Dead man's hand Dead man's hand The dead man's hand is a nickname for a particular poker hand, popularly a two-pair of black aces and black eights, although definitions of the hand have varied through the years. Such a hand is said to have been held by Old West folk hero, lawman, and gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok when he was murdered. No contemporaneous source records this hand's exact cards, but Frank Wilstach's 1926 book "Wild Bill Hickok: The Prince of Pistoleers" led to the popular modern conception of the "dead man's hand" as containing pairs of black aces and black eights. In Hickok's
Dragon Poker everyone shows their hole cards. As in traditional poker, the person who starts each round is the one with the best hand "showing", that is, from just all the face-up cards. What makes Dragon Poker so intriguing (and confusing) is the concept of conditional modifiers. These are a standard set of rules that, depending on the day, weather, number of people playing, and other factors, determines what cards are wild, what cards are "dead" (unusable), and other subtle changes in how the game is played. In the books, the rules delineating conditional modifiers vary as well, depending on the dimension