Appendix A

Description of the Games
Used in This Book

In almost every one of the games described there are variations and complex betting rules. Descriptions and rules are brief for the sake of simplicity.

atep: An Egyptian game of guessing the number of upheld fingers.

baccarat: A European card game dating to the fifteenth century similar to basset and faro. No skill or strategy is involved. There are several modern variations of the game. Players bet on the hands they are dealt. High score wins, but scoring has a twist. The score is the remainder after dividing the sum of the face values of the cards by 10.

backgammon: This is one of the oldest board games. Two players move pieces around a board according to rolls of dice. The objective is to remove one’s checkers from the board before one’s opponent can. A player wins by removing all of his pieces from the board. This game does require skill, which is in strategy.

basset: A card game involving a banker and players who win according to the values of the cards dealt. No skill or strategy is involved.

bingo (the card game): Each player is dealt two hands of cards face down. The value of each hand is the sum of the values of each card, where the cards have blackjack values. On a display board, cards are revealed with chances to bet. Those cards displayed are eliminated. The pot is split between the players with the highest and lowest point totals, unless a player loses every card, in which case he wins the entire pot.

blackjack: Sometimes called 21. This card game is of unknown origin but surely dates from before the seventeenth century, as Cervantes writes about it in one of his stories. The aim of the game is to bet that your hand will total closer to, but not greater than, 21 than the dealer’s hand. All picture cards count as 10 and an ace can count as either 1 or 11 at the player’s choice.

brag: A uniquely British variant of poker.

Brazil Slingo: A slot machine game in which players are given three spins to match numbers on a playing board.

Caribbean stud: This is a variant of standard poker, where the game is played against the house rather than against other players. No bluffing is possible.

chuck-a-luck: Played with three dice in a wire-frame birdcage. Bets are made. The dealer rotates the cage and calls the outcome.

craps: This is a dice game of several variations, depending on whether it is played on or off the street. It is a simplified American derivative of hazard. Players take turns rolling two dice. The player rolling the dice is called the shooter. Other players make bets on the shooter’s rolls. In essence the game is played like this: First there is the “come-out roll.” If the come-out roll is 7 or 11, those players betting on the shooter wins. If the come-out roll is 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, or 10 that number becomes the point. The shooter continues to roll until either the point is made or a 7 is rolled. If a 7 is rolled, the players betting on the shooter lose.

draw poker: A poker game where players are dealt a complete hand before the first betting round. The objective is to develop the hand by drawing new cards to replace discarded ones.

E. O. (evens and odds): Two players (one designated as odds, the other evens) each hold out a fisted hand, and on the count of three, hold out either one or two fingers. If the sum of fingers shown by both players is an even number evens wins, otherwise odds wins.

euchre: A card game most commonly played with four people in two partnerships with a deck of 24 standard playing cards, which has been very popular in the United States since the nineteenth century. A player names a specific hand, betting that his or her partner will be dealt that hand.

faro: A card game, very popular in eighteenth-century France and England, and in the nineteenth-century American West. It was played with an entire deck and any number of players against a banker. A card of each of the complete 13 face values was placed face up on a table. Each player lays his or her stake on one of the 13 face values on the layout. The dealer then deals two cards per round alternately to two stacks, the first called the losing stack and the second the winning stack. If the player staked on the card value dealt to the winning stack bet and that value is not dealt to the losing stack, he or she wins.

fly loo: Players sit around a table, each with a sugar cube. A fly is released. A player stakes his or her bet (usually a considerable sum) that the fly will perch on his or her cube.

gin rummy: A card game in which each of two people play with a hand of seven, nine, or eleven cards. A dealer deals one card face up next to the remaining deck. The first player to go takes a card from the deck or the up-facing card. At each turn a player may take one card from either the top of the face-up pile or the top of the deck. If you draw from the deck, you add it to your hand without showing it and discard a card from your hand to the turned-up pile. The object of the game is to collect a hand where most or all of the cards can be combined into sets and runs and the point value of the remaining unmatched cards is low.

grand hazard: Similar to chuck-a-luck. Players place their bets on the outcome of the three dice that are rolled by the house.

hazard: An ancient English game played with a pair of dice originating from the time of the crusades in the twelfth century. Immensely popular in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

high/low: Another variant of poker in which the high hand wins half the pot and the low hand wins the other half.

immies: A marble game in which players shoot marbles toward a cardboard box with holes cut out for winning targets.

keno: Ping pong–like balls marked 1 through 80 are blown around in a glass chamber. A “caller” presses a lever opening a tube, where the balls lift one at a time into a “V” shaped tube. The caller records each of 20 balls drawn and a computer tabulates all wagers based on the numbers drawn.

loo: A popular card game played mostly in England from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Three or five cards are dealt; highest score wins. Players choose to either stay in or drop out. Staying in takes a proportionate share of the pot for each hand they win and pays in an amount equal to the whole pot if they drop out.

mayores: A simple dice game played with three dice—highest roll wins.

monte: This simple game is usually played with just three cards. A dealer places three cards face down on a table, shows one card (the target), and then rearranges them quickly to confuse the player. If the player identifies which card is the target he or she wins the bet. Generally, this is a con game, in which the dealer uses quick sleight of hand.

numbers: An illegal lottery wherein the player bets through a bookie on three or four digits to match those that will be displayed in a newspaper the following day. The winning number is generally the last three numbers in the published daily volume of the New York Stock Exchange.

piquet: A poker-like card game played with a 52-card deck with all the 2–6 value cards removed. The player scoring the most points wins.

rouge et noir: See trente-et-quarante.

stud poker: A poker game where players receive a mix of face-down and face-up cards dealt in multiple betting rounds.

tau: An ancient Egyptian board game with an objective similar to that of backgammon.

Texas hold’em: A poker game where the objective is not winning every hand but deciding when and how much to bet, raise, call, or fold. The strategy is to maximize long term winnings by maximizing expected value on each round.

three-card poker: A fast-moving poker game using only three cards. After seeing the cards dealt, the player can fold and lose the ante bet or raise by placing a bet of equal money. If he chooses to continue, there are three possibilities. The first is that the dealer may not have the required hand of a queen high or higher, in which case the ante is paid out as even money. If the dealer does have a queen high or higher, the player wins if his hand is of higher value than the dealer’s, and gets paid out even money on both his ante and play bets. If the dealer’s hand is of higher value, the dealer takes the ante and play bets.

trente-et-quarante (also called rouge et noir): Six packs of 52 cards each are used. In this game, a croupier deals out two separate rows of cards (red and black), sequentially. Players bet on either row (with cards counted at face value and face cards counted as 10). When the rows total greater than 30, the hand is settled and whichever row comes closest to 31 wins.

video poker: Players place bets by inserting either money or a bar-coded paper ticket into the machine. A virtual hand is displayed. The player may then press a “Deal” button to draw cards. There are buttons to keep or discard one or more of the cards in exchange for new cards from a virtual deck. After the draw, the machine evaluates the hand and offers a payout if the hand matches one of the hands determined by the machine.

whist: Four players in two fixed partnerships play from a 52-card deck. The cards in each suit are ranked highest to lowest. Each player is dealt 13 cards ranking highest to lowest, in reverse of normal poker. The players must play the same suit as the card that was just played. If a trump suit card is played, then the highest trump (the card determined by the dealer’s last card) wins. However, if no trump card is played, then the high card of the suit wins.