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According To Hoyle, United States Playing Card Company, Alfred Robert Roberts

Accounting Historians Notebook

Some four decades before the American Revolution, there existed in London a number of coffee houses in which the gentry and merchant classes gathered to sip chocolate and coffee, to talk, and to play Whist, the increasingly popular card game destined to be the forerunner of Auction and Contract Bridge and other trump games of the partnership family. One of the habitues of the Crown Coffee House on Bedford Row was Edmond Hoyle, a middle-aged lawyer. Hoyle became so proficient at Whist that he decided to teach it and forego the practice of law.