Online Poker Tournaments.POKER HISTORY
Three games successively dominated poker, particularly as limit-betting games in the USA, during the first century and a half of poker history: draw, seven-card stud, and holdem, with each game cornering over 2/3 of the market during their ascendancy. Draw was far ahead in popularity until sometime in the early 20th century, when seven-card stud took the lead, which it kept until about 1980, thriving in the armed forces during WWII, and then during the rise of the Nevada casino industry in the fifties and sixties.
Five-card stud played a role as a major big-bet game from it's invention in the 1850's right up until holdem really took off in the 1970's, but it was never as popular as either draw or seven-card stud, which are both excellent limit-betting games and as such appealed to a mass market which five-card stud does not suit.
In the late-seventies or early eighties sometime, holdem overtook seven-card stud in popularity, helped on it's way to the top by the huge leap in status it gained through being used as the world championship game from the early seventies, and also by a surge in player numbers as US gambling laws were liberalised. Unlike seven-card stud and five-card stud, holdem plays equally well with any form of betting from limit to no-limit. It quickly made five-card stud more or less obsolete, and steadily reduced seven-card stud's share of the market from about 70% in 1971, to less than 20% today.
While holdem's huge success shows that it was an excellent choice as world championship game, it is interesting to speculate how different things might be today if no-limit seven-card stud had been invented in 1960 say, instead of 1998. Like holdem, mississippi plays equally well at any limit and it is arguable that if it had been an established game back then, it may well have been selected in 1971 to decide the world championship instead of holdem. After all, holdem had been around for thirty or forty years in 1971, but even on it's home ground in the south-west of the USA it remained far less popular than seven-card stud until it was made world championship game.
http://www.almopoker.com