Question of the Day - 24 February 2018

This is an easy one.

In a nutshell, you don’t see faro at any casinos; faro was the most popular casino gambling game for more than 50 years.

You also don’t see chuck-a-luck, sic bo, five-card stud, Sigma Derby, trente et quarante, two-up, panguingue, loo, seven-up, monte, banco, euchre, Let It Ride, and many other games of chance that, according to Herbert Asbury in his seminal Sucker’s Progress, An Informal History of Gambling in America (1938), “have enjoyed more or less lengthy periods of popularity in various sections of the U.S. and have all contributed to the development of gambling in America.”

Games come and go; they achieve a degree of popularity, then fall out of favor. It’s just evolution, the natural ebb and flow of trends and fads and the latest in-things.

As for Caribbean Stud, it was introduced to casinoland in 1988, one of the original three (along with Let It Ride and Three Card Poker) proprietary table games, meaning that they were among the earliest of the new inventor- and company-designed patented table games supplied to the casinos starting around that time. Prior to that, casinos and card rooms offered only the traditional public-domain table games of blackjack, craps, baccarat, and roulette.

Each of those three new games achieved more than 1,000 "installs" (the table-game-design term for number of games in casinos nationwide), so they hit the casino jackpot from the custodial side of the pit. During the heydays of these games, each install charged somewhere around $1,000 a month per rental, meaning these games earned $1,000,000 a month in revenue — and for quite a number of years. In fact, these games put ShuffleMaster on the map 25 years ago in a big big way.

A lot of the success of these games was due simply to pioneering a trend, not much different from Ray Kroc trailblazing a fairly decent fast-food hamburger, which is nothing special today. Neither Caribbean Stud nor Let It Ride is particularly compelling now; they were simply appropriate for their time. Only Three Card Poker has maintained its prominence on a permanent level and is now a casino staple.