Meaning
A face that betrays nothing - the deliberately blank expression of a player who does not want opponents reading joy or despair in it. By extension, anyone's studied blankness under questioning, negotiation, or scrutiny. Often modulated as 'a good poker face'; the adjective poker-faced serves when the blankness is a permanent installation. Regional use: General English (American card-game origin).
Origin
From the American card game, whose own name is old and disputed: Etymonline dates poker to 1834 in American English and lists the German Pochspiel and French poque candidates only to call them, without documentation, mere speculation, noting the game was already being played in a twenty-card form on lower Mississippi steamboats by 1829. The face followed the game. Etymonline records slang poker face, meaning deadpan, from 1874, and the sources of the day treated it as technical equipment: a review in the Saturday Review of December 1874 discussed the term, and Cavendish's Round Games at Cards of 1875 instructed that 'the possession of a good poker face is an advantage. No one who has any pretensions to good play will betray the value of his hand by gesture, change of countenance, or any other symptom.' Ammer dates the idiom to about 1880, by which time the blank face was already leaving the card table for business and diplomacy, where it has been standard equipment ever since.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a good poker face
- keep a poker face
- poker-faced (adjectival)
Usage Examples
- The negotiator kept a poker face through the absurd opening bid, knowing the ledger behind it was desperate.
- He has the politician's poker face: grief, boredom, and triumph all arrive as mild interest.
- You cannot bluff at this table without a poker face, and you cannot last at this firm without one either.