Dealer Button
A dealer button is used in poker to indicate the order of play. To ensure that there is incentive in every hand played; players must post the automatic bets known as the big and small blind. These bets ensure that there is money in the ‘pot’ and serves to prevent players sitting out until they get dealt monster hole cards.
The dealer button which players are on the big and small blind, typically the 2 players to the left of the dealer button. With each new hand dealt, the dealer button would move clockwise round the table so that in one full round, all players would have posted I big blind and then one small blind.
History of the Dealer Button
When poker became a popular saloon game in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century, the integrity of the players was unreliable and the honor codes that had regulated gambling for centuries became inadequate. Because the dealer has the greatest opportunity to cheat (by manipulating the specific cards that players receive, or by inspecting the dealt cards), the players would take turns in this role. To avoid arguments about whose turn it was to deal, the person who was next due to deal would be given a marker. A knife was a common object used as such a marker, and the marker became generally known as a buck as an abbreviated reference to the buck's horn that formed the handle of many knives at that time.
When the dealer had finished dealing the cards he "passes the buck". According to Martin, the earliest use of the phrase in print is in the July 1865 edition of Weekly New Mexican: "They draw at the commissary, and at poker after they have passed the buck.". The phrase then appears frequently in many sources so it probably originated at about this time. Fred M. Canfil, United States Marshal for the Western District of Missouri and a friend of US president Harry S. Truman, saw a sign when visiting the Federal Reformatory at El Reno, Oklahoma in 1945. He thought it would appeal to the plain-speaking Truman and arranged for a copy of it to be made and sent to him. Truman's use of the slogan "the buck stops here" in speeches, and on a sign on his desk, derives from the adoption of the phrase "passing the buck" as a metaphor for avoiding responsibility.
The use of other small disks as such markers led to the alternative term "button". Silver dollars were later used as markers and it has been suggested that this is the origin of "buck" as a slang term for "dollar," though by no means is there universal agreement on this subject. The marker is also referred to as "the hat". The origin of this term is believed to stem from the wearing of a hat having been used to denote dealership.
