Best online poker games on Launchpoker.com

Throughout history great generals and captains of armies around the globe have been attributed with incredible strategic minds, minds capable of far reaching plans and anticipating the moves of their enemies. Each of these minds have often been compared to those of great chess players, or been referred to as chess masters, linking the skill and depth of thought required for excellence in chess with the same required for excellence in battle. Where it might take a chess master to accurately plan long range and long reaching tactics covering large groups of soldiers, it takes a poker player to pull off singularly spectacular moves in order to win a battle. Moves like those attributed to the 18th President of the United States during his time as a leader in the American Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant.

  Grant's stunning victories in war earned him the respect of President Abraham Lincoln, who more than once personally intervened to further his military carrier. While Grant did write a famous memoir covering this and other elements of his personal history, which was completed shortly before his death at the hands of throat cancer, he did not mention poker playing in the manuscript. We do know that he played poker, however, both from the fact that it was so prevalent a game during the Civil War, being played by soldiers and officers alike on both sides of the conflict, and from the reporting of his friend and fellow Union officer, William Tecumseh Sherman.

  Sherman has said that Grant played poker during his presidency, and played for money. Considering Grant was one of the first leaders in US Military history to abandon his supply lines in enemy territory to gain mobility, and used that mobility to win a decisive victory considered by military historians as the turning point of the war, the fact that Grant was a poker player is not at all surprising.