Question of the Day - 13 October 2022

In case you missed the "chicken dinner" answer, here's the link. Read the question for more jargon you might hear at a crap table, especially from the stickman calling the rolls. 

As for other gambling phrases, there are so many of them that it would require a book to list and trace them all, so here we'll just hit the highlights.

Since we're on the subject of craps, the term "crapshoot," meaning a matter that's risky or uncertain, originated in the mid-20th century. It started as a compound adjective, but along the way merged into one word. The first mention we found of it was in an article on boiler rooms in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1956: “The aim has been to distinguish between sound investment objectives and ‘the old crap-shooting game of speculation.’”

And "no dice," of course, means that something has approximately a zero chance of succeeding. Again, the term dates back to the back-alley crap games in 1920s and after; since gambling was illegal everywhere, gamblers shooting craps had to hide the dice, even to the extent of swallowing them, if they were questioned by law enforcers. No evidence, no infraction. 

Another gambling phrase we've written about is "hit the jackpot." The concept of a jackpot was first articulated around 1879, when a gambler explained to a court in Indiana the workings of the betting pool in a version of draw poker that required a pair of jacks or better to "open the pot" and start the betting. "The money up is called the pot," explained the gambler, "and the man who holds jacks can require the others to bet him or to drop him out." If no one had a pair of jacks or better, the players added to the ante and the cards were reshuffled and redealt, resulting in an increasingly bigger pot to play for. Somewhere down the line, this pot became known as a "jacks pot," which in turn morphed into the single word "jackpot" and became a generic term for a big prize pool, even though it no longer has any relationship with a jack.

"Bet the farm” is one we've always liked, meaning risking everything. Its etymology is from the early 20th century, when seriously hard-core gamblers in rural American who'd lost all their cash resorted to wagering their assets, such as real estate; they also used it to pay off gambling debts. 

"Down to the wire,” referring to a competition that's too close to call, originated in the early 1700s in the northeastern American colonies (Rhode Island, in particular), the center of horseracing at the time. On the shorter race courses, it was common to stretch a wire across the finish line, so officials could tell which horse finished first. 

“Quit while you're ahead" came from Baltasar Gracián, a Spanish Jesuit monk and philosopher who lived in the early 1600s. Interestingly, he wasn't referring to gambling. Instead, he was warning Spanish explorers that they were taking excessive risks in their insatiable appetites to discover and conquer new territories around the world. He was encouraging them to settle for what they already had, rather than pursuing their potentially fatal quests for more. 

"Luck of the draw,” as far as we can tell, originated in the 1940s when, in card games, the playing cards were drawn from a randomly shuffled stack, not unlike today. 

Finally, the phrase "bucking the tiger" was originally associated with the game of faro as far back as the mid-19th century. Faro was known as "the tiger," we understand, due to the size of the "bite" it took out of bankrolls. And no wonder; faro, like poker, was a game that was monopolized by cheaters and sleight-of-hand artists of all sizes and, you should pardon the pun, stripes. A sign outside a saloon or back-alley casino with a tiger painted on it meant that faro was played within. Along the way, bucking the tiger came to mean an attempt to win against insurmountable or even impossible odds.