History of Online Gin Rummy
Gin Rummy is a popular two player card game that has been around since 1909, when it was developed based off games developed in the previous century. As our page relates to playing Gin Rummy online, we’ll first cover the history of online gin Rummy.
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The first known version of online Gin Rummy appeared in 1998 on a free games website now part of pogo.com. It was only a matter of months before most large online games websites began offering the game in various formats, so for over a decade there have been many places to play online Gin Rummy for free.
The first real money version of Online Gin Rummy appeared at Game Colony in September 2000. The same that was true regarding play money in Online Gin Rummy was also true here, that before long there were many competitors. Despite a half dozen viable options for playing Gin Rummy online, for whatever reason the game never caught on. During peak hours, traffic remained under 10 real money players at a time at most websites offering Online Gin Rummy for real money.
Online Gin Rummy finally caught on well after the online poker boom. If you’re not familiar with the poker boom, this occurred when World Poker Tour (WPT) began broadcasting Texas Hold’em Tournament final tables on television and after an amateur poker player, who had won his seat online at pokerstars.com (an online poker room) named Chris Moneymaker, won the most prestigious annual poker tournament (The World Series of Poker) capturing $2.5 million in prize money. Poker took the world and the internet by storm, and today at any given time, up to half a million simultaneous players can be found playing real money poker online across dozens of websites.
Gin Rummy and Poker have always been closely intertwined. Stu Ungar, known as the greatest Gin player in history, is better known for his poker career where he won fives WSOP bracelets including 3 main event titles, despite having only entered a handful of events through out his career. The second most known Gin Rummy player is John Hainline who founded both the Gin Rummy Association and the World Series of Gin Rummy and also loves poker. A more recent example is 2006 World Series of Poker Champion Jamie Gold, who has cards in his blood from a young age as his father played Gin Rummy successfully.
It made sense that as poker grew in popularity so would the world’s second most popular game Gin Rummy. The missing piece of the puzzle was a trustworthy site dedicated to promoting the game. The net founded this in 2006, when Cyprus based gaming company RM Royal Media LTD took the internet’s first Rummy exclusive room to the market. This site is RummyRoyal.com which is now by far the largest and most successful Online Rummy for Real Money website with up to 7,000 simultaneous players during peak hours.
To learn more about the largest site for real money Gin Rummy, visit our RummyRoyal Review or the RummyRoyal website.
Recent Growth in Live Gin Rummy
To learn more about the recent growth of Gin Rummy in Las Vegas, Nevada, which has been fueled by and helps fuel online rummy: we suggest reading our page on the World Series of Gin Rummy, and our page about its founder John Hainline.
Actual History of Rummy
Like many of the old and popular games played today, Rummy has many theories of its origin. One theory says that it began as conquian and “probably” dates back to the seventeenth century. It is said, but that too is controversial, to have arrived in the United States in Texas from Mexico. According to David Partlett ( Penguin book of Card games 1978 ), conquian is the ancestor to all modern rummy games.
Even the name conquian has two possible derivations: One possibility is that it comes from the folk term “con quien”, which translates “with whom”, and the other possibility is that the word comes from the Chinese game Kon Khin, a variation of an older game called Khanhoo. The older name was corrupted to “Coon Can”, and that card game name was actually in The Standard Hoyle book of 1887.
For more on the origins of Gin Rummy we suggest reading Wikipedia page Gin Rummy.
