What is the origin for meaning of "Wild-card"?

Please go through this excerpt from The Tales of Kasi by Madhira Subbanna Deekshitulu:

'Kasyam maranam mukti', goes the sanskrit saying, which means dying in Kasi leads to liberation. Hindus believe that if they die here, there is an automatic upgrade to heaven, no matter what the sin committed on earth. It is amazing how god provides this wild-card entry at death.

I perceived the applicable meaning of wild-card for this context is a rarest luck or facility which comes with no cost.

But what is the origin for this meaning?

Well, a "wild card" is from card games where it's a card that can be counted as any other card. You would say, starting a game of poker, "Jacks are wild". During the game you could use a Jack as a 10 if it would help your hand.

And in software, a wild card is used in something called Regular Expressions. A regular expression is a series of letters and symbols that can "match" many words. In regular expressions, the '*' is the wildcard, typically. So, the regular expression 'd*g' matches dog, dig, dag, dxg . . . and so forth.

So, I guess, in this passage, there is no special requirement on who can get into heaven. Who can get into heaven? If there was a regular expression to match who can get into heaven, it would be the "wild card" - '*' get's into heaven. Everyone, everything even.

Without seeing the original context that the passage derives from, it is impossible to say for sure, but I strongly suspect that this use of wild-card entry alludes to the term’s use in sporting competitions:

A wild card is, in general, a tournament or playoff berth awarded to an individual or team that has not qualified through normal play.

So a wild-card entry is a place awarded to an individual or team who would not normally qualify. In this instance, that means the individual did not deserve to get into heaven, but got there via a wild card.