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This gambling trivia quiz covers the whole history of betting in 48 free questions with answers: Bronze Age dice and Tang-dynasty playing cards, the Ridotto in Venice, Pascal's accidental roulette wheel, Bugsy Siegel and the Flamingo, the Strip that isn't in Las Vegas, Macau overtaking Vegas, Monte Carlo and the night black came up 26 times, the Liberty Bell slot machine, keno's terrible odds, the oldest lottery, the biggest jackpot, card counting and the MIT team, Archie Karas's run, the Kentucky Derby, and the great gambling films. It starts with questions anyone who has walked past a casino can answer and works up to ones for people who know their house edges. It is written for adults and stays factual and neutral about a subject that ruins as many people as it thrills. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered. Play the full set for a shareable score.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On a standard die, the numbers on opposite faces always add up to what?
Seven
Seven: a standard die pairs 1 with 6, 2 with 5 and 3 with 4, so every pair of opposite faces totals seven.
Q 02The oldest known dice, from around 2800 to 2500 BC, were found at the Burnt City in which modern country?
Iran
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.
Q 03Playing cards were invented in which country, around the 9th century?
China
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.
Q 04The joker was added to the deck in the United States around 1860 as a trump card for which game?
Euchre
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.
Q 05The Ridotto, generally considered the first casino, opened in 1638 in which city?
Venice
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.
Q 06The word "roulette" is French for what?
Little wheel
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.
Q 07The single-zero roulette wheel was introduced in 1843 by the Blanc brothers in which German spa town?
Bad Homburg
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.
Q 08What is the house edge on a double-zero American roulette wheel?
5.26%
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.
Q 09What happened when Ashley Revell bet his entire $135,300 on a single roulette spin in 2004?
He won on red
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.
Q 10In 1913 at Monte Carlo, black came up how many times in a row as gamblers lost fortunes on red?
26
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.
Q 11The gambler's fallacy holds that a random outcome that has happened less often than expected is now what?
More likely
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.
Q 12Who is famously forbidden from entering the gaming rooms of the Monte Carlo Casino?
Citizens of Monaco
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.
Q 13Joseph Jagger "broke the bank at Monte Carlo" in 1873 by exploiting what?
Q 21In which year did Nevada legalise casino gambling?
1931
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.
Q 22Which two US states ban every form of gambling, including lotteries?
Utah and Hawaii
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.
Q 23The 2018 Supreme Court case that opened the door to legal US sports betting was Murphy v. whom?
NCAA
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.
A biased roulette wheel
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.
Q 14Charles Fey's Liberty Bell, built in San Francisco around 1895, was an early version of what?
The slot machine
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.
Q 15Why did lemons, cherries and plums end up as symbols on early one-armed bandits?
Machines dispensed fruit-flavoured gum
The gum attachment got around anti-gambling laws and gave Britain the term "fruit machine".
Q 16Roughly what share of an average US casino's income comes from slot machines?
About 70%
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.
Q 17The Las Vegas Strip mostly lies outside the city of Las Vegas, in which unincorporated town?
Paradise
The 4.2-mile stretch technically sits in Paradise and Winchester in Clark County.
Q 18Which resort was the first full-service casino hotel on what became the Strip, opening in April 1941?
El Rancho Vegas
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.
Q 19Which mobster financed the Flamingo, which opened in December 1946?
Bugsy Siegel
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.
Q 20The Mirage's 1989 opening is credited with starting the mega-resort era. What attraction sat outside it?
A volcano
The Bellagio's fountains followed in 1998, and the MGM Grand, one of the world's largest hotels, opened in 1993.
Q 24Which gambling hub overtook the Las Vegas Strip in gaming revenue in the mid-2000s?
Macau
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.
Q 25Which game produced about 91 percent of Macau's casino income in 2014?
Baccarat
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.
Q 26Which businessman held the exclusive gambling concession in Macau from 1962 until 2001?
Stanley Ho
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.
Q 27Blackjack descends from a Spanish game first described by which author, in 1601-02?
Miguel de Cervantes
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.
Q 28What is the traditional payout for a natural blackjack?
3 to 2
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.
Q 29The MIT Blackjack Team's exploits inspired the 2008 film 21 and which Ben Mezrich book?
Bringing Down the House
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.
Q 30The 1988 film Rain Man is blamed for spreading which misconception about US casinos?
That card counting is illegal
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.