Question of the Day - 17 October 2021

Thanks for asking. Faro is a good gambling story.

Its history, as is true of most gambling games, isn't written in stone. Most accounts peg faro as originating in France in the early 1700s, having evolved from an English card game called basset. Faro is believed to be a shortened version of "Pharoah," the name of an old French design for playing cards. Faro's nickname was "bucking the tiger," which supposedly came from the picture of a Bengal tiger on the back of faro playing cards. A picture of a tiger appearing on a shingle hung outside a saloon or storefront indicated a faro game inside. A back street with a number of tiger signs was known as Tiger Alley.

Faro was first introduced to the colonies through the port of New Orleans in the 1700s. By the turn of the 19th century, faro was the most popular card game in the country and remained so for more than 100 years.

The banker was sometimes a house dealer, but more often he was a freelance gambler who carried his "faro bank" with him from game to game and town to town, setting up in an alley, on a riverboat, or in a saloon and taking on all comers. Colored chips were used, similar to today's wheel chips at roulette, to tell the difference among players.

It's a simple guessing game about which card will come off the top of a 52-card deck. The banker draws two cards, the "losing" card first and the "winning" card second. A winning bet pays even money.

The layout contains 13 cards, ranks only; the suits of the cards are irrelevant.

The cards in the dealer's "faro box" are face up. The banker burns the first card off the top of the deck. This reveals the next card, which is a losing card -- let's say a 7. The banker collects any bets on the 7 card on the layout and leaves the rest of the bets alone. The banker then discards the losing card, revealing the winning card and paying off winning bets on the layout. Bets on the rest of the cards on the layout are a push; they stay up or are taken down as the players see fit.

A player can bet on a single card rank by "backing" or "flatting" his bet -- in other words, placing it on the one card rank of his choice. Players can also "split" their bets among multiple ranks -- two-way, three-way, and four-way. The bet itself isn't actually split; players are paid even money if any of their cards wins, but they lose the bet if any of their cards loses first.

Because players can track which cards come and go, faro gets more exciting the deeper into the deck the banker deals. On the last "turn" (counting the burn card, then 24 hands), three cards remain in the deck. The turn bet predicts the last three cards in order and it pays 4-1. Coppering, dead card, corner, and other esoteric bets are available at faro.

Cheating was commonplace and a variety of sleight-of-hand mechanics stacked decks and gaffed faro equipment to separate the suckers from their money. Ultimately, it's believed that an honest faro bank in the U.S. was as hard to find as an honest politician.

Cheating at faro, and the distrust and violence that surrounded the game, helped usher in its demise and makes any renaissance unlikely. The public's distaste for legal gambling in general also led to faro's fall from grace. At the turn of the 20th century, thousands of faro banks peppered the west, but the "progressive" era of the early 1900s, which included Prohibition, tough divorce laws, and other moral strictures, prompted the delegalization of gambling. By 1931, the only legal gambling games, including faro, were found in Nevada.

The casinos didn't care for faro. In the first place, the game had a bad reputation from all the cheating and violence. Secondly, the house advantage was negligible (though the math of the house advantage wasn't as fully understood in those days as it is today). Third, faro's popularity waned as blackjack's and craps' waxed.

The last faro bank in Las Vegas, at Binion's, closed in 1955, primarily due to lack of interest. The last game in Nevada, little more than a historical novelty dealt at the Ramada Inn in Reno, disappeared in the 1980s.