Edmond Hoyle (1672 - August 29, 1769) , also known as Edmund Hoyle, is a writer best known for his works providing detailed descriptions of games. The phrase "according to Hoyle" came into the language, a reflection of his generally-perceived authoritativeness on the subject.
Little is known about most of his life, though he is widely believed to have been
trained to become a barrister. In 1741, Hoyle began working as a whist tutor to members of high society. Along with personal instruction, he sold a short booklet on the game to his clients, describing his basic approaches to the game. The booklet became quite popular, and unauthorized copies of it were circulated about London. To prevent this, Hoyle published A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist in 1742, copyrighting his work.
Because of his success, Hoyle followed with similar treatises on backgammon, chess, quadrille, piquet, and brag. In 1750, a single compendium of the these was published.
The first fifteen editions of Hoyles' works are now extremely rare and mostly only to be found in the hands of collectors. Only two copies of Hoyle's original work on whist (the first edition) are known to still exist; one is in the Bodleian Library. Only one copy (a fore-edge painted volume now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center) is known to exist of his first edition work on Backgammon [1].
A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist was regarded as authoritative until 1864, after which time they were superseded by the new rules written by John Loraine Baldwin and adopted by the Arlington and Portland clubs.
Many of modern card game rule books contain the word "Hoyle" in the title, but the moniker does not mean that the works are derivative of Hoyle's. Because of his contributions to gaming, he was a charter inductee into the Poker Hall of Fame in 1979.
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