The Poker Hall of Fame at Binion’s Horseshoe, Las Vegas, boasts some of the most talented gamblers ever to play the game – and a sole Englishman, who not only never set foot in a Las Vegas cardroom, never played a hand of poker in his life either.

You can’t really blame the man – after all, he died half a century before the game was invented. Nonetheless, the importance of Edmond Hoyle to the world of cards (and by extension poker) is indisputable, as he was the first chap to set about the serious task of recording and systematising the rules of card games in the 18th century.