The Vegas Guy: The Ghosts of Faro

LAS VEGAS, Dec. 10 (UPI) -- In Virginia City, Nev., at the old Delta Saloon, they have a faded green-felt layout for the old game of faro, and it's known as "the suicide table." Three 19th-century gamblers committed suicide after losing everything at that table, but here's the twist on the story:

The suicides were all casino owners. They were operating the faro game, not playing it.

Faro is no longer played in Nevada or anywhere else. The last faro turn was at the Ramada Casino in Reno, Nev., and it closed in 1985. That means the game had a run of about 170 years in the United States, but there's some evidence that it was played as early as the 15th century in Italy.

It vanished for a simple reason. It had the most favorable odds for players of any game of chance in a casino. Once the casinos went corporate, there was no executive willing to risk his neck on a game that sometimes -- gasp! -- developed in such a way as to give an odds advantage to the player. Baccarat and craps are scary enough -- Las Vegas casinos sometimes list "table luck" as a loss item in their Wall Street reports -- but faro was the kind of game that could ... well ... make you want to commit suicide.

The reason we're revisiting faro is that there was a burst of interest after my column last week on the decline of table games and why people can't be lured away from the blackjack tables anymore. One reason is that many of the card games allowed by law simply aren't dealt by the casinos, faro being the most famous example.

If you had gone to any American gambling town around the time of the Civil War -- and almost EVERY town was a gambling town at that time -- the most popular game by far would have been faro. In some casinos it was the only game. It had been introduced to America by the French natives of New Orleans shortly after 1800, but it didn't spread from there until the 1820s, when the riverboats carried it up the Mississippi and the Ohio.

Like most games of that era, it was rarely played honestly -- yet another reason it was easier to justify economically in the 19th century. Today it's mostly remembered, when it's remembered at all, for its colorful slang.

The word "faro" itself came from the court of Louis XIV, where one of the honor cards in a standard playing deck bore the face of an Egyptian pharaoh. The first card out of the dealer's box was called the "soda." The last card was the "hock." "Coppering the bet" meant betting on a card to lose -- the equivalent of playing the "don't pass" line in craps. (The term came from the practice of placing a penny on top of a stack of chips to indicate you wanted the number to lose.) "Whipsawed," a gambling term still used today, meant losing two bets on the same turn. And most famous of all was "bucking the tiger," the term for hitting the faro tables, because all faro establishments advertised on the street with a sign displaying a tiger. (No words necessary.)

OK, let's try to recreate what a faro session was like in its heyday -- say, at the old Palace Club in Reno, which was one of the last casinos to heavily invest in it.

It was played at a usually noisy table that was about half again as large as a standard blackjack setup. The players stood around the edges, like at a craps layout, and any number could play, though it started to get crowded if more than 10 were trying to muscle in at the same time. It took three casino employees to run the game -- a dealer, a "casekeeper" (more on him later) and a "lookout," who watched the bets and ruled on disputes.

The basic layout had 13 square boxes painted on the felt, with pictures of a standard playing card, Ace through King, in each box. (Spades were used for the pictures, but the suit of the cards has no bearing on the game.) A single 52-card deck was dealt from a special box, similar to a blackjack shoe, except that it was upside down. A spring inside the box pushed the deck toward the top. The cards were revealed one at a time, face up. The first card, or soda, was a dead card because it could be seen as soon as the cards were placed in the box.

Everyone placed bets directly on the 13 squares. You bet a number either to win or lose. Then the dealer would draw two cards. The first card was placed beside the box and was declared the losing card. The second card was left exposed in the box and declared the winner. So if the two cards were, say, a "two" and a Jack, then all bets on the "two" to lose would be paid, and all bets on the Jack to win would be paid. Both bets paid even money. All other bets would be wiped off the table.

If you're thinking the game is pure chance, you're almost right. The only element of strategy involved the aforementioned casekeeper. The case he kept was similar to the device at a roulette table that shows the last 10 numbers called. It was a scoreboard showing the 13 cards, and each time one of the numbers was drawn, the casekeeper would move an abacus bead across a string and place it in front of that number. A bead to the left meant the card had been drawn a winner. To the right meant a loser. When the number had been called three times, he called "the cases," which meant only one card remained in the deck.

After that card was drawn, the four beads would be snapped together, indicating that the number was dead. If someone mistakenly bet on the number after it had been closed out, the first gambler to notice the mistake was allowed to pick up the money and keep it. (Another practice that would create havoc in a modern casino. Fistfight City!)

The farther you get into the deck, the more interesting the game becomes. With fewer and fewer numbers to bet on, the bets tend to get larger. The final bet, when there are three cards remaining in the deck, is "calling the turn." What you do is predict the order of those three cards: the loser, followed by the winner, followed by the "hock" card, which is not used. If you hit this bet, it pays four to one -- unless two of the last cards are identical, in which case it pays two to one. (This situation is called "the cat-hop.") In the unlikely event that all three remaining cards have the same value, you bet on the colors of the cards to be drawn.

Oddly enough, that final bet was the most popular moment in the game, though it's the one that has the best odds for the banker. The actual odds on it are five to one, but it only pays at four to one, giving the casino a 16 2/3-percent advantage. The only other time the casino has an advantage is on a push -- when two identical cards are drawn on a turn. The house takes back half the bet in that case, for a 2 percent edge.

The ideal time to bet, of course, is after three cards of any card value have already been played. The house has absolutely no advantage at that point, and so smart players could pretty much go heads up with the casino if they hung around the game until the table turned in their favor. In other words, in the tradition of great carnie games, it LOOKED like something that could be beat.

That's why, if you search through the list of illustrious gamblers of the Wild West era, you'll find that they may have been remembered for their poker, but they got rich off their faro. They didn't play the game, though -- they banked the game. Doc Holliday, among others, was an itinerant faro dealer, toting the table apparatus with him wherever he traveled.

And therein lies the problem -- the dealer's box. I've never even played the game, and I can think of about 20 ways to rig that box. You wait till the game has heavy betting on the cases, and then you make sure the wrong card comes up. In fact, we know now from collectors of gambling memorabilia that one of the most common cheating methods involved sanding and trimming the cards, so that they could be manipulated inside the box merely by flipping a hidden switch that altered slightly the aperture out of which the cards emerged.

The amazing thing is that the game remained so popular long AFTER it became known as a cheater's paradise. Partly it's the simple psychology of communal betting. You get the same atmosphere at a craps table, where people throwing money down on a table, sometimes betting on the same numbers together, can produce a sort of temporary group madness. It's also a FAST game. You don't really have time to grieve over your losses. And as time went on, the casinos added a few proposition bets to the table as well -- you could bet odd/even, for example, or you could bet that the next card would be higher or lower than a certain number. The cumulative effect was to make it a very lively, very noisy, very social game. The blackjack table is a snoozefest by comparison.

Evidence of just how popular faro became can be seen in the various ethnic versions of it. On New York's Lower East Side, they played "Stuss," or Jewish Faro. In Italy, they played -- and still play -- ziginette. The slaves and descendants of slaves played a game that was so simple it could be set up on any sidewalk, and it was called "skin." Hispanics played Spanish Monte. Asians played Chinese Fan-Tan.

The most primitive of all versions of faro, which occasionally makes a comeback in the casinos, is a sucker game called Red Dog. It was played by World War II soldiers and, alas, by newspapermen.

The most complicated faro game I ever saw is "Rouge et Noir," also called "Trente et Quarante," which is played at the Casino Monte-Carlo in Monaco. The game uses a special table with complicated diagrams on it, 312 cards in a six-deck shuffle, and requires five croupiers to keep track of the play. I watched it for an hour and I still have no idea how it works.

Faro is, at any rate, commonly considered the oldest banking game in the world, but I think it will be remembered more for the men who ruined it than for the men who actually played it. Foremost among them was probably Elijah Skaggs, an uneducated backwoods boy who learned to play cards in the Kentucky hill country and one day decided to reinvent himself. After learning every cheating method available to him -- bottom-dealing, false-cutting, trimming, marking, and all the rest -- he bought a black

frock coat, a stovepipe hat, a starched white shirt and a choker, and he showed up in Nashville, lean and lanky, looking very serious and Lincolnesque. It was there that he discovered faro in the early 1820s, and he studied it for hours and hours.

He paid especially close attention when he came across a game he could tell was rigged. He would study the dealer until he learned his tricks -- or, if that didn't work, he would find the dealer later and offer to pay him several thousand dollars to teach him the trick. Eventually he knew so many cheating methods that he made a small fortune dealing faro on steamboats and in Mississippi river towns.

By 1830, he was ready to expand. He recruited young men of loose morals wherever he could find them. If they were handsome and could fill out a good suit of clothes, all the better. One by one he trained them in how to cheat faro gamblers, and then sent them on the road in two-man teams, paying them 25 percent of the profit. By 1850 "Skaggs patent dealers" was a universal term for card-game cheaters. But Skaggs was almost finished anyway.

In 1859 he retired, a millionaire many times over, and used his fortune to buy a southern plantation. Alas, the only time he used his money for something other than gambling turned out to be the biggest gamble of all. It was the wrong business to be in, and the wrong part of the country. The Civil War wiped him out, not least because he'd invested $3 million in Confederate bonds.

He died in 1870, a drunkard, in Texas. (Where else?)

Apparently he hadn't heard about the suicide table.

E-mail Joe Bob Briggs, "The Vegas Guy," at [email protected] or visit Joe Bob's Web site at www.joebobbriggs.com. Snail-mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas, 75221.