Question of the Day - 20 November 2022

[Editor's Note: Once every few years, we receive a question about solitaire being played in Las Vegas casinos. This time, in our ongoing research, we were lucky enough to find Jeroen Romme, a writer from Malta, who spent the long months of the coronavirus lockdown by researching the history of solitaire from a gambling perspective. His work revealed many new facts about the history of solitaire, including as a casino-gambling game. Here's what he told us.]

Solitaire became very popular at the end of the 19th century. Originally, it wasn't a gambling game and many new versions of the single-player card game were invented. Due to its worldwide renown, many game developers over the years tried to adjust the rules in order that players could gamble on it and two of them were successfully adapted to the winning and losing of money.

The first one was called, aptly enough, "Gambling House Solitaire," the correct name of the game; it's now better known as "Canfield Solitaire" (with slightly different rules), named after Richard Canfield, a prominent businessman and art collector in the late 1800s and early 1900s who became known as the "Prince of Gamblers" and was one of the earliest developers of what has become the modern American resort-casino (in Saratoga, New York). Gambling House Solitaire was played around the turn of the 20th century in illegal gambling houses, mostly in New York and Chicago. 

Around the same time during the Klondike gold rush, the sourdough prospectors and miners adjusted another game, called “Small Triangle Patience.” The game was offered by gamblers in saloons in the Yukon Territory in Canada and Alaska and was renamed “Seven-Card Klondike.” 

The game's popularity spread across the "lower 48" when the miners returned home or relocated after the gold rush. A number of men operating gambling houses in the Yukon moved from there to Nevada. One notable example was Tex Rickard, whose Northern hotel-casinos spread from the Klondike to Alaska, then to Goldfield, Ely, and Reno, Nevada. (Rickard later founded the New York Rangers and built the third version of Madison Square Garden.) That Seven-Card Klondike ended up in the young railroad town of Las Vegas is likely, though no hard evidence has been found.  

Initially, the player shuffled the cards himself. The dealer cut the cards, then the player dealt the cards on the table in the starting setup. The player bet a certain sum per card, but started to win only If he succeeded in playing more than 26 cards. Then he was paid $5 for each additional card. Eventually, the 26-card rule was abolished, in order to increase the payout percentage and make the game more attractive to players.

Neither Gambling House nor Seven-Card Klondike solitaire was ever a long-term popular gambling game. As played in the saloons and gambling houses, the ratio of dealer to player was 1 to 1, obviously way too labor intensive to be profitable. Considering that during the time it takes to deal one hand of solitaire to one player, a casino could deal multiple hands to six blackjack players, it's easy to see why the game didn't catch on with American operators.

From the player's side, there was too much room for cheating. The gambling houses cheated the players in various ways, since unlike poker and craps at the time, they were playing against the house, not other players. 

For some reason, around the late 1960s and 1970s, Klondike Solitaire gained popularity again as a gambling game. And just like the original “Triangle Patience” was renamed "Klondike" to highlight the gambling character of the game, it was renamed again, "Las Vegas Solitaire." 

Thank you, Jeroen. You can read up on the history of Las Vegas Solitaire as a gambling game, plus learn about the rules, odds, and strategy and play a free online version, at vegassolitaire.com.