[5] David Parlett and John McLeod suggest that modern Brag is an extract of Post and Pair.

In the latter case, the players left in may agree to divide the stakes; otherwise they must show their cards and the best hand wins.

[9] As Charles Cotton said in The Compleat Gamester (1674):[10] The vye is what you please to adventure upon the goodness of your own hand; or if it be bad, and you imagine your adversary's is so likewise, then bid him high courageously, by which means you daunt your antagonist, and so bring him to submission.

[11] Shakespeare mentions the vye ("taunt") of the game, named as "pair", in a dialogue between the character Rosaline and the Princess of France in a conversation about the courtier Berowne, in his early play Love's Labour's Lost, written in the mid-1590s.

In Ben Jonson's Masque of Christmas, the card game of post and pair is introduced as one of his children,[13] thus characterizing him as a knave.

According to the A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases and Ancient Customs of the Fourteenth Century, by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, written in 1868, pur was the term given to the knave or jack in the game of post and pair.

[15] Post and pair is also prominently mentioned in A Woman Killed with Kindness by Thomas Heywood and in the anonymous Swetnam the Woman-Hater in which several characters play the game onstage.