48 Fun Facts About Gambling

On a standard die, the numbers on opposite faces always add up to what?

Seven: a standard die pairs 1 with 6, 2 with 5 and 3 with 4, so every pair of opposite faces totals seven.

The oldest known dice, from around 2800 to 2500 BC, were found at the Burnt City in which modern country?

Iran: the Burnt City, Shahr-e Sukhteh in Sistan-Baluchestan, yielded the dice alongside a backgammon-like board; Romans later gambled with dice despite official bans.

Playing cards were invented in which country, around the 9th century?

China: cards appear in Tang-dynasty records of the 9th century; they reached Europe via Mamluk Egypt in the late 1300s, and the French suits were fixed around 1480.

The joker was added to the deck in the United States around 1860 as a trump card for which game?

Euchre: American players added the joker as the 'best bower', a trump outranking the bowers; the ace of spades, meanwhile, once carried England's tax stamp.

The Ridotto, generally considered the first casino, opened in 1638 in which city?

Venice opened the Ridotto in a wing of Palazzo Dandolo near San Moisè; patrons wore masks and three-cornered hats, and the city closed it in 1774.

The word "roulette" is French for what?

Little wheel: roulette is the diminutive of the French roue, 'wheel'; the game in its modern form was being played in Paris by the 1790s.

The single-zero roulette wheel was introduced in 1843 by the Blanc brothers in which German spa town?

Bad Homburg's Kursaal casino, run by François and Louis Blanc, dropped the second zero to lure players from rival spas; the brothers later took over Monte Carlo.

What is the house edge on a double-zero American roulette wheel?

5.26%: with 38 pockets and 35-to-1 payouts, the house keeps 2/38 of even-money and straight bets alike; no betting system changes that average.

What happened when Ashley Revell bet his entire $135,300 on a single roulette spin in 2004?

He won on red and walked out with $270,600, doubling his stake; he had sold everything he owned, including his clothes, to raise the $135,300.

In 1913 at Monte Carlo, black came up how many times in a row as gamblers lost fortunes on red?

26 times: black hit 26 spins running on 18 August 1913, and the episode gave the gambler's fallacy its other name, the Monte Carlo fallacy.

The gambler's fallacy holds that a random outcome that has happened less often than expected is now what?

More likely: the gambler's fallacy treats independent spins as if they must 'even out', so a run of one colour makes the other feel overdue; its mirror image is the hot-hand fallacy.

Who is famously forbidden from entering the gaming rooms of the Monte Carlo Casino?

Citizens of Monaco were barred from the tables from the casino's early years, a rule Princess Caroline imposed on moral grounds; Paris Opera architect Charles Garnier redesigned the building in 1878.

Joseph Jagger "broke the bank at Monte Carlo" in 1873 by exploiting what?

A biased roulette wheel: Jagger, a Yorkshire mill engineer, found one Monte Carlo wheel favouring nine numbers and won a fortune before the casino swapped the wheels; the music-hall song probably honours Charles Wells instead.

Charles Fey's Liberty Bell, built in San Francisco around 1895, was an early version of what?

The slot machine: Fey's three-reel Liberty Bell paid out automatically, its reels carrying horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts and a cracked bell; three bells paid the top prize of ten nickels.

Why did lemons, cherries and plums end up as symbols on early one-armed bandits?

The gum attachment got around anti-gambling laws and gave Britain the term "fruit machine".

Roughly what share of an average US casino's income comes from slot machines?

About 70%: slots produce roughly 70 cents of every gaming dollar at US casinos; the first fully electromechanical machine, Bally's Money Honey, arrived in 1963 and could pay out 500 coins.

The Las Vegas Strip mostly lies outside the city of Las Vegas, in which unincorporated town?

The 4.2-mile stretch technically sits in Paradise and Winchester in Clark County.

Which resort was the first full-service casino hotel on what became the Strip, opening in April 1941?

El Rancho Vegas, Thomas Hull's Western-themed resort on Highway 91 just outside the city limits, opened on 3 April 1941 and burned down in 1960; the 'Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas' sign followed in 1959.

Which mobster financed the Flamingo, which opened in December 1946?

Bugsy Siegel took over Billy Wilkerson's unfinished project with mob money; his bosses believed he had skimmed about $1 million, and he was shot dead through a Beverly Hills window in June 1947.

The Mirage's 1989 opening is credited with starting the mega-resort era. What attraction sat outside it?

The Bellagio's fountains followed in 1998, and the MGM Grand, one of the world's largest hotels, opened in 1993.

In which year did Nevada legalise casino gambling?

1931: Nevada's Assembly Bill 98, signed on 19 March 1931 during the Depression, legalised wide-open casino gambling in the same session that eased divorce residency to six weeks.

Which two US states ban every form of gambling, including lotteries?

Utah and Hawaii have had no lottery, casinos or racetracks throughout the modern era; Utah's constitution bans games of chance outright, and Hawaii has rejected repeated lottery and casino bills.

The 2018 Supreme Court case that opened the door to legal US sports betting was Murphy v. whom?

NCAA: the college body led the pro leagues in suing New Jersey, and the case carried Governor Phil Murphy's name by the time the Court struck down PASPA, the 1992 law that confined sports books almost entirely to Nevada.

Which gambling hub overtook the Las Vegas Strip in gaming revenue in the mid-2000s?

Macau, a former Portuguese colony and the only place in its country with legal casinos, passed the Strip in 2006; by 2013 its gaming revenue was several times the Strip's, and gaming taxes supplied most of its budget.

Which game produced about 91 percent of Macau's casino income in 2014?

Baccarat, in its punto banco form, dominates the VIP rooms and produced about nine-tenths of the territory's 2014 casino income; the banker bet's house edge is just 1.06 percent.

Which businessman held the exclusive gambling concession in Macau from 1962 until 2001?

Stanley Ho's STDM held the monopoly for four decades until the concession expired at the end of 2001; the market was liberalised in 2002 and Sands, Wynn and others moved in.

Blackjack descends from a Spanish game first described by which author, in 1601-02?

Miguel de Cervantes described veintiuna, twenty-one, in his novella Rinconete y Cortadillo, written around 1601-02 and published in 1613 in his Novelas Ejemplares.

What is the traditional payout for a natural blackjack?

3 to 2: a natural on a $10 bet returns $15; some casinos have quietly cut it to 6 to 5, which adds about 1.4 percentage points to the house edge.

The MIT Blackjack Team's exploits inspired the 2008 film 21 and which Ben Mezrich book?

Bringing Down the House (2002) followed Jeff Ma's team, renamed Kevin Lewis in the book; spotters counted at the tables and signalled big players to swoop in when the deck turned hot.

The 1988 film Rain Man is blamed for spreading which misconception about US casinos?

That card counting is illegal: Raymond and Charlie count their way to about $86,000 at Caesars Palace and are asked to leave, which casinos may do, but no law was broken.

In craps, what is a roll of two ones called?

Snake eyes, a roll of 1-1, loses on the come-out; two sixes are boxcars, and the game grew out of the English game hazard, brought to New Orleans around 1805.

Around 1907, dice maker John H. Winn added which bet to craps, giving casinos a reason to use fair dice?

Don't Pass let players bet against the shooter, so a house running both sides had no reason to crook the dice; WWII soldiers then spread the game on barracks blankets.

Keno slips from China's Han dynasty are believed to have helped pay for which project?

The Great Wall: legend credits Cheung Leung's lottery game with helping fund it; Chinese railroad workers later brought keno to the American West, where it carries some of the worst odds in a casino.

In a game of keno, how many numbers are drawn from the 80 on the board?

The odds of hitting all 20 on a 20-spot ticket are about one in 3.5 quintillion.

The world's oldest still-running lottery, dating from 1726, belongs to which country?

Queen Elizabeth I ran England's first official lottery in 1566, but the Dutch Staatsloterij has never stopped.

The $2.04 billion jackpot of November 2022, then a world record, was won in which US game?

Powerball: the November 2022 drawing paid $2.04 billion to a single ticket sold in Altadena, California; Spain's Christmas lottery, El Gordo, hands out more total prize money than any draw.

Which universities were partly funded by colonial American lotteries?

Princeton, Columbia and Penn all raised building funds through colonial lotteries, as did Harvard and Yale; lotteries also helped pay for the Jamestown settlement and the Revolutionary War.

The word "jackpot" comes from an 1880s poker rule about which cards?

The antes accumulated until someone could open with jacks; slot machines borrowed the word in the 1930s.

Who organised the first World Series of Poker in 1970 at his Horseshoe casino?

Benny Binion, the Texas-born owner of Binion's Horseshoe, invited a handful of top players downtown in 1970; Johnny Moss was voted the first champion by his peers and received a silver cup, not cash.

Which amateur's 2003 World Series of Poker win, after qualifying online for $86, set off the poker boom?

Chris Moneymaker, a Tennessee accountant, turned an $86 online satellite into the $2.5 million first prize, beating Sam Farha heads-up; Main Event entries jumped from 839 to 2,576 the next year.

Archie Karas arrived in Las Vegas in 1992 with $50 and ran it up to more than how much in about 2.5 years?

$40 million: Karas turned $50 into roughly $40 million by early 1995, mostly at pool, poker and craps, then lost about $30 million of it in three weeks at the dice and card tables.

Which racing bet requires naming the first three finishers in exact order?

Trifecta: the bettor must name the first three finishers in exact order; an exacta covers two, a superfecta four, and a quinella pays for two in either order.

The fictional Tangiers in Scorsese's Casino (1995) was based on which real Las Vegas casino?

The Stardust: Frank 'Lefty' Rosenthal, the model for De Niro's Ace Rothstein, secretly ran it for the Chicago Outfit, which skimmed its count room in the 1970s.

In Ocean's Eleven (2001), the crew robs the shared vault of the Bellagio, the Mirage and which casino?

The MGM Grand: Terry Benedict owns all three, and the crew empties the vault of about $160 million on fight night; the film is a remake of a 1960 Rat Pack picture.

Roulette is thought to have developed from Biribi, a game from which country?

Italy: Biribi was an Italian game in which players bet on numbered squares, with the winning number drawn from a bag; its layout merged with a spinning wheel to form roulette.

Which mathematician reputedly created a primitive roulette wheel while chasing perpetual motion?

Blaise Pascal's 1650s experiments with a perpetual-motion machine reputedly produced a primitive wheel; he also founded probability theory in his 1654 letters with Fermat about dividing gambling stakes.

Which Indian text of about the 4th century BCE recommends taxing and controlling gambling?

The Arthashastra, Kautilya's manual of statecraft, has a superintendent of gambling license the dice and tax the winnings; older poems such as the Rigveda's Gambler's Lament dwell on gambling's ruin.

Ancient Jewish authorities disqualified professional gamblers from doing what?

Testifying in court: the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 3:3) lists dice players among those unfit to serve as witnesses, since they contribute nothing useful to society.