87 Fun Facts About Gambling

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

Seven: that rule forces the 1, 2 and 3 faces to meet at one corner, leaving just two mirror-image layouts for a die.

Playing cards most likely first appeared in which country, around the 9th century?

China: cards probably grew out of printing on paper there, and they reached Europe through the Islamic world by the 1370s.

The joker was first added to the American deck as the top trump for which card game?

Euchre: a British firm was soon printing jokers for American packs, a few years before British packs carried one.

The word "roulette" is French for what?

Little wheel: its zero pockets are what give the house its edge.

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

Bad Homburg: the Blanc twins had opened its casino in 1841, and François later took his business to Monaco to run the Monte Carlo casino.

Which roulette betting system tells players to double their stake after every loss?

Martingale: the first win recovers every earlier loss plus one stake, but a long losing streak can wipe out the player's bankroll.

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.

Wild Bill Hickok was reputedly holding which two pairs when he was shot dead at a poker table in 1876?

Aces and eights: the story made black aces and eights known as poker's 'dead man's hand'.

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

More likely: lottery studies found that betting on a number falls sharply right after that number has been drawn.

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

Citizens of Monaco: yet the casino itself was opened to rescue the ruling Grimaldi family from bankruptcy.

Charles Fey's Liberty Bell, built in San Francisco in the 1890s, was an early version of what?

The slot machine: the Liberty Bell proved so popular that rival makers copied its basic design.

Which game in Japan's noisy parlours pays out in prizes that players can then sell for cash nearby?

Pachinko: gambling for cash is illegal in Japan, so parlours hand out prizes that nominally separate shops buy back.

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

Paradise: even so, the addresses of the Strip's resorts there still say Las Vegas.

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

El Rancho Vegas: Thomas Hull built it on Highway 91, just outside the city limits, to catch motorists driving in from Los Angeles.

Which mobster took over Billy Wilkerson's unfinished Flamingo resort, which opened in December 1946?

Bugsy Siegel: costs soared under him, his mob investors grew impatient, and he was shot dead in June 1947.

Which free attraction sat out front of the Mirage, the 1989 resort that began the Strip's megaresort era?

A volcano: after buying the resort, Hard Rock planned a guitar-shaped hotel tower to stand where the volcano was.

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

Utah and Hawaii: Utah's constitution forbids its legislature to authorise any game of chance or lottery 'under any pretense'.

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

NCAA: the college body and the major pro leagues had sued to block New Jersey's betting law, and the Court struck down the 1992 federal ban.

Which Asian country charges its own citizens and permanent residents a daily levy to enter its casinos?

Singapore: the levy, S$150 a day or S$3,000 a year, aims to deter casual and impulse gambling by locals.

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

Baccarat: high rollers betting borrowed cash in private VIP rooms drove much of that income.

Which businessman held Macau's exclusive gambling concession for about four decades from 1962?

Stanley Ho: he and his partners won the 1961 public tender, displacing the company that had run Macau's casinos before.

The early card game veintiuna appears in a novella by which Spanish author?

Miguel de Cervantes: in Rinconete y Cortadillo, a young card sharp boasts that he has earned his living playing veintiuna.

What is the traditional payout for a natural blackjack?

3 to 2: a $10 natural wins $15, though many tables pay only 6 to 5, a rule strongly in the casino's favour.

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

Snake eyes: rolled on the come-out, that 2 loses a pass-line bet, just as a 3 or a 12 does.

Which US state launched the first modern state lottery, in 1964?

New Hampshire: its towns voted by special ballot to allow it, and its profits have gone to the state's public schools.

Craps is thought to take its name from 'crabs', the lowest throws in which older dice game?

Hazard: the old dice game's name later took on its everyday meaning of risk or danger.

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

Powerball: the Altadena gas station that sold the winning ticket earned its owner a $1 million bonus.

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

A pair of jacks or better: until someone could open with jacks the pot kept growing, and 'hit the jackpot' later came to mean any big success.

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

Benny Binion: he invited top players to his Horseshoe in 1970, and they voted Johnny Moss the first world champion.

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

Chris Moneymaker: after his win, Main Event entries grew from 839 in 2003 to 8,773 by 2006.

Archie Karas drove to Las Vegas with $50 in 1992; roughly how much had his winning streak reached by 1995?

$40 million: soon afterwards he lost it all back again at the tables.

In US horse racing, a 'show' bet pays out if your horse finishes where?

In the top three: when a huge favourite is heavily backed to show, the minimum payout can cost more than the pool holds, a 'minus pool'.

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: the crew times its raid on the vault for the night of a high-profile boxing match.

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

Blaise Pascal: he had already built one of the first mechanical calculators, to help his father, a tax collector in Rouen.

Which ancient Indian text has officials run gambling and take a cut of winnings?

The Arthashastra: its superintendent of gambling hires out honest dice, warning that gamblers are naturally false players.

Ancient Jewish authorities disqualified professional gamblers from doing what?

Testifying in court: the Talmud's sages split on why, and one said a gambler's winnings are money that isn't legally his.

Cassius Coolidge's famous canvases, commissioned to advertise cigars, show which animals playing poker?

Dogs star in the sixteen oil scenes Coolidge made in 1903 for the calendar firm Brown & Bigelow, and his earlier Poker Game sold for $658,000 at auction in 2015.

Which video game giant began in Kyoto in 1889 as a maker of hanafuda playing cards?

Nintendo sold handmade flower cards for decades before it turned to toys and consoles; hanafuda had caught on after Japan banned most forms of gambling in 1882 but tolerated these decks.

Prize quiz nights usually escape gambling laws because trivia is classed as a game of what, rather than chance?

Skill is the dividing line in law: Britain's regulator, for one, requires no licence for a prize competition whose outcome is decided by the entrants' ability, judgement or knowledge.

Which future US president helped fund his first run for Congress with poker winnings from his wartime Navy service?

Richard Nixon became a very good five-card stud player as a wartime naval officer, and the money he won went toward his successful 1946 campaign for a California seat.

In British bingo halls, the traditional call 'two fat ladies' announces which number?

88 earns the call because each rounded digit resembles a plump lady, and by tradition the players may answer the caller with a shout of 'wobble, wobble'.

Which English monarch is said to have lost the bells of a St Paul's chapel on one throw of the dice?

Henry VIII reputedly staked the bells of the Jesus Chapel in St Paul's churchyard against £100 from the courtier Sir Miles Partridge, who won, broke up the bells and pulled down their tower.

In a standard deck, the king of which suit is nicknamed the 'suicide king' for the sword behind his head?

Hearts is the suit of the 'suicide king', whose pose is an accident: centuries of bad copying by English card makers erased the head of the axe he once held.

Which Enlightenment writer grew rich by joining a mathematician's syndicate that bought up a government lottery?

Voltaire joined the scheme proposed over dinner by the mathematician Charles Marie de La Condamine, which bought up a lottery run to pay off state debts and earned him perhaps a million livres.

Why did founder Jay Sarno leave the apostrophe out of the name of Las Vegas's Caesars Palace?

Every guest is an emperor was the idea: 'Caesars' is a plural, not a possessive, chosen so that everybody staying at the 1966 resort would feel like a Caesar.

Which crime syndicates take their name from 8-9-3, one of the worst hands in a traditional card game?

The yakuza are named for ya-ku-za, the way those numbers are read in Japanese counting: the cards add up to twenty, which scores zero in a game where the aim is nine.

Which country singer had a 1978 hit with The Gambler, a song of card-table advice from a stranger on a train?

Kenny Rogers took the Don Schlitz song to the top of the country chart and won a Grammy for it, after earlier versions by Bobby Bare and by Schlitz himself had made little impact.

Which actor plays Mike McDermott, a law student and gifted poker player, in the 1998 film Rounders?

Matt Damon began shooting the underground card-room drama just as Good Will Hunting, the film that made his name, reached cinemas in December 1997.

Which comedy star plays Howard Ratner, a New York jeweller and gambling addict, in the 2019 thriller Uncut Gems?

Adam Sandler played so far against type as the debt-ridden Ratner, who must recover an opal to pay what he owes, that several reviewers called it the best performance of his career.

Which Broadway musical follows Nathan Detroit as he hunts for a place to hold his illegal floating craps game?

Guys and Dolls opened in 1950, ran for 1,200 performances and won the Tony for Best Musical; Frank Sinatra took the part of Nathan in the 1955 film, opposite Marlon Brando.

Which 1973 Best Picture winner has Paul Newman and Robert Redford set up a fake betting parlour to con a mobster?

The Sting revives an elaborate, obsolete racket called 'the wire', in which a large crew stages a phoney off-track betting room, and the film also took the Oscars for directing, editing and original screenplay.

Which US president kept a desk sign reading 'The buck stops here', a phrase with roots in frontier poker?

Harry Truman's sign plays on 'passing the buck', said to come from the marker, sometimes a knife with a buckhorn handle, that showed whose turn it was to deal.

Which poker hand, an ace-high run of five cards in one suit, beats every other when no wild cards are used?

Royal flush is simply the name for the highest straight flush, ace down to ten, and only a deck with wild cards can produce a hand that outranks it: five of a kind.

In Texas hold 'em, what name is given to the first three community cards, dealt face up together?

The flop is followed by a single card called the turn and a final one called the river, with a round of betting after each deal.

In poker, what four-letter word describes a change in behaviour that hints at how a player rates their hand?

A tell is most useful to opponents when it is unconscious and reliable, which is why some players fake one to push rivals into a poor decision.

In poker, what is the name of the forced bet that every player puts into the pot before the deal begins?

The ante is paid in equal amounts by everyone at the table, unlike a blind, which is posted by only one or more of the players before the deal.

In blackjack, what is it called when a hand's total passes 21 and loses automatically, whatever the dealer holds?

A bust is the reason an ace is so valuable in blackjack: it counts as either 1 or 11, whichever keeps the hand's total from passing 21.

On a roulette wheel, which colour marks the zero pocket, setting it apart from the red and black numbers?

Green was picked for the zeros in the 1800s to avoid confusion: on the wheels of Paris in the 1790s the single zero had been red and the double zero black.

What name is given to the dots on dice and dominoes, and to the suit symbols on a playing card?

Pips also give numbered playing cards their name: the ten cards from one to ten in each suit are called pip cards, in contrast to the picture cards.

What term describes dice that have been secretly tampered with so that certain numbers come up more often?

Loaded dice are modified to favour some results, quite unlike the precision dice of a casino, which are larger and translucent, with sharp rather than rounded corners.

What do casinos call the free drinks, meals and hotel rooms they hand out to encourage customers to keep gambling?

Comps begin with free alcohol at the lowest level, and what a player receives usually depends on the games chosen, the size of the bets and the hours spent playing.

In which lottery-style casino game do players pick from 80 numbers before 20 are drawn at random?

Keno has a name traced to French and Latin words for a set of five winning numbers, and immigrant railway workers carried the game across the Pacific in the 19th century.

Which instant-win lottery product grew out of the first computer-generated game, made by Scientific Games in 1974?

The scratchcard began with the scientist John Koza and the retail promotions specialist Daniel Bower, whose American company produced that first instant game.

Spain's huge Christmas lottery, drawn each 22 December by singing schoolchildren, is known by which nickname?

El Gordo, 'the big one', strictly means the first prize; pupils of the San Ildefonso school, once reserved for orphans of public servants, draw the numbers and deliver the results in song.

Which Australian coin-tossing game, banned for most of the year, is traditionally played in pubs on Anzac Day?

Two-up was a soldiers' pastime in the First World War, so the authorities looked away from games among returned servicemen on the day of remembrance while it stayed illegal at all other times.

Which game uses a doubling cube, marked from 2 to 64, to raise the stakes in the middle of play?

Backgammon gained the doubling cube in America, the last major change to an old game, and the cube is never rolled: it simply marks the stake.

Which street hustle, also known as 'find the lady', dares a mark to follow one queen as the dealer moves it about?

Three-card monte is a confidence game, not a fair bet: marks are tricked into wagering on the assumption that they can find the 'money card' among those lying face down.

Which gambler and gunfighter stood with Wyatt Earp and his brothers at the gunfight at the OK Corral?

Doc Holliday earned a degree in dentistry at the age of 20, then turned professional card player in the West, where he became a close friend of the lawman Wyatt Earp.

In which American city did the young heir Bernard de Marigny reputedly introduce craps and name a street Rue de Craps?

New Orleans is where, by some accounts, Marigny brought a London dice game home around 1805, and the street he named for it ran through the new subdivision he laid out in the city.

Construction of which giant dam in the 1930s brought a flood of young male workers to the new casinos of Las Vegas?

Hoover Dam was called the Boulder Dam while it was going up, and theatres and gaming halls were built in Las Vegas to entertain the men who worked on it.

Vegas Vic, the giant neon figure that has greeted visitors on Fremont Street since 1951, is dressed as what?

A cowboy made a friendlier welcome than the lettered neon signs of the day, and Vic, built with a waving arm and a recorded greeting, outlived the Pioneer Club casino he advertised.

Which group of entertainers around Frank Sinatra made the Copa Room of the Sands casino famous in the 1960s?

The Rat Pack was born at the Sands in 1960, when Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and friends staged their 'Summit' shows while the caper film Ocean's 11 was being shot at the hotel.

Which New Jersey resort became home in 1978 to the first legal American casino outside Nevada?

Atlantic City got its casinos after New Jersey voters legalised them there in 1976, and Resorts opened two years later as the first of them.

Foxwoods, a six-casino resort owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, stands on a reservation in which state?

Connecticut gave its approval in a deal that hands the state a quarter of the revenue from the resort's gaming machines, a sum that reached almost $200 million a year by 2007.

The 'Black Book' kept by a gaming control board is a list of people who are what?

Barred from every casino is the fate of those listed, generally people with suspected or known ties to organised crime, and a casino that lets one of them in can face sanctions.

Which term for shares in large, dependable companies comes from the highest-value tokens on a poker table?

Blue chip stocks borrow from the simplest poker sets of white, red and blue counters, in which American tradition makes the blues worth the most.

Which 18th-century adventurer, newly escaped from prison, became a trustee and top salesman of a Paris state lottery?

Giacomo Casanova reached Paris in January 1757 after breaking out of the Piombi prison, helped persuade the authorities that a lottery would raise revenue, and proved one of its best ticket sellers.

How did television host Nick Perry rig a 1980 state lottery draw in the scandal nicknamed the 'Triple Six Fix'?

Weighting the balls, all except the fours and sixes, made 666 come up as planned, but unusual betting patterns alerted the authorities and the chief conspirators went to prison.

Which poker legend won the World Series main event two years running holding ten-two, a hand named after him?

Doyle Brunson made a full house as the underdog on the final hand in both 1976 and 1977; a second holding also carries his name, because he said he tried never to play it.

Since 1976, what item of jewellery has been awarded to the winner of every event at the World Series of Poker?

A bracelet cost only about $500 when the tradition began, and championship wins from before 1976 are counted as bracelets too when players' tallies are compared.

Which technique, reading tiny flaws on the backs of cards, did UK courts rule was cheating when Phil Ivey used it?

Edge sorting lets a player judge whether a face-down card is high or low from unintended differences in the printed pattern, and the UK Supreme Court agreed a casino could withhold his winnings.

In the late 1970s, the Eudaemons, a group of physics students, beat roulette with a computer hidden where?

In a shoe was the answer devised by Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard, with data tapped in by the big toe; by 1978 the system worked and the group took it to Las Vegas.

In law, gambling is said to need three elements: a prize, a risk or chance, and which other, the amount wagered?

Consideration is the stake itself, which is why a prize draw that costs nothing to enter generally falls outside the definition: nothing has been wagered.

Which Caribbean nation passed a 1994 law allowing licences for companies that wanted to open online casinos?

Antigua and Barbuda passed the Free Trade & Processing Act, and many of the companies that set up on the islands went on to be traded on the London Stock Exchange.

Which Australian media tycoon lost almost A$28 million in three days at London casinos in 1999?

Kerry Packer was just as capable of the reverse: he once won A$33 million at a single Las Vegas casino, and often took home as much as A$7 million from his annual holidays in Britain.

Which singer's Poker Face, titled after a card player's blank expression, was the best-selling single of 2009?

Lady Gaga sold more than 9.8 million copies of the song that year alone and became the first new act since Christina Aguilera to send her first two charting singles to the top of the Billboard Hot 100.