edition still did. Culbertson's account has the game enjoying a revival in 1927 to 1930 and then going quiet until 1940.

The Hollywood Craze, 1940 to 1946

Gin stayed largely a New York game until film studios and radio performers adopted it around 1940. By 1941 it was a Hollywood fad with national publicity, and Culbertson calls it the principal fad game of the United States from 1941 to 1946. The game suited a film set: a hand is quick, and play can stop when a scene is called and resume afterwards.

The craze left its own scoring. Hollywood gin runs three games at once on one score sheet, and gambling bonuses were added in the same years. Armstrong tells of a Burbank country club persuading Oliver Hardy to stay out of its card room after months of heavy losses at gin.

The fad reached print as humor too. In the 12 February 1944 issue of Collier's, Damon Runyon's story "The Lace-work Kid" joked that nearly everybody in the country played gin rummy.

The 1942 Laws and the War Years

In 1942 the Bridge World in New York published Gin-Rummy: How to Play It and Authorized Official Laws, by Walter L. Richard, Oswald Jacoby, and Lee Hazen. Those laws paid 20 for gin and 10 for an undercut, gave no undercut on a tie, and printed Hollywood scoring as a way to play simultaneous games. Modern North American play has since moved to 25-point bonuses with ties going to the defender, which is how our game scores a hand.

The war spread the game further. In 1947 Jacoby reported in the New York Times on a survey by the American playing card makers: the number of people who learned gin during World War II matched the number who learned pinochle, cribbage, poker, and bridge put together.

Tournament Gin and Stu Ungar

Stu Ungar, widely regarded as the greatest gin rummy player, dominated tournament gin in the 1970s and 1980s so completely that his run is thought to have helped end gin as a big tournament game in Las Vegas. He moved on to poker. Oswald Jacoby, the bridge and backgammon champion behind the 1942 laws, also played gin for high stakes and wrote several books on it.

Organized gin still runs today. The Gin Rummy Association holds live tournaments, including events in Las Vegas, under rules that use the first upcard as the knock card and play best-of-five matches of 250-point games.

Gin in Films and Books

The comedian Ernie Kovacs published How to Talk at Gin in 1962. In the 1964 film Goldfinger, the villain cheats at gin rummy with an accomplice reading his opponent's hand through binoculars; Ian Fleming's novel had used two-handed canasta. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine play gin in The Apartment, and in The Golden Girls Dorothy spends a whole night failing to break her mother Sophia's winning streak.

Gin Rummy and Computers

Gin became a research problem in 2020, when Todd Neller of Gettysburg College set it as the Undergraduate Research Challenge for the EAAI symposium. Fourteen teams built gin-playing programs, and thirteen papers were accepted for EAAI-21. Two findings matter to anyone who plays: the strongest programs knocked around their ninth turn, in line with the old advice to knock early, but they played for gin far more often than the classic strategy books recommend.

The gin rummy strategy guide puts those findings to work, and you can try them in a free game of gin rummy against the computer.