The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader: Communities, Cultures and Play 9781501347252, 9781501347283, 9781501347276

Citation preview

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

PLAY BEYOND THE COMPUTER SERIES EDITOR: MARK R. JOHNSON Volume 1

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader Communities, Cultures and Play Edited by Mark R. Johnson

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Volume Editor’s Part of the Work © Mark R. Johnson, 2022 Each chapter © of Contributors For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. 347 and 418 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4725-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4727-6 eBook: 978-1-5013-4726-9 Series: Play Beyond the Computer Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

List of Illustrations  ix List of Contributors  xi

1 Why study games and money?  Mark R. Johnson 1

Part I  Foundations 17 2 Gambling games, money and late capitalism  James F. Cosgrave 19 3 To skill, perchance to win: How chance and skill have co-existed in gambling history  David G. Schwartz 39

Part II  Poker 57 4 ‘An hour’s commercial for the Horseshoe’: Popular memory, sports television and the World Series of Poker  Alexander Kupfer 59 5 Be a Pal: Women’s intrusions into men’s poker play on TV sitcoms  Danielle Seid 79

vi

Contents

6 Poker fiction: Romance, possible worlds and magic circles  Paul Wake 98

Part III  Money and class 119 7 Cards, banking games and the normalization of finance  Joyce Goggin 121 8 ‘Pitch and toss’: Casinos of hope and despair in working-class Britain  Graham Taylor 140 9 Selves in play: Pop-up casinos and discontinuous persons in Greece  Thomas Malaby 160 10 Honourable risks and dishonourable certainties: Naiveté and cynicism at play over the card table in Imperial Russia  Ian Helfant 177

Part IV  Casino cities 197 11 Monte Carlo’s wheel of fortune: The social impact of risk, reward and roulette on visitors to Monaco’s legendary casino, 1863–1914  Robert W. Miller 199

Contents

12 Gambling in the kitchen: Monte Carlo from the nineteenth to the midtwentieth century  Paul Franke 221 13 What statistics don’t say: Game innovation in Macau’s casinos since 2002  Xavier Paulès 240 14 Playing with heritage: Gambling and Venice’s tradition  Marta Soligo 259

Part V  Spaces and times 279 15 Locating Native American gambling traditions in contemporary Indian casino gaming  Laurie Arnold 281 16 On the infrastructure of gaming: The case of pachinko  Keiji Amano and Geoffrey Rockwell 294 17 An enchanting witchcraft: Masculinity, melancholy and the pathology of gaming in early modern London  Celeste Chamberland 314 18 Everyday casinos: The expanding gambling landscape in America’s neighbourhoods  Rex J. Rowley 330

vii

viii

Contents

19 The market in the conclave: Gambling on election outcomes in Renaissance Italy  John M. Hunt 351 20 Eighteenth-century lotteries  Mathias Fuchs 374

Part VI  Cinema, art, literature and culture 395 21 ‘Whiskey, women, and loaded dice’: The images and places of gambling in popular music  Matias Karekallas 397 22 From parasite to anti-hero: Shifting depictions of the card sharp  James Banks 423 23 Gambling ladies: The games that Barbara Stanwyck plays  Catherine Russell 442

Part VII  Insiders 463 24 The poker economy: The skill gap problem and the lifecycle of PvP games  Jeffrey Hwang 465 Index  471

Illustrations

Figures 5.1 8.1 11.1 13.1 13.2 13.3 15.1 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 18.1 18.2 18.3 18.4 18.5

19.1 20.1

Lucy crashes Ricky’s poker game in an attempt to bond with him 87 Working-class men playing pitch and toss in Nottingham, 1926 147 Alphonse Mucha, Monaco Monte Carlo, 1897 208 The Galaxy Macau 244 Slot machines in Macau 245 Changes in slot machine revenue and slot machine revenue percentages 248 Colville men’s stick game during the Ceremony of Tears, 15 June 1940, Kettle Falls, Washington 285 ‘Masamura Gauge All 15’ 296 ‘CR Pachinko Fuyu no Sonata 2’ 297 ‘Hyper Sea Story in Carib’ 302 Pictures of ura-mawari and ball cleaning baskets 304 Gambling venues in America 334 Hollywood Casino (with parking garage) in Aurora, Illinois 338 Jumer’s Hotel and Casino at the suburban edge of Rock Island, Illinois 339 Locations of establishments licensed to offer video gaming in Illinois 342 (a) Strip mall location of slot parlour in Normal, Illinois, in January 2018. (b) Slot parlour in former service station in Cairo, Illinois, in June 2014 344 Map of the Banchi region of Rome 356 The game: rich in the morning and a beggar at night. Copperplate engraving, seventeenth century 377

x

Illustrations

20.2 Public announcement of a state lottery in Fleet Street/London 382 20.3 Contemporary advertisement for a state lottery drawing in BadenWürtemberg/Germany 383 20.4 Detail from another advertisement in Hessen/Germany 383 20.5 Mechanical gaming table, c. 1780–83 by David Roentgen, produced in Neuwied/ Germany 384 20.6 Lotto in the streets of Berlin 386 23.1 Barbara Stanwyck in California 448 23.2 Barbara Stanwyck in Gambling Lady 450 23.3 Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve 452 23.4 Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Gambles 457

Tables 13.1 Percentage of Casino Profits from the Four Main Types of Games in 2005 and 2018 245 13.2 Percentage of Casino Gross Revenue from Live Multi Game (2010–18) 255 24.1 PartyGaming: New Player Attrition Rates (2005–10) 467 24.2 Nevada Statewide Poker (1992–2018) 468

Contributors

Mark R. Johnson is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on Twitch.tv and live streaming, esports, gamification and gamblification, game production and consumption, game design, and procedural content generation in games. His first book, The Unpredictability of Gameplay, was recently published by Bloomsbury, and offers a Deleuzean examination of randomness, chance and luck in both digital and analogue games. Beyond academia he is also an independent game developer and a regular games blogger and podcaster. James F. Cosgrave is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Trent University, Canada, and teaches at the Durham campus in Oshawa, Ontario. He teaches sociological theory, and his research areas include the sociology of gambling, the state’s role in the development of gambling markets, the production and mass-mediation of Canadian national and cultural identity and the sociology of humour. Publications include The Sociology of Risk and Gambling Reader (Routledge, 2006), Casino State: Legalized Gambling in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2009) and Desiring Canada: CBC Contests, Hockey Violence, and Other Stately Pleasures (with Patricia Cormack, University of Toronto Press, 2013). David G. Schwartz is the Director of the Center for Gaming Research and an instructor for the History Department and Honors College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He studies the history of games, gambling and play and has written several books, including Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling, Grandissimo: The First Emperor of Las Vegas and Boardwalk Playground: The Making, Unmaking, and Remaking of Atlantic City.

xii

Contributors

Alexander Kupfer (PhD, New York University) is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Film Department at Vassar College. His current book project examines the history of educational and training motion pictures in college football starting in the 1910s. His other research interests include useful cinema, television compilations and sports media. Danielle Seid is an Assistant Professor of English at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where she teaches courses in film and media, women’s studies and American ethnic literature. Her current research examines histories of Asian/American women performers on American network television from the 1950s to the 1990s. Paul Wake is a Reader in English Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Co-Director of the university’s Games Research Network. He is author of Conrad’s Marlow: Narrative and Death in Youth; Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Chance (2007) and Co-Editor of The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory (2013). His essays have appeared in Archival Science, The Conradian, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, The Lion and the Unicorn, Narrative, Rethinking History and Textual Practice. Joyce Goggin is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Amsterdam, where she also teaches film and media studies. She has published widely on gambling and finance in literature, painting, film, TV and computer games. She is currently researching and writing on casino culture, Las Vegasization and public debt, gamification and the entertainment industries. Graham Taylor is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UWE, Bristol. His publications include Understanding Brexit (Emerald, 2017), The New Political Sociology: Power, Ideology and Identity in an Age of Complexity (Palgrave, 2010) and Money and the Human Condition (with M. Neary, Macmillan, 1998). Thomas Malaby is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research interest is in the ever-changing relationships among institutions, unpredictability and technology, espe­

Contributors

cially as they are realized through games and gamelike processes. His work suggests that the increasing use of digital games by institutions marks a fundamental transition in modern governance. He is currently writing his third book, Modern Games, on games as a key resource for modern institutions. Ian Helfant is an Associate Professor of Russian & Eurasian Studies and Environmental Studies at Colgate University in upstate New York. He is the author of The High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia (published by Northwestern UP) as well as additional articles on the effects of gambling and other risky male behaviours such as duelling upon Russian women. His most recent work focuses upon ecocritical approaches to Imperial Russian culture. He recently published a book entitled That Savage Gaze: Wolves, Hunters, and the Contested Terrain of Wild Nature in Imperial Russia. Helfant received his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. Robert W. Miller holds a PhD in European history from the University of Kansas, and is currently a lecturer of history at South Texas College. He is a modern European historian with research interests in culture, consumption, travel and leisure. He has written about the casino tourism industries in Monaco, the United States, Cuba and Macao. Paul Franke is a PhD candidate at the International Max-Planck Institute for Human Development and the Humboldt-University of Berlin (Germany). His research focuses on the history of gambling, urban history and the history of consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 2016, he was an Eadington fellow at the International Center for Gaming Studies at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, as well as visiting research student at UC Berkeley. His dissertation is a comparative history of Gambling in Monaco and Las Vegas. Xavier Paulès is a historian, a specialist of Modern China. He is an Associate Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and Director of the Centre d’études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine. His present research interests include Chinese urban history and the history of gambling, especially the game of fantan 番攤.

xiii

xiv

Contributors

Marta Soligo is pursuing a PhD programme in sociology at University of Nevada Las Vegas, and is Research Assistant at the International Gaming Institute (UNLV). Soligo is also collaborating with Università di Bergamo (Italy) as Heritage and Cultural Studies researcher. She holds a master’s degree in planning and management of tourism systems from Università di Bergamo in 2012, with a thesis focused on Entertainment, Cultural Heritage and Tourism. Laurie Arnold is an enrolled member of the Sinixt Band of the Colville Confederated Tribes, and holds a PhD in History from Arizona State University and a Bachelor’s degree in History from Oregon State University. She is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Native American Studies at Gonzaga University. She has previously held positions at the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago and at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead: The Colville Confederated Tribes and Termination, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2012. Her publications have appeared in Time Magazine and in scholarly journals including Montana: The Magazine of Western History, the Western Historical Quarterly and Collection Management. Keiji Amano is a Professor of Cultural Economy at Seijoh University (Faculty of Business Administration) in Japan. His research interest is the utilization of digital technology from business and educational point of view. Currently he is working on the practical use of serious games in higher education, and Japanese local amusement (like pachinko) and its business environment. Geoffrey Rockwell is a Professor of Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has published and presented papers in the area of big data, textual analysis and visualization, computing in the humanities, computer games and multimedia including a recent book from MIT Press, entitled Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities. He is collaborating with Stéfan Sinclair on Voyant Tools (http://voyant​-tools​.org), a suite of text analysis tools, and leads the TAPoR (http://tapor​.ca) project documenting text tools for humanists. He is currently the Director of the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies.

Contributors

Celeste Chamberland is an Associate Professor of History at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where she teaches world history, the history of medicine and early modern European history. Her research interests include the history of masculinity and surgery and the cultural history of addiction. Rex J. Rowley is Associate Professor of Geography at Illinois State University. His primary interests lie in sense of place, cultural landscapes and gambling geographies. He teaches courses in human and urban geography, and GIS as well as field classes in Japan and the American Southwest. John M. Hunt (PhD, Ohio State University) is an Assistant Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Utah Valley University. His research focuses broadly on street life, popular culture and community in early modern Rome and the Papal States. He is currently working on two book manuscripts, one on the advent and impact of the carriage in Renaissance Rome and the other on the culture of gaming and gambling, likewise in Renaissance Rome. Mathias Fuchs is an artist, musician and media scholar. He pioneered in the artistic use of computer games and exhibited work at ISEA, SIGGRAPH, transmediale, PSi #11, futuresonic, EAST, and the Greenwich Millennium Dome. He has been Senior Lecturer at the University of Salford/ UK from 2002 to 2012. In October 2012 he became a professor at Leuphana University in Lüneburg and is currently a professor at Leuphana University in Lüneburg. Matias Karekallas holds a master’s degree in cultural geography, and has been carrying out his PhD studies and writing his dissertation on the cultural images and places of gambling, firstly at University of Helsinki, and more recently at Game Research Lab in University of Tampere, Finland. In addition to gambling, his research interests include different phenomena of popular culture, especially popular music and sports. James Banks is Reader in Criminology at Sheffield Hallam University. He has authored two books exploring the relationships between gambling and crime, Online Gambling and Crime: Causes, Controls and Controversies, published by Ashgate, and Gambling, Crime and Society, published by Palgrave MacMillan.

xv

xvi

Contributors

Catherine Russell is Distinguished Professor of Film Studies and teaches at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of four books, including Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (1999). Her book Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices was published in 2018 by Duke University Press. Jeffrey Hwang is a gaming industry consultant and the best-selling author of Pot-Limit Omaha Poker: The Big Play Strategy (2008) and the threevolume Advanced Pot-Limit Omaha (2009) series.

1 Why study games and money? Mark R. Johnson

Chapter Outline Introduction1 The insiders 12 Conclusion12

Introduction In the past two decades, game studies has taken the consideration of games beyond a niche interest of a few scholars – most famously Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois – into a growing and vibrant field of study. Much of its early work focused on the inevitable foundational questions of what is a game, what is play, what is the relationship between a player and the game, and enquiries of this sort. Later work has evolved along certain lines, with a number of clear trends emerging: for example, we see extensive research into representation in games. As a media form enjoyed by well over a billion people, how games depict political or social topics (e.g. Williams et al., 2009; Hong, 2015; Ruberg, 2019) is a vital and vibrant question for understanding

2

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

how media consumption and production shape, and are shaped by, the contemporary world. We also see a strong strand of historical games work, interrogating game genres (Apperley, 2006; Arsenault, 2009), platforms and innovations (Wolf, 2008; Arsenault, 2017; Švelch, 2018), alongside much else. Another strand, in which I and many others work, emphasizes political economy and the broader ecosystems of gameplay. The digital games industry is now worth more than both cinema and music combined (Hoggins, 2019). Games have become interwoven with global capital (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter, 2009) and even military technology (Crogan, 2011), while the sector itself is increasingly seeing calls for unionization (Weststar and Legault, 2019) in the face of often punishing work practices (Schreier, 2018) and little job security (Colwill, 2019). These factors generate inevitable profound questions surrounding labour, economics, game production and money. Yet despite the extensive literature on most of these areas, one of the most noticeable gaps in the game studies canon is the role of money in play. Much has been written about issues that surround money, while the integration of money itself into game studies remains elusive. It is this money gap which the present volume seeks to contribute, in some small way, to opening up for wider debate. There are few research projects in game studies which have tried to seriously interrogate this area up to now. Lots of games research marginally addresses money, such as studies of game purchasing patterns (Liu, 2010; Bounie et al., 2015), examinations of ‘microtransactions’ – small amounts of money which give players access to new virtual goods in digital games (Park and Lee, 2011; Evers, Van de Ven and Weeda, 2015; Švelch, 2017) – and work on professional gaming careers (Taylor, 2012; Borowy, 2013). Money is of course inevitably implicated in these studies of so-called ‘esports’, although this has almost never been the focus. Some of my own work (Johnson and Woodcock, 2019; Johnson and Luo, 2017; Johnson, 2018a; Abarbanel and Johnson, 2018a) has also explored some of the effects of entangling money with one’s play, but it remains a niche topic in the field. Yet money is fundamentally imbricated in play: it costs money to buy most games or buy the material infrastructure required to play them; it costs money to play games where one rents equipment, for example; it costs money to have the internet and play games online; it costs money to buy additional content in many digital games; and perhaps most obviously,

Why Study Games and Money?

many games both analogue and digital entail some aspect of wagering. Money is thus essential to the broader ecosystems of play beyond the traditional magic circle (Consalvo, 2009; Lehdonvirta, 2005), but perhaps most visible when we move outside of digital games and back into their analogue cousins and progenitors. A field which has not been shy to consider the relationship between play and money, however, is that of ‘gambling studies’. Gambling studies scholars have looked closely at topics including gambling addiction, the psychology of making gambling choices, cognitive biases relevant to gambling and other ‘vices’ understood as being often entangled with gambling play or inclination. However, gambling studies approaches these questions from a perspective rooted in pathology, psychology and, more broadly, psychological and biological sciences (Reith, 2007; Young, 2013). The act of gambling is almost exclusively presented as a single, personal choice, and one devoid of any societal or cultural dimensions. The recent movement in more ‘critical gambling studies’ (e.g. Cassidy, 2002; Nicoll, 2007, Schüll, 2014; Livingstone et al., 2018) has begun to challenge this sense, but the field remains dominated by quantitative studies of large numbers of gamblers, rather than qualitative (or mixed-methods) studies of the deep complexities and entanglements present between gambling and many other areas of life. Critically engaged studies of gambling and its intersections with sports, entertainment, social identities, indigenous gaming, race, popular culture, technology, government and law, gender, aesthetics, data, communities – and so forth – are hard to come by. As such, game studies offers us nuanced and complex appraisals of games and gameplay, but is almost completely uninterested in the role of money; gambling studies gives more weight to the monetary dimensions of play, but offers few studies of a critical nature. Prior to the growth of gambling-esque systems in or around digital games in recent years (Macey and Hamari, 2019), the two fields also remained entirely uninterested in mutual conversance, outside of the smallest handful of scholars making these connections. Although more research is needed to trace the evolution of these two disciplines which – in a different universe – might have been close cousins, I suspect some immediate hypotheses to explain this separation can be put forward. Game studies, seeking legitimation both as a discipline and in the objects of its study, has been disinclined to court a discipline concerned with what is often viewed as a dubious or undesirable practice, while

3

4

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

gambling studies has not, to date, seen any need to engage with digital games (the largest and most visible part of game studies), nor much inclination to pursue critical research that doesn’t bring with it the social status, funding and opportunities that more ‘direct’ and supposedly ‘scientific’ gambling work tends to (cf. Adams, 2011; Cassidy, 2014). What this means is that we have a gap, into which would fit research applying the tools and perspectives used by game studies (and of course, many other disciplines) to the study of games in which money is at stake and unpredictability is rife (Johnson, 2018b). This collection is therefore designed to showcase some of the diversity of work on card, casino and betting games from largely outside the traditional disciplinary confines of ‘gambling studies’, and in a manner far more akin to that of game studies. Studying card games, casino games and other betting games is a way to highlight more fully the role of money in play – its complications, its entanglements and its diverse manifestations across different historical and cultural contexts. These complications and entanglements are extremely diverse, and extend far beyond the psychologies of individuals – or their condemnation. In this volume we will range across thousands of years, many continents, many different games and every kind of player, all of which should leave a deep and lasting impression upon the reader regarding both the macro-scale structuring, and the individual experiences, of real-money gameplay. It also brings a range of different methodologies and epistemologies to play in attempting to understand real-money playing phenomena, and shows the range of ways these practices can be studied. In turn, the attendant diversity of voices coming together to address games will, I believe, be one of the strongest, and most lasting, benefits of this volume – and the others planned for the future of this series. Following are short abstracts, or outlines of the volume’s chapters, and their categorization into six areas: Foundations, Poker, Money and Class, Casino Cities, Spaces and Times and Cinema, Art, Literature, and Culture. After these scholarly chapters, we then conclude with a short think piece by a professional working in the field: this will help present us with a sense of what is happening in these areas beyond the academy and ‘on the ground’. In total, the work consequently offers twenty-four chapters of study, reflection and analysis on card, casino and betting games from

Why Study Games and Money?

around the world, which help us to problematize the relationship between money and play in ways as distinctive as they are diverse. To wit:

The chapters Foundations Jim Cosgrave begins the book by examining the status of gambling games within wider culture, and how significant they have become in the late capitalist cultural milieu. Noting that sociologists of play such as Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois have looked at the cultural relevance of games of unpredictability, he proposes that the specific role of money in these games deserves greater attention, given its centrality to modern life and the concurrent expansion of gambling opportunities around the world in recent decades. His chapter draws on the theorizations of these scholars, as well as the work of Goffman, in understanding how play with money can unsettle existing categories such as boundaries between work and play. David Schwartz’s chapter then invites us to consider the skills of game in games which contain skill, as well as the unpredictability inherent in card, casino and other betting games. He shows how contemporary societies tend to sharply delineate games of chance and skill, and the regulatory or legal complexities and justifications for these processes. However, as Schwartz demonstrates, this separation is a very new distinction: by subsequently tracing the emergence of ‘gambling’ through different sorts of contests, he shows how the emergence of mercantile gambling pushed the conception of ‘gambling’ – as a form of play – evermore towards concepts of unpredictability rather than concepts of skill. He concludes by looking more closely at the skill involved in various games, including the newly emerging daily fantasy sports.

Poker The second part of the book addresses poker, a central game for a critical assessment of gambling. Alex Kupfer’s chapter focuses on the famous World Series of Poker (WSOP), and how the events, their broadcast and their advertising regimes have produced cultural memory for particular

5

6

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

visions of the game and Las Vegas’ past. He studies the World Series’ presence on ESPN, the growth of televised poker, and situates these in the contexts of televised sports and their effects on creating forms of history that are acceptable to corporations or institutions. Television thus shapes gaming culture, and Kupfer’s chapter offers an incisive and original examination of this process. Continuing with the exploration of the ‘poker imaginary’, Paul Wake then approaches the game in terms of storytelling. His chapter examines the links between fiction and poker, in terms of both the construction of alternate realities through the ‘bluff ’ and the act of reading by players looking to decipher the possibilities of the game. Drawing on possible worlds theory and narrative theory, Wake examines the links between fictionality and poker, especially as central parts of the genres of romance and mystery. The chapter concludes by turning its attention to a pair of novels specifically focused on these connections, which are Don DeLillo’s Falling Man: A Novel (2007) and Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero (2007) – Wake shows how the mechanics of poker they depict help to explain their complex narratives. To conclude our examinations of poker, the book then turns to Danielle Seid’s chapter, which examines representations of poker play on television. Noting that Hollywood has often used poker to depict dramatic struggles between male protagonists – by focusing on risk, high stakes and possible criminal activity – depictions of poker in a sitcoms context stress the domestic and the familiar, and thus disrupting expectations of both gender and play. Sitcom representations of poker are thus assessed through gender studies and media studies lenses, in particular those from I Love Lucy (1951–9), Living Single (1993–8) and Roseanne (1988–97). She argues that male homosocial poker – especially its rules and strategies and their deployment – sheds light on existing dominant gender conventions and roles within American culture.

Money and class The next part of the book considers the intersections between concepts of money and class within games of gambling. Joyce Goggin opens this section by looking at relationships between card games, finance and banking, ranging from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and across England, the Dutch Republic and Europe more broadly. She looks

Why Study Games and Money?

at a range of topics, including how the introduction of cards into Europe was connected to new kinds of numeric literary, and how later shifts in the relationship between finance and cards make clearer their relationships to wider economies. In doing so, card games helped to normalize the practices of the emerging markets in which they were popular, and thus had a significant effect on the history of Europe. The next three chapters then address particular geographical-cultural contexts in which relationships between money and class in a gambling context play out. First, Graham Taylor’s chapter looks at gambling’s role in the development, and subsequent reproduction, of working-class cultural and communities within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. The focus is on ‘pitch and toss’, played secretly on the wastelands of industrial districts in this period. Played for sometimes quite substantial stakes, and able to attract large crowds, this contributed to a hidden working-class subculture – including the emergence of criminal gangs – which was seen to potentially undermine more ‘legitimate’ working-class communities. In doing so, Taylor also examines attempts to control play by religion, social movements and the law, as well as the broader links between gambling, poverty and labour. Thomas Malaby’s chapter then shifts our attention to Greece and the relationship between gambling and the self. Drawing on literature studying the ‘patterned’ or ‘continuous’ selves, Malaby looks closely at the phenomena surrounding New Year’s Eve gambling in Greece. He outlines the presence of heavy gambling in so-called ‘pop-up’ casinos, where poor luck is entangled with reputation and past play, while other forms of gambling can bring rapid wins or losses and thus offer constant change. Malaby’s work, drawing on ethnographic work in Crete over seven years between 1994 and 2002, gives us insight into a highly distinctive cultural context of gambling play, and how gambling is entangled with self-image, and one’s image in an immediate peer group. To conclude this section, Ian Helfant’s chapter considers high-stakes gambling in the last century of Imperial Russia. Russian nobleman in the last century of the empire played for vast fortunes at games such as Faro and Bank, often leading to their ruin or contests with far more skilled and ruthless players than themselves. In turn, such activities were interwoven with gentry identities, a disdain for money and a commitment to ‘debts of honor’, which offered behavioural patterns easily exploited by those with the ability. Helfant explores these factors, their evolution over the nineteenth century and how these were reflected in the works of some of

7

8

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Russia’s most famous ‘writer-gamblers’ – Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky – who gambled heavily and gave gambling a central role in some of their literary works, making this part of Russian history an incisive study into the lives of gambling players.

Casino cities The fourth part of the book addresses the relationship between gambling and cities, urban environments, and urban geography. We open with Robert Miller’s chapter, which looks at the role of roulette in the social class and leisure habits of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century holidaymakers from Europe and North America. Monte Carlo offered a monopoly on the game, and the sense of sophistication and culture around the game gradually turned it into the continent’s leading leisure destination for the wealthy classes. Miller therefore argues that examining specific kinds of leisure offers insight into the connections between social class, casino tourism and specific cities. He shows how a close connection between roulette and Monte Carlo was cultivated by the involved actors, and how roulette play served to both generate and reinforce social distinctions in the era. Paul Franke’s chapter keeps us in Monte Carlo, but instead looks at the city from a perspective focused on consumption and urban history, to understand how the possibility of gambling in the city was produced, and consumed. He looks at Monte Carlo’s expansion and emergence as both an urban space and a space of consumption, looking in both cases to study how meaning developed and evolved over time. A particular ‘atmosphere’ of gambling was thus produced through the games played, the spaces games were played in and the associations of both these in the minds of players, cultivated by those with interests in the success of the casinos. Franke does so drawing on a range of sources, including archives, newspaper articles and travel groups, which combine with the previous chapter to present us with a comprehensive image of Monte Carlo’s role in gambling history and culture. We then shift to considering Macau, arguably in many ways the ‘modern Monaco’ for the high- stakes socially-mobile international gambler. Xavier Paules looks at the trends in European and North American casinos to increasingly replace croupiers with machines, whereas in Macau this is not the case. The dominance of baccarat remains,

Why Study Games and Money?

and players insist on having some kind of access to a physical croupier. To achieve this, while also maximizing the number of players who can take part, Macanese casinos have implemented a system called ‘live baccarat’, where a croupier makes the draw which is broadcast to the computers of players. Paulès’ chapter is the first to examine the historical emergence of this unusual physical-digital game, and thus highlights a highly distinctive set of interrelations between culture, technology and gambling innovation. Finishing off our focused look at cities of gambling, Marta Soligo’s chapter looks at how the long history of Venice as a space for gambling attracts people to the city and how this is interwoven with Venice as a space of cultural heritage. Using concepts from heritage studies, such as UNESCO concepts of ‘intangible’ heritage and ‘tangible’ heritage, her chapter examines how casinos, and the social groups who engaged in their play, have influenced Venice’s historical and contemporary urban structure. She unpacks how Venetian gambling traditions intersect with tourism to now attract both international and domestic visitors to the city, and thus offers us another glimpse at a distinct city of gambling play.

Spaces and times This fifth part looks at how gambling plays out in different spatial, and to a lesser extent temporal, contexts. To begin with, Laurie Arnold’s chapter focuses on the Indigenous peoples of the pre-colonial Columbia Plateau and their gambling on activities such as foot or horse races, as well as hand games, where the spirit power of individuals was understood to wax and wane in keeping with their success in wagering. More recently, the US court recognition that indigenous sovereignty is connected to contemporary Indian casinos points to a cultural persistence of gambling activities and ethics, which Arnold examines. She shows how indigenous American gambling in the modern day has emerged from ancient traditions, and thereby sets a cultural and historical context for contemporary casinos. Keiji Amano and Geoffrey Rockwell then turn our attention to pachinko, and the cultural context of gambling or gambling-esque play in Japan. They begin by introducing the distinctly Japanese game of pachinko, a pinball-esque gambling form rarely found outside of the country – yet as they show, it dominates the economics of leisure in its native Japan. The chapter then focuses on an argument surrounding the importance of

9

10

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

understanding the infrastructure of leisure activities such as pachinko, and what an examination of its infrastructure can show us about how game culture and pachinko have become interwoven. They focus particularly on recent changes in this infrastructure, from small halls to large neighbourhood parlours; and now, with the popularity of pachinko falling somewhat, they conclude by looking at the rise of new integrated resorts and how these might alter this cultural landscape. Celeste Chamberland follows this by turning our attention to seventeenthcentury England and the politics surrounding gambling and addiction in this era. She examines how gambling games were closely examined at the time, with moralists deploying language comparing real-money play to both physical and mental ailments; equally, these attitudes were complicated by emerging work in mathematics and economics. She examines how ideas of mental illness, reason and religion conflicted with ideas of manhood and addiction, and consequently argues that this combination of factors were vital for the ‘proto-medicalization’ of addiction in this era. Rex Rowley’s chapter then takes us to the United States, in which he looks beyond Las Vegas to examine the expansion of legalized gambling across the country since the late 1980s. Using mapping techniques alongside ethnographic observation at relevant sites, Rowley shows us the diffusion of gambling on this sort of scale, before then considering larger resorts that are more explicitly trying to echo their archetypal cousins in Nevada. In doing so, the chapter connects these cultural meanings, and their places, to changes in broader American culture and identity over the last fifty years. Next, John Hunt’s chapter moves to Renaissance Italy, and the gambling of Italians on world events including promotions of cardinals, outcomes of major battles and even elections of new popes. He shows how this offered many Italians, even commoners, the chance to both be involved with and feel like they were involved with great events and political secrets. Popular opinion, politics and gambling were thus all intertwined in this context, and Hunt argues that this kind of wagering stood as an intersection between elite and popular culture. His chapter is consequently a fascinating – and rare – study of gambling in political events and, more broadly, the relationship between gambling, class and religion. To conclude this section, Mathias Fuchs takes us to the roots of early lotteries in the 18th century, which transformed rapidly in terms of their legal status, popularity, economic impact, acceptability, and the extent to which they could be accessed by different social groups. His chapter argues that the

Why Study Games and Money?

18th century transformed how lotteries have functioned since that time, and by looking at 18th century gambling policy Fuchs explores these changes and their influences from prohibition, legislation, and the monetisation of play.

Cinema, art, literature and culture The final part examines the depictions of wagering games across a range of artistic media. Matias Karekallas’ chapter examines how cultural images of gambling are produced through popular music. Presenting a detailed study of lyrics and thematic elements in the work of many different singers and bands, he focuses particularly on the place-related ideas of gambling in this popular music, and its intersection with – and framing and presentation of – the activities of gambling and associated cultures. Karekallas also makes the return journey, and looks at how places might be constructed through ideas of gambling in popular music, and thus sheds light on the ambiguities in gambling, and the places of gambling. The chapter categorizes a number of core themes, such as agency and gender, and concludes by considering what makes popular music so effective at conveying these, and where such research might continue. James Bank’s chapter then moves on to considering the cultural depictions of the ‘card sharp’. Noting how recognizable this figure is throughout gambling culture, media and folklore, he tracks depictions of these sorts of figures and the cultural associations they come with, from Renaissance artists to modern-day superhero characters. His chapter thus illustrates the ‘rehabilitation’ of this figure as gambling has become more acceptable across much of the Western world, and the concurrent shift from morally dubious activities to mainstream leisure. Banks argues that this mythic image of the card sharp is surprisingly integral to modern life, romanticizing many aspects of games in an increasingly sanitized and standardized world. This section concludes with Catherine Russell’s chapter on depictions of women gamblers in cinema. She examines how gambling tables in Hollywood Westerns enabled strong female characters who could gain and maintain positions of authority in ‘frontier culture’. She focuses on Barbara Stanwyck’s films Gambling Lady (1934) and The Lady Gambles (1947), analysing her roles and their framing within the metaphorical centrality of gambling as an element of Manifest Destiny and capitalism. Just as supposedly anyone from any class can make it to the top, the same

11

12

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

supposedly applies to women; she thus shows how class and gender are staked in depictions of gambling in these films, and how gambling can become a subversive – if playful – theme.

The insiders We then finish with a short think piece from someone working within card and gambling spaces. Jeffrey Hwang presents a piece on the factors that affect the long-term survival, profitability and security of game ecosystems. He examines this specifically in the case of poker (or the many different games that constitute ‘poker’) but his arguments apply equally to many different domains. Hwang’s piece sets out a range of detailed concerns for understanding how gambling games ebb and flow, and rise and fall, and how we must look outside both the actions of individuals – and the agendas or interests of major actors – if we are to understand these dynamics. Scholarship on gambling spaces, contexts, players, behaviours and histories are rich and valuable, yet this is also a space so rife with insider knowledge and culture – not to mention also being such a rapidly changing area of human life – that I think it important, in studying real-money gameplay, to always try to engage with those who “live” it, as well as those who study it. It is hence my hope this short essay will help to connect the past and present of games and gambling to their future, and in doing so perhaps stimulate new enquiries in these areas.

Conclusion The twenty-three following chapters in this book offer us significant original insights into the play of card, casino and betting games. Across these chapters we travel to many different places, and almost every historical era, for which we have any kind of significant data about practices of card playing, casino attendance or betting on anything else that presents itself. We will look at wagering on papal elections and rooms housing dozens of computers broadcasting live images of real croupiers; we will examine how gambling shapes the performances of

Why Study Games and Money?

sitcoms and cinema, and the stories of literature and music; we will consider a range of other social factors entangled with gambling such as finance, class and selfhood; and we will show throughout this book how discourses of addiction and deviance do very little to truly explain the play of these sorts of games. The approach I took in selecting the chapters for this volume was deliberately interdisciplinary, and as the reader will note, many of the chapters could have potentially been placed within other categories. Nevertheless these groupings reflect distinctive thematic ways we can think about the entanglements of games and money, and emphasize how many other elements of social life gambling has been, is and always will be involved with. This work shows what can be done with a critical look at games involving unpredictability and money, and will hopefully encourage more research of this sort both within game studies, and from the diverse sorts of scholars arrayed here working outside of existing, and emerging, game studies intellectual traditions. I firmly believe that bringing casino, card and other betting games into the intellectual space of game studies matters – both for their own sake and for potential cross-pollination with other research agendas within the discipline and beyond – and it is my hope that this volume contributes to doing so.

References Abarbanel, B. and Johnson, M. R. 2018. ‘Esports consumer perspectives on match-fixing: Implications for gambling awareness and game integrity’. International Gambling Studies, 19(2): 296–311. Adams, P. J. 2011. ‘Ways in which gambling researchers receive funding from gambling industry sources’. International Gambling Studies, 11(2): 145–52. Apperley, T. H. 2006. ‘Genre and game studies: Toward a critical approach to video game genres’. Simulation & Gaming, 37(1): 6–23. Arsenault, D. 2009. ‘Video game genre, evolution and innovation’. Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture, 3(2): 149–76. Arsenault, D. 2017. Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Borowy, M. 2013. ‘Pioneering eSport: The experience economy and the marketing of early 1980s arcade gaming contests’. International Journal of Communication, 7(21): 2254–74.

13

14

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Bounie, D., Bourreau, M., Gensollen, M. and Waelbroech, P. 2005. ‘The effect of online customer reviews on purchasing decisions: The case of video games’. Working paper, Telecom ParisTech, Paris. Cassidy, R. 2002. The Sport of Kings: Kinship, Class and Thoroughbred Breeding in Newmarket. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassidy, R. 2014. ‘Fair game? Producing and publishing gambling research’. International Gambling Studies, 14(3): 345–53. Colwill, T. 2019. ‘Why game developers are talking about unionization. IGN’. https​:/​/ca​​.ign.​​com​/a​​rticl​​es​/20​​19​/03​​/18​/w​​hy​-ga​​me​-de​​velop​​ers​-a​​re​-ta​​lking​​​ -abou​​t​-uni​​oniza​​tion (accessed 17 June 2019). Consalvo, M. 2009. ‘There is no magic circle’. Games and Culture, 4(4): 408–17. Crogan, P. 2011. Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture, vol. 36. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dyer-Witheford, N. and De Peuter, G. 2009. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Evers, E. R., Van de Ven, N. and Weeda, D. 2015. ‘The hidden cost of microtransactions: Buying in-game advantages in online games decreases a player’s status’. International Journal of Internet Science, 10(1): 20–36. Hoggins, T. 2019. ‘Gaming worth more than video and music combined in record UK entertainment revenues’. The Daily Telegraph. Available at https​:/​/ww​​w​.tel​​egrap​​h​.co.​​uk​/te​​chnol​​ogy​/2​​019​/0​​1​/03/​​video​​-game​​s​-mak​​e​ -hal​​f​-rec​​ord​-u​​k​​-ent​​ertai​​nment​​-reve​​nues/​ Hong, S. H. 2015. ‘When life mattered: The politics of the real in video games’ reappropriation of history, myth, and ritual’. Games and Culture, 10(1): 35–56. Johnson, M. R. 2018a. ‘“The biggest legal battle in UK casino history”: Processes and politics of “cheating” in sociotechnical networks’. Social Studies of Science, 48(2): 304–27. Johnson, M. R. 2018b. The Unpredictability of Gameplay. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Johnson, M. R. and Luo, Y. 2017. ‘Gaming-value and culture-value: Understanding how players account for video game purchases’. Convergence, 25(5–6): 868–83. Johnson, M. R. and Woodcock, J. 2019. ‘“It’s like the gold rush”: The lives and careers of professional video game streamers on Twitch. tv’. Information, Communication & Society, 22(3): 336–51. Lehdonvirta, V. 2005. ‘Real-money trade of virtual assets: Ten different user perceptions’. In Proceedings of Digital Arts and Culture (DAC 2005), 52–8. Copenhagen: IT University of Copenhagen.

Why Study Games and Money?

Liu, H. 2010. ‘Dynamics of pricing in the video game console market: Skimming or penetration?’ Journal of Marketing Research, 47(3): 428–43. Livingstone, C., Adams, P., Cassidy, R., Markham, F., Reith, G., Rintoul, A., Schüll, N. D., Woolley, R. and Young, M. 2018. ‘On gambling research, social science and the consequences of commercial gambling’. International Gambling Studies, 18(1): 56–68. Macey, J. and Hamari, J. 2019. ‘eSports, skins and loot boxes: Participants, practices and problematic behaviour associated with emergent forms of gambling’. New Media & Society, 21(1): 20–41. Nicoll, F. 2007. ‘The problematic joys of gambling: Subjects in a state’. New Formations, 63: 103–20. Park, B. W. and Lee, K. C. 2011. ‘Exploring the value of purchasing online game items’. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(6): 2178–85. Reith, G. 2007. ‘Gambling and the contradictions of consumption: A genealogy of the “pathological” subject’. American Behavioral Scientist, 51(1): 33–55. Ruberg, B. 2019. Video Games Have Always been Queer. New York: New York University Press. Schreier, J. 2018. ‘Inside rockstar games’ culture of Crunch’. Kotaku. https​:/​/ ko​​taku.​​com​/i​​nside​​-rock​​star-​​games​​-cult​​ure​-o​​f​-cru​​n​ch​-1​​82993​​6466 (accessed 17 June 2019). Schüll, N. D. 2014. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Švelch, J. 2017. ‘The Discourses of Microtransactions’ Acceptance and Rejection in Mainstream Video Games’. In C. B. Hart (ed.), The Evolution and Social Impact of Video Game Economics, 101–21. Lanham: Lexington books. Švelch, J. 2018. Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Taylor, T. L. 2012. Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Weststar, J. and Legault, M. J. 2019. ‘Building momentum for collectivity in the digital game community’. Television & New Media, 20(8): 848–61. Williams, D., Martins, N., Consalvo, M. and Ivory, J. D. 2009. ‘The virtual census: Representations of gender, race and age in video games’. New Media & Society, 11(5): 815–34. Wolf, M. J., ed. 2008. The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to Playstation and Beyond. Westport: Greenwood Press. Young, M. 2013. ‘“Following the money”: The political economy of gambling research’. Addiction Research & Theory, 21(1): 17–18.

15

16

Part I Foundations 2 3

Gambling games, money and late capitalism To skill, perchance to win: How chance and skill have co-existed in gambling history

18

2 Gambling games, money and late capitalism James F. Cosgrave

Chapter Outline Introduction: Gambling context(s) 20 Gambling, gambling games and ‘practical gambles’ 22 Games of chance and culture 24 Gambling in late capitalism 28 The social functions of contemporary legalized gambling games 30 Conclusion35

In themselves gambling games are very curious subjects for cultural research, but for the development of culture as such, we must call them unproductive. – Johann Huizinga (Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture) . . . the destinies of cultures can be read in their games. – Roger Caillois (Man, Play and Games) Money . . . has been made a substitute in our society for almost anything you can name. Even for character. I’m just sorry we have to use if for gambling. It’s only a stake!) – Nick the Greek Dandalos (Gambling Secrets of Nick the Greek)

20

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Introduction: Gambling context(s) Particular periods in modern Western history have seen widespread gambling activity, and the latest period, which is still being played out, can be dated back to the 1960s, when particular gambling forms, primarily lotteries, were legalized in a number of countries. Legalization set the stage for a veritable bursting forth of all manner of gambling games, notwithstanding some cultural variation in terms of game legalization trajectories in different jurisdictions (Chambers, 2011). The contemporary ubiquity of gambling opportunities, supported not only by their legal status but by states’ own use of gambling for various economic purposes, is a phenomenon of notable cultural – and global – significance, and bridges a variety of social practices and meanings: entertainment or leisure versus work, play versus serious economic life, chance versus diligence, unproductive expenditure versus accumulation, and so on. Further, the rapid expansion of legal gambling that began roughly in the early 1990s occurs within the political-economic milieu of neoliberalism in Western countries and benefits from the climate of market deregulation (Harvey, 2007). States’ further entry into the gambling environment, marked, for example, by the use of casinos as economic tool, raises questions about the milieu that prompts states to go the gambling-as-economic-strategy route. Apparently, the state itself has been ‘neoliberalized’ precisely by entering into an activity that downloads risk onto citizens by selling ‘risk products’ (games of chance) as it responds to the pressures neoliberalism places on it in the name of ‘free market’ ideology in the form of taxation strategies (Cosgrave, 2006; Young, 2010). There are also links between gambling and market activities themselves, such as the place of speculation in late capitalist economies, particularly the financialization of these economies – a primary cause of the 2008 financial crisis. The history of the gambling/speculation relationship dates to the earliest days of capitalism and is discursively murky when considering speculation’s legitimizing efforts to purify itself of the dark taints of gambling, while the 2008 crisis prompted the return of accusations of ‘casino capitalism’ (de Goede, 2005; Preda, 2009; Stäheli, 2013; Strange, 1986). However, financialization and its cultural effects (see, e.g. Goggin, 2012) require serious thought regarding the increasing significance of financial products and practices and the cultural drive to speculate. This drive has been a precondition

Gambling Games, Money and Late Capitalism

for financialization and a consequence of it – where we find the efforts to ‘purify’ the making of money of its connection with produced physical goods, and the furtherance of the cultural development of money – means becoming ends – through the virtualization of its semiotic-value capacities enabled by computer and trading technologies (Simmel, 1978; Saber, 1999; Davis, 2003). As Aalbers (2008) notes, ‘financialization can be characterized as the capitalist economy taken to extremes: it is not a producer or consumer market, but a market designed only to make money.’ We note also the endemic uncertainty that has accompanied late capitalist markets post-Bretton Woods. It is in this political-economic environment that gambling legalization and expansion has taken place. We are now living in a unique period in the history of gambling, since gambling opportunities (legal and illegal) abound for many people, no longer requiring a special trip to the (formerly) liminal spaces, but easily accessible a short trip from one’s home, or in one’s home if online gambling is the preference. Thus, if the casino was at one time a separate, if not liminal, space (epitomized by Las Vegas, or perhaps Monaco) in relation to the moral order and larger economy, in the contemporary economic environment it is a cultural space not separate from the political-economic and cultural forces that have prompted gambling expansion. The cultural significance and meaning of the activity has changed, affected by sociohistorical conditions and modes of understanding. One confirmation of this idea is the cultural status of widespread gambling in the contemporary milieu as legal activity: in general terms, gambling is no longer understood to be a threat to morals or economic productivity, and is indeed almost fully integrated into late capitalist economies. It is not only Western countries that have seen gambling expansion; gambling is a global phenomenon that requires consideration as political-economic and cultural phenomenon. Gambling thus serves as an exemplary instance of ‘the becoming cultural of the economic, and the becoming economic of the cultural’ (Jameson, 1998: 60). This chapter posits the salience of games of chance for an interpretation of the late capitalist milieu. The discussion also puts into relief the hard distinction offered by Johann Huizinga (1955) between the world of play and the economic world, and his exclusion of gambling from the ‘development of culture’. Gambling becomes good for thinking the interplay of games, culture and the economic dimension, to paraphrase Lévi-Strauss.

21

22

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Gambling, gambling games and ‘practical gambles’ A problem with the term ‘gambling’ is the variety of gambling-related practices and activities themselves, including of course the many types of gambling games. We can distinguish between gambling in general terms, gambling as manifested in games of chance, and what Goffman (1967) refers to as ‘practical gambles’. All gambles have in common the role of stakes and uncertainty. Thus, gambling takes place not only in games of chance, but in other dimensions of social (and economic) life not typically understood as obvious gambling contexts. Goffman analysed those occasions where our everyday life decisions resemble gambles. One distinguishing factor in ‘practical gambles’ was that, unlike casino game gambles, where the outcome is disclosed and witnessed within an enclosed duration and relatively quickly (the spin of the roulette wheel or the playing of a blackjack hand), practical gambles could take a long time to manifest their outcome (e.g. taking a new job). However, the social actor may not realize they are effecting a gambling-like decision. The figure of the late modern probabilistic social actor has been taken up to some extent by the ‘risk society’ theorists, Anthony Giddens (1991) and Ulrich Beck (1992), but Goffman’s work on gambling, as well as strategic interaction (Goffman, 1969), anticipates some of these arguments, particularly regarding the probabilistic dimensions of everyday life in risk societies. Robert Herman (1976: 215–16), drawing upon Roger Caillois’ (1961) work on the cultural significance of games and games of chance, posited that ‘(t)he greater the sense of physical distance between a player’s home and the gambling arena, the more aleatory games (games of chance) are encouraged, and the more mimicry is encouraged, and the more vertigo is encouraged . . . (the) sense of distance from home is very useful in releasing the individual from the bind of conventional responsibilities and controls. Chanciness can then increase in influence’.1 Herman wrote this prior to the widespread legalization of gambling. The idea that gambling

The terms ‘aleatory’, ‘vertigo’ and ‘mimicry’ are taken from Caillois’ (1961) classification of game structures. 1

Gambling Games, Money and Late Capitalism

opportunities are now ubiquitous does not refer solely to the availability of gambling games (games of chance), but to other domains of social life, such as financial markets and stock trading. And indeed, following the risk society theorists, if the late modern social actor reflexively constructs identity and biography in relation to risks (Giddens, 1991), many dimensions of social life open themselves up to being ‘practical gambles’ as the actor navigates life through a multitude of choices and decisions. To marry or not? To smoke or not? To exercise or not? To save or spend? Put in these terms, the contemporary popularity of games of chance in their many forms, and the proliferation of venues that house them, seems to be a suitable cultural analogue for how late modern social actors orient themselves, or respond to the social (and economic) conditions affecting their lives. Inside the casino, we find a wide variety of games, from traditional card games such as poker and blackjack to myriad electronic games – from the video poker terminal to the simulated horse race. Further, there is the distinction between pure games of chance, such as roulette or lottery-type games, where there is no player influence on the outcome, and games that combine chance and skill, or alea and agon (Caillois, 1961; Johnson, 2018), such as poker. These orientations – aleatory and agonistic – can be seen as writ large, outside the casino space, as social action orientations and/or economic orientations (Weber, 1978), which are socially distributed in particular ways, depending on the sociohistorical and economic shaping of social structures (Caillois, 1961) – from the aleatory orientation of the player of state lotteries (or other fatalistic economic practices) to the agonistic orientation of the professional poker player or financial market speculator. While lottery is typically the most common gambling activity in jurisdictions with legal gambling (due to its low cost and risk), the explosive popularity of poker in the new millennium, particularly No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em, serves, as will be discussed later in the chapter, as a notable bridge between the worlds of play and work, culturally significant beyond the fact that it is now also a legitimate career choice if one has the skills. By contextualizing contemporary gambling, noting the widespread opportunities and venues for the activity (lotteries, casinos, sports betting, etc.), we can begin to develop an understanding of the place of gambling games in late capitalist culture. To proceed, however, our discussion must first take up the cultural status of games of chance offered in some influential formulations.

23

24

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Games of chance and culture The quote by Huizinga that begins this chapter indicates his largely negative view of gambling, an activity he excludes, or at least marginalizes, from the world of play.2 Gambling is too close to the material interests of everyday life to be fully included as play. Further, his claim that gambling games are ‘unproductive’ for a consideration of the development of culture is curious, given that gambling games were treated as exemplary resources for the development of probability theory and other mathematical problems by a number of thinkers.3 To be fair, perhaps Huizinga was discussing premodern culture, since probability and chance have emerged as fundamental to the self-understanding of modernity, at least in socialtheoretical and philosophical terms (e.g. Hacking, 1975, 1990; Reith, 1999). Further, the instituting of probability as form of knowledge has had wide-ranging and unintended effects on the ‘development’ of modern culture, as addressed through the notion of the ‘risk society’ (Giddens, 1991; Beck, 1992). While Huizinga’s formulation of play as primordial civilizational value is influential, his view of gambling has been challenged, not only by Caillois (1961), but by Erving Goffman (1961, 1967), both of whom offer positive formulations of games of chance in terms of their cultural significance. Further, these thinkers thin Huizinga’s analytical distinction between play and everyday life. Huizinga’s distinction between play world and everyday life (the latter including its economic dimensions) constitutes, in effect, a sacralization of play: play is enclosed in a ‘magic circle’ (Huizinga, 1955: 10–11). This sacralization echoes Emile Durkheim’s primordial sociological distinction between the sacred and profane realms of social life (Durkheim, 1995; Caillois, 2001). This sacralization makes sense when considering forms of social organization where the play and agonistic features of social life are perhaps central, and where the economic interests of social actors are not

Huizinga (1955) is inconsistent on this point, at times linking games of chance with ritual and the sacred. 3 For example, Gerolamo Cardano, Blaise Pascal and John von Neumann. von Neumann’s ‘On the Theory of Parlor Games’ was published in German in 1928, ten years before the Dutch publication of Homo Ludens. 2

Gambling Games, Money and Late Capitalism

paramount in the ‘collective representations’ of the group (Huizinga, 1955; Durkheim, 1995). Durkheim’s distinction however was to be understood as being in play socio-historically, since a wide variety of objects could obtain sacred status for collectivities, and thus their sacredness was socially and historically variable. This opens the possibility – briefly indicated by Durkheim, but not developed – that even the economic dimension could be sacralized insofar as it constitutes a form or expression of mana (i.e. collective anonymous power; Durkheim 1995; Cosgrave, 2014). We could think of Huizinga’s sacralizing distinction instead as an ideal typical construction (of play), isolating the meaningful characteristics of play, as analytically but not necessarily empirically distinct from other dimensions of social life (Weber, 1949). Huizinga, however would not likely agree with this, as earlier, apparently play-based societies seem to be valued by him over contemporary economically driven (i.e. modern) societies (Huizinga, 1955: 195–213). The point here is to entertain the socio-historical variability of types of social organization and their instituting of particular cultural distinctions and sacralizations. Caillois offers a characterization of the social and moral perspective on chance and gambling, in contrast to the agonistic dimension of modern societies. This perspective makes a distinction between chance (gambling) and work (wealth/economy): chance is not only a striking form of injustice, of gratuitous and undeserved favor, but is also a mockery of work, of patient and persevering labor, saving, of willingly sacrificing for the future – in sum, a mockery of all the virtues needed in a world dedicated to the accumulation of wealth . . . To draw one’s entire subsistence through chance or gambling is regarded by nearly everybody as suspect and immoral, if not dishonorable, and in any case, asocial. (Caillois, 1961: 157–8)

These passages envision the gambler as a rejecter of or resistor to the bourgeois values of persevering labour and accumulation. This moral perspective – gambling as profane activity – allows us to understand the ‘physical distance’ that once separated the individual from gambling venues (Herman, 1976). However, as Caillois (1961) himself draws upon historical and anthropological material to demonstrate the vicissitudes of agon and alea in different periods of history and social formations, he would no doubt acknowledge the socio-historical particularity of the integration of chance and gambling into the late capitalist economy. We

25

26

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

note the transformation of the social and moral perspectives on chance and gambling that occurs in the latter. This transformation indicates that gambling is no longer profane. Gambling is now regarded as ‘play’, challenging Huizinga’s exclusion. As will be discussed, the economic dimensions of contemporary life are ‘played with’ in gambling, notably in the ‘playworld’ of the casino which permit the devaluation of money, but where the play is enframed by economic values and interests. Goffman’s discussion of the relationship of games to the wider world, and the centrality of money in games of chance, helps us to grasp their significance in the late capitalist context, and further allows us to see the thinning of Huizinga’s distinction. Goffman begins by treating games as a form of ‘social encounter’: any social encounter, any focused gathering, is to be understood, in the first instance, in terms of the functioning of the ‘membrane’ that encloses it, cutting it off from a field of properties that could be given weight . . . the stability of this world (encounter) is intimately related to its selective relationship to the wider one. (Goffman, 1961: 138)

Not only must this ‘membrane . . . be maintained (to) control the flow of externally relevant sentiments into the interaction’ (132), but the games and game equipment themselves are a ‘disguise’ of the wider world: ‘the malleability of game arrangements – choice of games, sides, handicaps, bets – allow for the fabrication of exactly the right amount of disguise’ (134). Goffman (130) echoes Huizinga’s distinction when he refers to the ‘reality-generating power of the game’; however, in games ‘the wider world must be introduced, but in a controlled and disguised manner’ (136). Games of chance, since they involve money (or other forms of stake), make the ‘membrane’ somewhat problematic for the player, or perhaps more significantly make a stake of the membrane itself. While recreational games and games of chance incorporate contingency, the rules of the game, and in games of chance, the staking or betting dimensions, funnel player attitudes in the direction of a ‘euphoria function’: If the participants perceive that the betting is very low relative to their financial capacities, then interest in money itself cannot penetrate the encounter and enliven it. Interest in the game may flag; participants may fail to ‘take it seriously.’ On the other hand, if the players feel that the betting is high in relation to their income and resources, then interest may be strangled, a participant in a play flooding out the gaming encounter into

Gambling Games, Money and Late Capitalism

an anxious private concern for his general economic welfare. A player in these circumstances is forced to take the game ‘too seriously’. (Goffman, 1961: 131)

The scale of the stakes means that ‘an interest in money can seep into the game’ (131). Thus, Goffman (1961: 131) says: ‘the notion of taking a game too seriously or not seriously enough does not quite fit our notions of the contrast between recreational “unserious” activity and workaday “serious” activity. The issue apparently is not whether the activity belongs to the recreational sphere or the work sphere, but whether external pulls upon one’s interest can be selectively held in check so that one can become absorbed in the encounter as a world in itself.’ Contra Huizinga, for Goffman the wider world and one’s particular interests in it can affect the game activity – the game depends on an attitudinal orientation, and the distinction play world/everyday life is understood instead in terms of an inculcated gaming frame (Goffman, 1974). ‘In games of pure chance . . . unless such other factors as money bets are added, mere uncertainty of outcome is not enough to engross the players’ (Goffman, 1961: 130). The involvement of stakes is what distinguishes gambling games from other types of games. Any game however can be turned into a gambling game if betting stakes are added. The game of Monopoly and ‘the game-relevant meanings of the various pieces of the game equipment’ may (or may not) be a ‘disguise’ for the external world of capitalistic values and social relations, but there are no real stakes: the game outcome is not materially consequential for the players. Betting on the outcome makes it a gamble. Indeed as Goffman says of the serious action-seeker: ‘The social world is such that any individual who is strongly oriented to action, as some gamblers are, can perceive the potentialities for chance in situations others would see as devoid of eventfulness. . . . Chance is not merely sought out but carved out’ (1967: 201). The stake can leak either way in terms of its meaning for participants: this means that gambling games can be oriented to from the perspective of an economic attitude (e.g. accumulation), or can be treated as play, where stakes enable player engrossment rather than being vehicles for accumulation. The stake casts a shadow in the realm of economic circulation: gambling games occupy a hybrid category that challenges the distinction play world/everyday economic life.

27

28

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Gambling in late capitalism Alexander Riley (2005), discussing the ongoing relevance of Caillois’ analysis of play, makes the case that play/games be understood in terms of their sacralizing dimensions in ‘postmodern’ societies. Alongside the asserted similarity of the separation of both play and sacred (spaces) from everyday life, play and the sacred (the latter through religious ritual) generate disorder and effervescence, which is particularly significant in relation to what Caillois refers to as the ‘rational bases of modern societies’ which demand ‘uniformity (of) social life’ (Riley, 2005: 9, 11). The existence of agon and alea in (post) modern societies through the widespread popularity of gambling (and Las Vegas) and agonistic sports are proffered as play forms that demonstrate sacred characteristics (Riley, 2005). This is a suggestive line of argument, one which both draws upon Huizinga’s distinction (play vs. everyday life) and corrupts it by placing gambling in the realm of play and the sacred. Our discussion partially concurs, in that Riley’s formulation presents an example of the socio-historical variability of sacred objects: the elevation of gambling from its Huizingan exclusion. A point of difference however sees gambling as embedded throughout late capitalist societies and not solely contained in ‘sacred’ spaces (e.g. casinos). It is possible to think not only of a sacralization of play in late capitalism, but a sacralization of gambling. To sacralize gambling, however, invites the paradox that the ‘magic circle’ is no longer enclosed, in effect blurring the distinction between play (sacred) and everyday life (profane). Another difference here lies in the conception of society as late capitalist, rather than ‘postmodern’: the emphasis on gambling as ‘play’ is read here as a cultural expression, if not form of sacralization, in the face of contemporary socio-economic existence.4 Notwithstanding the proliferation of gambling opportunities and venues – interpreted in a mundane sense as providing ‘entertainment’ – casinos can be thought symbolically as a particular type of ‘playground’ through which certain ways of ‘thinking, feeling, and acting’ are played out, dramatized and experienced (Huizinga, 1955; Caillois, 1961; Durkheim, 1982). Further, since money flows from the outside of the casino to the inside, and since it is the stake that makes the whole gambling experience possible, money itself

The relationship of postmodernism to late capitalism has been taken up in a Marxian interpretation by Fredric Jameson (1992). 4

Gambling Games, Money and Late Capitalism

is experienced in particular (i.e. intensified) ways that both resemble its uses outside the casino and destroy its utilitarian meanings. Neither Caillois nor Goffman elaborate at length the extra-game significance of money in games of chance, although Goffman (1961: 132) does see in this significance a way in which ‘socially significant externally based matters’ can enter into the game experience; in their interpretations money is devalued economically in certain games and becomes merely a token enabling play to proceed. But this is already to move past Huizinga’s distancing of games of chance from the world of play. Moreover, the possibility of the seepage of ‘externally based matters’ into play challenges a strong distinction between play and everyday life. Money, or any staked object of value, is necessary for games of chance to accomplish their engrossing capabilities and to induce in the player a proper serious comportment towards the game (Goffman, 1961). Money is too mundane (or perhaps profane), linked to quotidian economic existence, to permit games of chance into the play world (Huizinga’s interpretation), or it becomes a stake, allowing play to proceed, disguising its economic value in the process (Goffman, 1961; Thackrey, 1968). A stake however is only a stake because it is valued and can be lost, having consequences (materially, emotionally, etc.) for the player’s subsequent life. The stake is what makes games of chance meaningful and fateful (Goffman, 1967). While gamblers themselves may devalue money in the gambling experience, there is still a monetary consequentiality (Goffman, 1967) in that gamblers either win or lose and are affected materially by the loss. Notwithstanding Nick the Greek’s view that money is only a means to gamble (an admirable view in many respects), there is still the need to accrue the stake, particularly if one has lost substantially or everything, as Nick had done many times over. For those gamblers (e.g. professional poker players) skilled enough to make a living, the playing of gambling games is a vocation, akin to currency traders or financial market speculators, who while approaching their activities in terms of certain gamelike characteristics, are nevertheless involved in a type of work (Smith, 2005). This is also to point to certain structural features of late capitalism – ludo-capitalism – in terms of the blurring of the economy (work)/play distinction. Caillois refers to the civilizing and socializing function of games, but also the imitative aspect of games in relation to structure and (sacred) collective values. Imitation, however, cannot ‘take on a character too much like parody or sacrilege’ (1961: 62). Taking a cue from Caillois, Ole Bjerg (2011) develops

29

30

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

an extended analysis of the contemporary popularity of poker (notably, NoLimit Texas Hold ’Em) and makes the case that poker is the ‘parody of capitalism’, a game form that is in parodic relationship to late, postindustrial, capitalism. And, since parody profanes the sacred, capitalism must in certain ways permit parody (e.g. since it absorbs everything – values, resources – into its system anyway), or that the parodic form (poker) sacralizes the system. Thus, we have a breakdown of the play/everyday (economic) world distinction. Bjerg (2011: 201) suggests that because poker does not fully conform to Huizinga’s theory of play and ‘eludes unambiguous analytical distinction’, it is ‘an eminently post-modern game’. In simulating the structuring principles of capitalism, poker is difficult to distinguish from ‘the real world of capitalist economy’. Money is the central reason for this transgression: while good poker players must learn to devalue money in order to play in a disciplined way (suspending money as ‘sublime object’), ‘money constitutes an intrinsic element in the game of poker’ and the ‘material interest’ is ‘the heart and soul of the game’ (Bjerg, 2011: 200). Bjerg’s discussion of the evolution of poker also echoes Caillois in seeing this evolution in relation to social structural and cultural changes as capitalism shifts from expansionist to industrial to postindustrial forms. In the now–globally popular No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em, the ‘use value’ of a hand (its objective game ranking) becomes subordinated to the (poker) market mechanisms for the determination of value through betting action, and where the value of hands can be simulated. Bjerg (220–1) situates the early rise in popularity of No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em in the 1970s, when ‘crisis’ capitalism emerges and when Bretton Woods breaks down. In postindustrial capitalism, the virtualization of money (produced by the increasing size and influence of financial markets) and the immaterialization of labour became central structuring factors. Poker is the parodic form of value generation in postindustrial capitalism, displaying the cynicism and greed of late capitalism itself.

The social functions of contemporary legalized gambling games If casinos provide a particular kind of space – a ‘playworld’ – that allows players to play with the value of money (where valuing and devaluing

Gambling Games, Money and Late Capitalism

occur, and where particular gambler orientations can be found along a continuum), the casino as the ‘house’ envelops all player orientations on the money side of the equation: its goal is profit. Paraphrasing Marx’s (1978) capital equation, the circuit Money–Commodity– Money (M-C-M) sees Commodity (C) replaced by Chips, to become Money-Chips-Money, where the casino is the game space transforming incoming money into chips or play tokens (banking the money instantly upon receipt), and transforming them back into money at the cashier’s window to cash out winners and losers. Gambling chips, unlike game pieces in ‘checkers or chess . . . are not part of any particular game, but rather part of the casino bank’s substitute currency, transferable on demand in to ordinary currency . . . while chips are in a sense “merely” symbols, they certainly aren’t merely symbols as roses or flags can be merely symbols; ordinarily a chip represents a very clear-cut extractable claim, much as money is a claim’ (Goffman, 1969: 151–3). The casino in effect is built upon and houses the whole M-C-M process. The ‘house’ is extended if, for example, a government or state owns the casino, or otherwise benefits from its revenues (player losses), such that the economic interests in the casino cannot be easily disentangled from the ‘playworld’ space inside the casino. But it is not difficult to see that the house would be interested, not only in making the casino space as profitable as possible, but in shaping the gambling proclivities of its customers to contribute efficiently to its bottom line. Thus, the casino is on the one hand a ‘playworld’ and on the other a venue where a monetization of the space and the players takes place to contribute to profitability. Both Huizinga and, ambiguously, Caillois, emphasize that play produces no material value and is unproductive, although in games a transfer of property may occur (Caillois, 1961). We note here how the late capitalist casino and the games therein, while producing no goods, nevertheless enact an economically extractive intent.5 Along with the civilizing and socializing dimensions of games (discussed in the following text), Caillois (1961) also argues that patterns of culture can be identified through society game activities. Thus, games can be taken to represent societal values, if not those it holds to be sacred.

That casinos are used for job creation also indicates the economic uses of gambling and the blurring of the play/economy distinction. 5

31

32

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

What do gambling games say about (a) culture when they are so widely available and used? Influential functionalist-sociological formulations of gambling, written when gambling was still an officially ‘deviant’ activity, saw gambling as a response to social structure that blocked mobility aspirations, but which nevertheless acted along the lines of a ‘safety valve’ serving to integrate those who were not achieving the goals offered by the economic system (Devereux, 1949; Merton, 1949; Zola, 1963). Now, however, gambling is no longer deviant and is embedded into everyday life. To be sure, there are important differences between aleatory forms of gambling (roulette, lotteries, electronic gaming machines) and agonistic games (poker). Both types of orientation are responses to late capitalist (or late modern) uncertainty – embracing it, as chance is constitutive of and oriented to in all types of gambling. The widespread popularity of lotteries may speak to frustrated mobility aspirations, but it nevertheless demonstrates the embeddedness of chance taking into the fabric of everyday life. If pure games of chance teach no skill, there is still the way these games socialize players also into the realm of chance. Poker play signifies the attempt to overcome chance through skill and interpellates players into agonistic action: it embraces chance even as it disavows its fatalism. It is somewhat ironic to speak about the ‘civilizing’ aspects of gambling games, given the history of condemnatory interpretations, of which Huizinga’s version would be an example (Reith, 1999; Huizinga, 1955). Thus, poker may be parodic of (late) capitalism, but this parodying includes the game’s socializing and pedagogical characteristics. It socializes players into a play realm of chance and teaches ways of orienting to chance – the mathematical, psychological, dramaturgical dimensions that one must learn to play the game effectively. Poker also teaches risk and budget management. If late financial capitalism and poker orient to the simulation of value (Bjerg, 2011), the phenomenon of simulation itself must be taken seriously as a principle – a ‘structural law of value’– in late capitalist societies (Baudrillard, 1994). This pertains not solely to the economic sphere of value, but characterizes the social sphere more broadly – its representations and social interactions. Poker, as a game, thus embodies particular orientations, interactional and cognitive, indicating a cultural patterning expressive of late capitalist societies.

Gambling Games, Money and Late Capitalism

Goffman (1961) referred to the ‘membrane’ that encloses the gaming ‘encounter’, which acts to cut it off from externally based matters that could threaten it. Caillois (1961: 44) raises a similar concern: If play consists in providing formal, ideal, limited, and escapist satisfaction for these powerful drives (note: Caillois is referring here to agon, alea, ilinx, mimicry), what happens . . . when the universe of play . . . is contaminated by the real world in which every act has inescapable consequences? . . .What used to be a pleasure becomes an obsession. What was an escape becomes an obligation, and what was a pastime is now a passion, compulsion, and source of anxiety. The principle of play has become corrupted.

Caillois is referring to play and games in general, and we see the reassertion of the play/real-world distinction emphasized by Huizinga. The ‘real world’ threatens to profane the sacred realm of play. With reference to gambling, certain difficulties emerge. As an activity, or as game, gambling is (already) contaminated by money, notwithstanding the particular attitudes of the gamblers and desublimations that might occur. Gambling corrupts the play/real world distinction itself. Either gambling is corrupt, as in the Huizingan interpretation, or gambling poses a challenge to the distinction by convoluting the play/real world (economy) ideal typical categories. As gambling games involve money, the ‘euphoria function’ takes on an added and risky dimension. This function is a product of the rules and norms of games that induce the player into the comportment necessary to enact a gamelike attitude and actions. However, as noted there is the risk that ‘socially significant externally based matters’ may creep too much into the game experience: for example, in gambling, the challenge by one bettor to another to make a large bet might prompt the latter to move out of a play orientation and into one of worrying about the economic-financial consequences of making the bet. There is however another risk – one which Goffman said little about – and that is the issue of gambling excessively, or ‘chasing losses’ (Lesieur, 1984). This is the risk that the ‘euphoria function’ overtakes the gambler and prompts loss of control (‘pathological’ and ‘problem gambling’ in medicalized terms). Here, the gambler not only abandons the play/game comportment but in effect loses agency (Cosgrave, 2008; significantly, we find here a contemporary form of ilinx). The official advocations and pronouncements of ‘responsible gambling’ are pedagogies that aim to address loss of control and to direct the gambler to treat gambling as ‘only a game’. However, they also point to the

33

34

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

very thin line separating the realms of play and economy, as the externally based matter of money is inscribed into the gambling experience. We can speak here of the modulation of the ‘euphoria function’ as it relates to the experience of money in gambling: one aspect of ‘responsible gambling’ pertains to the issue of dealing with monetary loss. Responsible gambling is a pedagogy of, and a socializing into, monetary loss, constituting a form of training as an ‘adaptation to failure’ (Goffman, 1952; Rosecrance, 1986). Such responsibilizing frames, when appended to games or other activities (Goffman, 1974), aim at attitudinal comportment, particularly with activities that might generate excess, and are a contemporary example of ‘civilizing’ functions, albeit in a disciplinary rather than in any evolutionary or progressive sense. They are notable for how they frame and link the relationship of pleasure and leisure to the social structural and economic conditions of late capitalism. A function of gambling games in late capitalism is to socialize players into various ways of orienting to money, signifying (even if by parody) the centrality of money in the capitalist culture. There is also, as mentioned, the oriented attitude to chance that is played with in the diverse forms of gambling encounter. Game theorists have called attention to games as legitimate arenas for contingency (Malaby, 2007); however, gambling games add an extra dimension to the meaningfulness and consequentiality of games via the role of money or the material stake, thus also challenging the line separating play and games from the real world and the economy. Huizinga marginalized gambling from the play element of culture because of the economic attributes of the activity; now, gambling is framed as play because of the economic dimension for at least two reasons: (1) because there is the risk that the externally based matter of money will seep into the play and generate excess and (2) in an unintended way, as gambling has become embedded into everyday life, unsettling the distinction between play/economy. The first point relates to the processes of gambling legitimation and explains the (official) claims that ‘gambling is only a game, treat it that way’, whereas the second point points to the sacralizing of gambling in late capitalist culture, as a response to chanciness and as a symbolization of the economic order. In this culture, these comments by Goffman can be appreciated for their contemporary significance: The social functions of fateful action-taking are . . . not hard to find. For the individual to be useful to society, he must be in sufficient physical and characterological command of himself to sustain social norms. When the

Gambling Games, Money and Late Capitalism

individual clearly appreciates the chances he is taking and does not become disorganized by this appreciation, he will bring to moments of society’s activity the stability and continuity they require if social organization is to be maintained. . . . To satisfy the fundamental requirements of morale and continuity, we are encouraged in a fundamental illusion. It is our character. (Goffman, 1967: 239, 259)

Conclusion The emphasis on the contemporary political-economic and cultural context in this chapter established a frame for offering an interpretation of gambling and gambling games, following the lead of Caillois on the linkages between games and larger social structures and culture. This contextualization also allowed for a consideration of meaning and significance, positing the significance of gambling for a culture where the activity is widespread and instituted for (economic) reasons that cannot easily be separated from the play aspects of the activity. As such, the hard distinction Huizinga makes between play and everyday life is outmoded. In late capitalism, not only does the ubiquity of gambling as ‘play’ raise the question of the cultural significance of the activity, but the economic dimensions of this type of society, such as the centrality of money, and the use of gambling venues and games for economic (accumulation) interests, make gambling a hybrid activity, deconstructing Huizinga’s distinction. The integration of gambling into the larger economy also indicates a shift in meaning and significance in broad terms, implicating the social actor. As Goffman indicates, games depend on the sustaining of a gaming comportment, which, in the case of gambling games, face the risk of externally based economic intrusions. Thus, gambling games, soliciting variable distributions of agonistic and aleatory orientations in the larger culture, serve not only as play, but also ‘civilizing’ and socializing functions in late capitalist economies.

References Aalbers, M. B. 2008. ‘The financialization of home and the Mortgage market crisis’. Competition & Change, 12(2): 148–66.

35

36

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Baudrillard, J. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Beck, U. 1992 [German ed., 1986]. The Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Bjerg, O. 2011. Poker: The Parody of Capitalism. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press. Caillois, R. 1961. Man, Play, and Games. New York: The Free Press. Caillois, R. 2001 [1939]. Man and the Sacred. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Chambers, K. G. E. 2011. Gambling for Profit: Lotteries, Gaming Machines, and Casinos in Cross-National Focus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cosgrave, J. F. 2006. ‘Editor’s introduction’. In J. F. Cosgrave (ed.), The Sociology of Risk and Gambling Reader, 1–24. New York: Routledge. Cosgrave, J. F. 2008. ‘Goffman revisited: Action and character in the era of legalized gambling’. International Journal of Criminology and Sociological Theory, 1(1): 80–96. Cosgrave, J. F. 2014. ‘The market totem: Mana, money and morality in late modernity’. Canadian Journal of Sociology, Special Issue: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: Contemporary Engagements, 39(4): 667–96. Davis, J. 2003. ‘Speculative capital in the global age’. Race & Class, 4(3): 1–22. de Goede, M. 2005. Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Devereux Jr., E C. 1949. Gambling and the Social Structure – A Sociological Study of Lotteries and Horse Racing in Contemporary America, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Downes, D., Davies, B. P., David, M. E. and Stone, P. 1976. ‘Gambling as a sociological problem’. In D. Downes, B. P. Davies, M. E. David and P. Stone (eds), Gambling, Work, and Leisure: A Study across Three Areas, 11–28. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Durkheim, E. 1982(1894). The Rules of Sociological Method, ed. S. Lukes, trans. W. D. Halls. New York: The Free Press. Durkheim, E. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. K. E. Fields. New York: The Free Press. Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Goffman, E. 1952. ‘On cooling the mark out: Some aspects of adaptation to failure’. In C. Lemert and A. Branaman (eds), The Goffman Reader, 3–20. Oxford: Blackwell Press. Goffman, E. 1961. ‘Fun in games’. In C. Lemert and A. Branaman (eds), The Goffman Reader, 129–46. Oxford: Blackwell.

Gambling Games, Money and Late Capitalism

Goffman, E. 1967. ‘Where the action is’. In Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face to Face Behaviour. Garden City: Anchor Books. Goffman, E. 1969. Strategic Interaction: An Analysis of Doubt and Calculation in Face-to-Face, Day-to-Day Dealings with One Another. New York: Ballantine Books. Goffman, E. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Goggin, J. 2012. ‘Regulating (virtual) subjects: Finance, entertainment and games’. Journal of Cultural Economy, 5(4): 441–56. Hacking, I. 1975. The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hacking, I. 1990. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, D. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University. Herman, R. 1976. ‘Motivations to gamble: The model of Roger Caillois’. In W. R. Eadington (ed.), Gambling and Society: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Subject of Gambling, 207–17. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas. Huizinga, J. 1955. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press. Jameson, F. 1992. Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Jameson, F. 1998. ‘Notes on globalization as a philosophical issue’. In F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi (eds.), The Cultures of Globalization, 54–80. Durham: Duke University Press. Johnson, M. R. 2018. The Unpredictability of Gameplay. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Lesieur, H. 1984. The Chase: Career of the Compulsive Gambler. Rochester: Schenkman Publishing Company. Malaby, T. 2007. ‘Beyond lay: A new approach to games’. Games and Culture, 2: 95–113. Marx, K. 1978. ‘Capital, volume one’. In R. C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 294–442. New York: WW Norton Co. Press Merton, R. 1968 [1949]. ‘Social structure and anomie’. In Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 185–214. New York: The Free Press. Preda, A. 2009. Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reith, G. 1999. The Age of Chance: Gambling and Western Culture. London: Routledge.

37

38

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Riley, A. 2005. ‘The theory of play/games and sacrality in popular culture: The relevance of Roger Caillois for contemporary Neo-Durkheimian cultural theory’. Durkheimian Studies, 11(1):103–14. Rosecrance, J. 1986. ‘Adapting to failure: The case of horse race gamblers’. Journal of Gambling Behavior, 2(2): 81–94. Saber, N. 1999. Speculative Capital, Volume 1: The Invisible Hand of Global Finance. Harlow: Pearson Educational. Shalin, D. N. 2016. ‘Erving Goffman, fateful action, and the Las Vegas gambling scene’. UNLV Gaming Research and Review, 20(1): 1–38. Simmel, G. 1978 [1900]. The Philosophy of Money, trans. T. Bottomore and D. Frisby. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Smith, C. W. 2005. ‘Financial edgework: Trading in market currents’. In S. Lyng (ed.), Edgework: The Sociology of Risk-Taking, 187–200. New York: Routledge. Stäheli, U. 2013. Spectacular Speculation: Thrills, The Economy and Popular Discourse, trans. E. Savoth. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Strange, S. 1986. Casino Capitalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Press. Thackrey Jr., T. 1968. Gambling Secrets of Nick the Greek. Chicago: Rand McNally & Co. von Neuman, J. and Morgenstern, O. 1944. Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weber, M. 1949. On the Methodology of the Social Sciences, eds. and trans. E. A. Shills and H. A. Finch. Glencoe: Free Press. Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society, eds. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittach. Berkeley: University of California Press. Young, M. 2010. ‘Gambling, capitalism and the state: Towards a new dialectic of the risk society?’ Journal of Consumer Culture, 10(2): 1–20. Zola, I. K. 1963. ‘Observations on gambling in a lower class setting’. In J. F. Cosgrave (ed.), The Sociology of Risk and Gambling Reader, 149–61. New York: Routledge.

3 To skill, perchance to win How chance and skill have co-existed in gambling history David G. Schwartz

Chapter Outline The earliest games 40 The rise of mercantile gambling 45 The business of making money 50 Conclusion54

After the 2015 rise in popularity of daily fantasy sports, DFS providers argued that the game they offered, which allowed gamblers the chance to assemble their own teams of players, with a prize for ‘owners’ whose team members perform the best, was one in which ‘skill . . . dominates over pure chance’ (Young, 2015). In doing so, DFS operators set up a dichotomy in which games of pure chance were ‘gambling’, while games of skill did not need to be licensed or regulated as a gambling activity. Around the same time, casino operators became increasingly concerned that their

40

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

primary ‘products’, slot machines and table games, were not appealing to millennials. Consultants, casino owners and gaming manufacturers proposed several solutions to bridge this generation gap, one of which was the creation of ‘skill games’, or electronic gaming devices that blur the lines between a traditional slot machine and a video game. As a result of these two developments, in recent years skill elements of gambling have received more attention than they previously had. There were often elements of self-interest in claiming skill as something novel in gambling – either attempts to skirt prohibitions on sports betting or to make a new gambling product appear innovative, even revolutionary. Examining the history of gambling, however, it is clear that elements of skill and chance have co-existed for millennia, and that completely divorcing skill from chance is a relatively recent phenomenon, driven primarily by legislative and business concerns.

The earliest games The first gamblers, in all likelihood, played a mix of pure chance and skill games. Games that evolved from divinatory practices were, by definition, entirely based on chance: the entire point of divination is that no human is able to alter or predict the outcome (provided that the divination is conducted honestly). Divination by sortilege (thrown or cast items) evolved from the casting of generic ‘lots’ to the use of sheep and goat ankle bones, or astralagi (Schwartz, 2013: 2). At some point, these practices became desacralized and were used to simply wager money. Thus was born strictly chance-based gambling. Skill-based gambling evolved out of physical contests – who could run the fastest or throw objects the farthest. Betting was fairly simple. But they soon came to include betting on board games which could be won not just through chance selection, but contained elements of skill as well. An ancestor of backgammon that used dice to determine how far pieces could move around a board dates to at least 3000 BC in Mesopotamia. In Egypt, similar games appeared about 500 years earlier. Most of these games relied on dice to randomize the permitted number of moves, but a game resembling draughts (checkers) was present early enough to be part of an

To Skill, Perchance to Win

origin myth which held that Thoth, the judge of the dead, made possible the creation of all earthly life by winning five days from the moon by playing the game (Schwartz, 2006: 9–11). In both India and China, gambling on games of chance and games of skill was present from ancient times. These included betting on dice, games which used dice and contests between animals. Cockfighting is so ancient in India that one theory posits that chickens were actually domesticated there not to provide eggs and meat, but for the sport of betting on their battles (Schwartz, 2006: 12). In the Vedic period (roughly 1500 to 500 BC), gambling was prevalent enough that within the Rig Veda, a collection of over one thousand religious songs, was a set of verses called the ‘gambler’s hymn’. In China, gambling likewise took place both on games of pure chance and on animal combat, dominoes and the board game po (Schwartz, 2006: 16). The evolution of chess reveals how gambling was once common on this, perhaps the supreme game of skill. With no randomizing elements, the outcomes in chess are entirely based on the decisions made by the players, which are informed by their knowledge of the game. The game developed around the start of seventh century AD in the area of Northwestern India (Murray, 1913: 26). By way of Persia, the game was adopted in the Islamic world, and from there, was introduced to Europe (Murray, 1913: 26). The diffusion of chess paralleled, curiously, that of playing cards, which originated in Korea or China in the eleventh century and spread to Europe via India, Persia and Mamluk Egypt by the late fourteenth century (Schwartz, 2006: 41–4). From its early days, chess was a gambling game. Al-Mas’udi, an Arabic historian of the tenth century, wrote that Indians primarily used ivory to make pieces for chess and nard (a backgammon-like game). ‘When the Indians play at chess or nard’, he wrote, ‘they wager stuffs or precious stones’ (Murray, 1913: 36–7). If they ran out of goods to bet, al-Mas’dui claimed that Indian players would then wager limbs, starting with a finger and progressing to an entire arm. It is unclear what the winner did with the severed appendages, but it is an indication of the centrality of gambling to early chess (Murray, 1913: 37). Further, while the skill elements of chess would be refined over the coming centuries, in the game’s early years variants which incorporated dice into gameplay were present in both Indian and Europe (Murray, 1913: 47). As the game evolved to prioritize skill, it retained an association with games of chance, and was seen as occupying the end of a broad skill/

41

42

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

chance spectrum shared with games from backgammon to dicing, not as an opposite of those games. Chess historian H.J.R. Murray, for example, writing of Muslim legends about the invention of chess, notes that chess was almost universally associated with nard in Muslim literature: ‘This linking of two games that to us seem so dissimilar’, he relates, ‘chess, a game in which chance plays the smallest of parts, and nard, a game in which chance plays the dominant part – appears somewhat singular, yet no association of games has been so persistent or endured so long’ (208). While Muslim writings made clear distinctions between games of chiefly skill, of which chess was the most outstanding exemplar, and games of near-pure chance, they gave them both equal attention (Murray, 1913: 208). Likewise, Murray writes, in Christendom chess and ‘tables’ (the thencurrent term for backgammon and related games) were co-equal. ‘The player of chess’, he writes, ‘appears almost everywhere in the literature of the Middle Ages as a player of tables also’ (208). Yet chess was beginning to be elevated above its chancier brethren. The Libro de los Juegos (‘Book of Games’), commissioned by King Alfonso X of Castle in 1283, places chess above games of chance, though it acknowledges their common roots. The author begins by describing how, to fulfil God’s wish that they be happy, men found many different ways of playing: mock fighting, athletics, ball play, in which ‘men use their limbs in order to make them strong and have fun’, and ‘other games that are done sitting like playing chess, tables and dice (Golladay, 3). Girolamo Cardano, scholar, mathematician and doctor, was a celebrity of the sixteenth century. He was also a confirmed and perhaps degenerate gambler. He chronicled his gambling habits in great detail in his autobiographical De Propria Vita Liber (‘The Book of My Life)’. Tellingly, his gambling exploits run the gamut of the skill spectrum. ‘I was’, he writes, ‘inordinately addicted to the chess-board and dicing table. . . . I gambled at both for many years, at chess more than forty years, at dice about twenty-five . . . every day, with the loss at once of thought, of substance, and of time’ (Cardano, 1930: 73). Although Cardano then claimed to have gambled only due to the ‘odium’ of his existence and to have stopped gambling as soon as circumstances permitted, his four decades of gambling at chess would argue that this was not a passing escape but a lifelong obsession. Indeed, he spent a great deal of time pondering the nature of games and gambling, and his posthumously

To Skill, Perchance to Win

published Liber de Ludo Aleae (‘The Book on Games of Chance’), in addition to its remarks on cheating, ethical play and rules of games, contained the first exploration of the math behind probability. Bellhouse (2005) considers this work to have not only anticipated the development of probability calculus, but to have invented the ‘gambling manual’ genre that would culminate in the works of Hoyle (181). Cardano began by considering the types of games, which he believed depended on agility (ball games), strength (discus and wrestling), skill (chess), chance (dice) and skill and chance simultaneously (fritillus, which most translate as ‘dice box, but which Cardano likely meant as ‘gaming board’) (Cardano, 1961: 1). Considering primarily games of dice, cards and knucklebones, but with a chapter on backgammon, Cardano considered the Liber a systematic exploration of all forms of gambling. Although the most famous sections of the book are those that develop what later became probability and are thus concerned with games of chance, Cardano himself viewed experience, skill and luck as equally important elements of gambling. ‘It is also foolish’, he writes, ‘to devote yourself entirely to gambling in order that you may win; for it is inevitable that he who plays more rarely should be less skillful’ (emphasis mine; Cardano, 1961: 8). Cardano had earlier declared that the ‘fundamental principle’ of all gambling was ‘simply equal conditions, for example, of opponents, of bystanders, of money, of situation, of the dice box and of the dice itself ’ (Cardano, 5). Departing from pure equality in the opponent’s favour made one a fool, and in one’s own favour made one unjust. But when discussing playing conditions, Cardano made it crystal clear that inequality was the key to success: So you ought to be more skillful than your opponent, and more experienced, or else you ought to play in such a way that it does not matter how the die falls, as will be the case if you play for small stakes or with your loved ones for a short time after dinner. But if you are determined to play for large stakes, then play constantly with an opponent who is neither more experienced than yourself now more fortunate, and let the conditions not be unlucky for you. For luck plays a very large part in these matters also. (Cardano, 1961: 8)

What makes this passage interesting is that Cardano is suggesting that while skill is important, luck ‘also’ plays a large role in determine the outcome of gambling games, even those played with dice. While today, with the odds of

43

44

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

the games well-calculated, playing craps at a casino can be viewed as a game of pure chance; evidently, in Cardano’s day this was not the case, as he writes of both experience and skill as being important elements of successful dice play. It is clear that Cardano here is not talking about chess or cards, since he specifically advises the reader to ‘play in such a way that it does not matter how the die falls’ (Cardano, 1961: 8; emphasis mine). Similarly, it appears that he does not consider his emphasis on ‘skill’ and ‘experience’ to be hedges against cheating, since he deals with cheating in several subsequent chapters as its own phenomenon, and makes no reference to skill or experience there. Instead, the antidote to fraud was to be both perceptive and cautious: ‘beware of men of deceitful mind’ and ‘have your own cards . . . [or] buy from men you can trust’ (Cardano, 1961: 27). Cardano did not, in the Liber, discuss cheating or gambling at chess, although in his autobiography he mentions chess in conjunction with gambling, mentioning that he had ‘expounded many remarkable facts in a book on the combinations in chess’ (Cardano, 1930: 73). His foremost biographer, Oystein Ore, discusses chess in Cardano’s time as being part of an unholy quadrumvirate that also included dice, tables and cards (Ore, 1965: 108). Chess, Ore writes, was usually played for money in a ‘fast and furious manner’ (108). To give less skilled players a chance at winning, superior players would surrender some pieces, or the players would attempt to solve a problem. These are the ‘combinations’ that Cardano alluded to. Not that chess play was free from cheating. A contemporary Latin manuscript cautions chess players to learn ‘the secrets of the gamester, concerning which many tricks are given’ (Murray, 1913: 653). These tricks included mostly pretending to not know the solution to a problem and setting up problems with hidden easy solutions. The gambling habits of Cardano show the prevalence of gambling on games of skill, those of chance, and those that mix the two during the early modern period. His personal experience gambling on chess, dice, backgammon and cards demonstrate the inclusiveness of the gambling along the skill-luck continuum up to this point. With gamblers risking their own money against other gamblers, they were free to play games of skill or chance, provided that they were confident of their opponents’ rectitude. Games across the spectrum, though they had different rules and even equipment, had one thing in common: they all relied on a degree of luck. As gambling shifted from pastime to business, the role of luck would have to dominate over that of skill.

To Skill, Perchance to Win

The rise of mercantile gambling In sources from the ancient, classical and medieval periods, there are distinctions made between betting on games of pure chance, games of skill and games that mingle both, but all are equally common vehicles for betting. In this period, gambling was primarily social: it took place among gamblers with ostensibly equal chances to win, who staked their own money. While there were gambling houses, these places primarily provided equipment for gambling, and did not, generally speaking, accept wagers from the general public. One exception was the proliferation of lottery-like games in China circa the tenth century AD (Schwartz, 2006: 16). Social gambling, which pitted players against each other rather than a professional gambling establishment, could accommodate games of skill and games of chance equally; with the chance to win balanced (at least in theory) between the two principals, it did not matter whether skill factored into the game, as long as the players were comfortable with the nature of the contest. The catch with games of pure skill, or even games that mix skill and chance elements, is that some people are more skilled than others, giving them the ability to win more consistently. It would be possible to earn a living gambling on chess, for example, if one was careful to play those less adept at the game. Those wishing to earn a living from chance-based gambling (and the category of professional gambler seems to be old, with references to professionals as old as the Jewish Talmud, circa first century AD) would have to either be very skilled or resort to cheating (Schwartz, 2006: 61). The development of mercantile gambling created a method for games to become the basis for an ongoing business concern. Mercantile games were different from social games in that they pitted a central institution, for the sake of convenience called ‘the house’, against any and all comers. Unlike social games, which unfolded among friends or at least acquaintances, mercantile gambling was impersonal. The nature of the business, which required the house to continually profit at the expense of players, made the lack of social connections between players and the house an advantage (Schwartz, 2013: 7–8). Mercantile gambling in China emerged as early as the tenth century with the proliferation of lottery games. It developed in Europe about 500 or 600 years later. Interestingly, paper money, which is tied to the

45

46

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

development of cash economies, also developed in China before it did in Europe, leading to speculation that mercantile gambling and the growth of a larger banking economy are linked (Schwartz, 2013: 7). It would appear that paper money, chess, cards and mercantile gambling each followed a similar process of diffusion from East to West. The first proper European lottery is recorded in L’Ecluse, Flanders, in 1444. It had the express intention of making money for the organizers – in this case, the city itself, which wanted to raise money to repair its defences. Advertising throughout the region, this lottery was successful, which meant that it was quickly imitated. The lottery spread to Venice – interestingly, also one of the first places in Europe that playing cards appeared in – in the early sixteenth century. Here, it initially appeared as a frankly commercial adjunct to another business. A contemporary diary records second-hand clothes seller Geronimo Bambarara inventing a new diversion by selling cheap chances to win both merchandise and cash prizes (Schwartz, 2006: 84– 5). These lotteries demonstrated in practical terms the advantages that mercantile gambling had. It could be run as a commercial venture to raise money, either for a specific goal (the L’Ecuse lottery) or just to increase income (Bambarara’s lottery). As long as the receipts covered the cost of the goods or cash prizes at stake, there was no way to lose money at a wellorganized lottery. This is in distinct contrast to both social games with skill (chess and backgammon) and those reliant primarily on chance (dicing). The nature of social games is Cardano’s fundamental principle is of essential equality: as long as everything was above board, with honest dice and cards, and even a handicap for known differences in skill, the outcome was anyone’s guess. By this point in human history, people had been demonstrating a passion to gamble that wasn’t diminishing. If anything, gambling was evolving to become more varied and suited to a variety of settings. The introduction of cards to European gambling created new milieu for play that, a century later, were still being explored. Despite millennia of religious and moral denunciations and laws against the practice, gambling continued to spread. At this point, even those charged with safeguarding the public trust began to wonder how this desire could be used in a positive way. Mercantile gambling provided a way to do that, but to effectively make mercantile gambling work, it was essential that only games based on pure chance or those with a negligible skill factor be permitted, due to the

To Skill, Perchance to Win

probabilistic mechanics of gambling, which, thanks to the efforts of Cardano and other motivated gambling mathematicians, were being better understood. A common misapprehension about mercantile gambling is the nature of the ‘house edge’. It is commonly assumed that the house edge is a way that games are skewed in favour of the house and against players – something like a coin or a die that is weighted so that it statistically favours one side over the other. In this conception, the house edge is something like legalized cheating: results are biased against the player. And, while social players have for thousands of years used a host of practices, devices and legerdemain to get an unfair advantage over their peers, and illegal ‘bust out joints’ have not been shy about using similar tactics, this is not what the house edge is. Rather, the house edge is the difference between the true odds of an outcome and the payoff offered to the player. Taking the game of double zero roulette as an example: on each spin, the ball will land in one of thirty-eight slots on the wheel. These slots are numbered one to thirty-six, with an additional zero and double zero. Eighteen of the numbered slots are red, while the other eighteen are black. Zero and double zero are green. There are a range of different possibilities: column, corner, street and split bets are just a few, but for the purposes of demonstration, we will consider a bet placed on a single number, five. In theory, the number five should come up once in every thirty-eight spins. Practice, in the short run, is different, but in the long term, it should, barring cheating or other connivance, approach the theoretical model. In this case, imagine that we spin the wheel and drop the ball exactly thirtyeight times, wagering one unit (which can be a dollar, five dollars, ten euros, or whatever currency is handy). Thirty-seven times, a number other than five will be the result. The thirty-eighth time, however, five comes up. If the game of double zero roulette operated under Cardano’s fundamental principle of equality, that winning bet would be paid 37 to 1; this is the true odds of the game, since, having lost thirty-seven units previously, profiting by thirty-seven units while keeping our original bet will put us absolutely even with our starting point. We began with one unit, and end with one unit net. But mercantile gambling does not operate under the fundamental principle of equality. Instead, it is based on an inherent inequality. Because double zero roulette customarily pays off a straight, single number bet at

47

48

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

35 to 1. The two-unit difference between the true odds (37 to 1) and the given odds (35 to 1) are the house edge. These two units give the house a theoretical advantage of 5.26 per cent, meaning that in a mathematically balanced world, the house will keep 5.26 per cent of all money bet. In other words, if we bet $1 on 100 spins of the wheel, we will walk away with $94.74 while the casino keeps $5.26. Or, to put it another way, in a game with a house edge of 5.26 per cent, the house expects to keep about one of every twenty units bet. Naturally, there is no calculable house edge on games of pure skill, like chess. While it is possible to handicap a match, perhaps even with a high degree of accuracy, there is simply no known way to achieve the same level of mathematical near-certain profitability that a game like roulette could deliver. So for both private enterprises and government to make mercantile gambling work, thereby channelling the public desire for gambling into profit and public gain, they would have to weed out games of skill. Mercantile gambling spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lotteries became popular, and were frequently authorized by governments to defray municipal expenses and in support of civic, charitable and even private institutions (Schwartz, 2006: 88). Card games on the mercantile model also appeared. One of the first, Lansquenet, dates from the sixteenth century. In the game, players bet against the bank on the suits of cards dealt (Schwartz, 2006: 93). Such games initially operated either illegally or in an unsanctioned grey market. They progressed from something like social games, conducted between acquaintances or at least peers, to nakedly commercial operations. In Venice, for example, nobles started hosting gambling parties in their ridotti in the mid- to late sixteenth century. By the end of the century, however, the nobles had begun hiring professional dealers and allowing any interested parties to gamble. After a few decades of unsuccessful attempts at prohibition, Venice’s Great Council in 1638 voted to legalize gambling in a single municipally sanctioned institution, the Ridotto in the San Moise Palace. The Great Council’s motivation was as much fiscal as it was moral: the city had been supporting the Barnabots, a clan of impoverished nobles, and to relive the burden gave the Barnabots the Ridotto gambling franchise (Schwartz, 2013, 9–11). The Great Council’s edict in theory let everyone come out ahead: the city got to trim its budget, the Barnabots got a steady income and the public had a presumably honest and safe place to gamble.

To Skill, Perchance to Win

From Venice, the concept of a government-sanctioned place where professionals conducted mercantile games spread across Europe, under the name ‘casino’. Frequently located in spas in small, resource-poor jurisdictions, these casinos were typically authorized for the explicit purpose of bringing visitors and revenue into an area. There were some exceptions: Paris developed a thriving gambling scene that endured the Revolution only to be shuttered with the prohibition of all French gambling in 1837. Primarily, though, European casino gambling was confined to smaller principalities eager for any kind of economic development. The rise of the casino at Monte Carlo in the late nineteenth century was the apotheosis of the grand spa resort, though the idea would be applied around the world in cities as diverse as Macau, Las Vegas and Atlantic City, as well as tribal lands in the United States. These casinos were powered by mercantile gambling, which was in turn built on a foundation of chance, not skill. That’s not to say that mercantile gambling pushed out social games and that all gambling became rigidly defined by chance. Quite the contrary: as mercantile gambling grew, social gambling also evolved. Whist, hailed as the ‘British national game’, developed out of a game called trump (Parlett). By the time of Charles Cotton’s The Compleat Gamester (1674), it was known alternately as ruff and honours, slamm and whist, the name that would stick with it from there on out (51). Ruff, according to Cotton, was a game ‘that every Child almost of eight Years old hath a competent Knowledge in’ (52), and whist was a close variation. As a trick-taking game, ruff and its variants (including whist) required a level of skill. Cotton goes on to discuss various ways of cheating at the game, and even speaks of ‘a sort of cunning fellows about this City [London]’ who played with marked cards (56). This game, which high enough sums to create a cottage industry of cheats were wagered, was one with a major skill component, as were other card games that Cotton discussed. As with chess and billiards, which Parlett also discussed, whist was a strictly social, not mercantile game. Whist would eventually evolve into bridge, in which gambling is eliminated or played for low stakes (Parlett), but another social game would, if anything, be played for higher stakes as it evolved. Poker developed out of the French game poque in and near New Orleans in the early tenth century (McManus, 2009: 55). The game has expanded tremendously since then, with variants like draw, stud and holdem each

49

50

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

having its adherents, and it has become a global phenomenon. Despite its high stakes, it is categorically not a mercantile game: although it can be played in casinos and card rooms, players don’t bet against the house. Instead, they wager against each other. The house takes a percentage of each pot (called the rake) in order to defray its expenses. Casinos do not make much money from poker; in 2017, for example, Nevada casinos collected a total of $118 million from poker players, just over 1 per cent of their total $11.6 billion gaming win in that year (Schwartz, 2018: 2). Still, poker is a popular game, with millions of players worldwide. While poker has a large chance element, it is still a game in which skill plays an important part. The debate over whether poker is primarily a contest of skill or luck is an old one, but the viability of poker-playing as a profession indicates that skill is, at minimum, present, and at most a determining factor. And, unlike chess and bridge, where high-stakes gambling is not the norm, and belying the miniscule amounts casinos make from the game, poker is among the highest-stakes gambles available. The 2018 World Series of Poker’s Main Event featured 7,874 players vying for a seat at the final table, which guaranteed a million-dollar payday. The winner of the tournament collected $8.8 million (World Series of Poker, 2018). In this case, and any others where money changes hands at a poker table, it would be outrageous to argue that skill and gambling are not compatible. But while gamblers are seemingly just as happy to wager on contests of skill as they are games of chance, gambling businesses, for the reasons explained earlier, invariably prefer their customers to play games with few or no skill elements.

The business of making money In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mercantile gambling would expand dramatically, in both legal and illegal regimes. In Europe, unsanctioned gambling flourished in taverns and dedicated gambling houses, while spa resorts replicated Venice’s legalization of casino gambling. The game that predominated in nineteenth-century spa resorts was roulette, a game of pure chance. Roulette, which developed out of earlier wheel games, first appeared in Paris around the year 1796. Within two decades, it would become ‘the chief engine propelling gaming funds

To Skill, Perchance to Win

into the French Treasury’ (Barnhart, 1987: 1). It had the benefit of being a game that in reality had no skill element, since each spin of the wheel, as an independent event, had no correlation to the events before it. For this reason, the many ‘systems’ that tried to beat roulette by predicting more likely wins have all failed, to the delight of gaming proprietors (Schwartz, 2006: 310–5). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an increase in industrialization and mechanization that profoundly changed culture and consumption. Phonograph records, radio and motion pictures were each technologies that allowed media to be consumed on a larger scale, as live entertainment could be replaced by cheaper mechanically reproduced or remote versions. The slot machine, developed in the 1890s, applied this same principle to gambling. This device, which accepted money, determined winners and paid them without need for a human operator, streamlined the process of gambling. Over the next several decades, slot machines became increasingly sophisticated, but their general premise – players bet money, activate the machine and await the results. Slot machines, with one notable exception, video poker, are entirely chancebased games. In the computer-driven machines currently on casino floors, game results are based on a random number generator. Although the player is free to choose the amount bet, and, indeed, whether she bets or not, there is no strategy that can influence the outcome of the game. Slot machines are the ideal game for casinos and other mercantile gambling operators because they are extremely labour efficient and entirely chance based. Since there is no skill involved, the only barrier to entry for players is money. As a result, slot machines have become an extremely popular form of gambling. In Nevada, the most mature casino gaming market in the United States, slot machines accounted for 64 per cent of total gaming win in 2017. In the high-repeat, locals-oriented Boulder Strip reporting area, 88 per cent of gaming win came from slots that year (Schwartz, 2018: 2, 5). Over the past century-plus, designers have refined slot machines into chance-based gambling devices that have driven the expansion of the American casino industry. Yet even casinos cannot purge skill entirely from the games they offer. While slot machines and games like craps, baccarat and roulette deliver the bulk of the revenues, casinos still offer games with skill elements. Video poker, in which player strategy in selecting and holding cards can have a definite impact on expected return, is the best electronic example.

51

52

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

In fact, with a favourable pay table, a player executing perfect strategy can have an expected return of over 100 per cent, meaning that theoretically, the house advantage is replaced by a player advantage. While in the short run and with the limited bankrolls available to players, consistent winning is not guaranteed, these machines, in theory, break the cardinal rule of mercantile gambling, ‘the house always wins’. Casinos continue to offer these games because very few players, in fact, are able to play them perfectly, and in most cases the machines retain their house edge. Blackjack, a card game, has an even more pronounced skill element. In the game, while the dealer must hit and stand according to rigid rules, the player is free to hit, split, double down or stand at will. Since there are a limited number of outcomes, certain decisions by players, while they don’t guarantee victory, over the long run would produce an optimal return. This is blackjack’s basic strategy, a series of rules about how to play a hand based on the player’s cards and the dealer’s up card. Basic strategy requires the skill to memorize and recall the optimal play in each situation, and it has a consequential effect on the game. A player following the dealer’s strategy, for example (drawing with a sixteen or lower, holding above that) is playing a game with a house edge of about 5.5 per cent. One following basic strategy, on the other hand, is playing a game that is effective even, with no discernable advantage to the house (Griffin, 1986: 17–8). But there is another dimension to blackjack skill play, one that can turn the game into one that favours the player. Since blackjack is played from a finite set of cards, the game has a memory. For example, if, in a game of single-deck blackjack, all aces have already been dealt, she knows she has no chance of hitting a natural blackjack (a ten-value card plus an ace), which in a traditional game pays three-to-two. Card counting is an attempt by players to track how many high-value cards (tens and aces) remain in the deck, raising their bets when the deck’s composition shifts to a theoretical advantage to the player (Griffin, 1986: 40–1). Since the popularization of card counting following the 1962 publication of Edward Thorp’s Beat the Dealer, casinos have tried many anti-counting countermeasures, but have not stopped offering the game (although some have changed its payouts), for the simple reason that players enjoy it, and most have a better confidence of their ability to count cards than is justified by their performance. Thus, while casinos and other mercantile gambling operators strongly prefer their games to be devoid of skill, there is a long history of operators

To Skill, Perchance to Win

tolerating games with large skill elements. Skill play may be discouraged, and successful skill play is typically seen in a dim light by casino executives, but there is no categorical prohibition against skill games on the casino floor. Gaming manufacturers are currently investing a great deal of money and effort into building ‘skill games’. These may be video games with gambling elements added or social games with betting components. It is telling that these games are promoted as completely novel ways for casinos to lure millennials and other younger gamblers into their properties. In actuality, however, the idea of a ‘skill game’ on a casino floor is not new. In fact, two extremely popular games, video poker and blackjack, have thrived due to their skill elements for decades. The line between skill and chance may be significantly thinner than is sometimes assumed. Sports betting, which has been around as long as sports themselves, is considered by many to be a game with a skill element. By definition, the outcome of the sporting events is the product of chance, but a bettor who has a good understanding of a team, or is able to exploit differences in betting odds offered by different bookmakers, has a chance of consistently beating the house. In general, players lose more than they win over time, but sports book operators acknowledge the existence of ‘sharps’ or ‘wise guys’, frequently refusing or limiting their bets. That some operators concede that some players have a better chance of winning than others seems to be an empirical proof that skill has a role in sports betting. For decades, the notion that skilled bettors had the ability to hurt the sports book was accepted by those whose profitability depended on maximizing the bets they took while minimizing their risk. Skill in sports betting was not a controversial notion. The rise of daily fantasy sports in 2014 and 2015 challenged the notion that sports betting was skill based. Due to legal restrictions on the expansion of sports betting in the United States, companies offering daily fantasy sports – in which a bettor selects a roster of players each day and wins or loses depending on how those players perform – argued that they offered games of skill, not chance. In a 2015 guest op/ed for the Legal Sports Report, the chief operating officer of DFS provider Star Fantasy Leagues, Seth Young, asserted that, as a game of skill, DFS was not subject to gambling regulations or restricted. He claimed that ‘any operator’ accepted that ‘these games are, at the course, skill-based games’ (Young, 2015). To prove this, Young’s company commissioned a third party a run a simulation that determined that ‘skilled’ players beat players who picked

53

54

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

their team at random nearly 70 per cent of the time. Young considered this a vindication of the skill-based (and therefore legal) nature of his product, even conceding that, ‘as a customer, I don’t’ care how it’s classified. As a business, the results of this study help to show it’s classified correctly’ (Young, 2015). In other words, whether chance or skill dominated DFS was not a matter of player preference, but was only important for the legal carve-out a skill basis could give his business. Curiously, after the Supreme Court’s May 2018 overturning of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which had prevented states from legalizing new sports gambling, major DFS operators stopped arguing that they provided games of skill that were not gambling and embraced the opportunity to offer gambling. Matt King, CEO of DFS powerhouse FanDuel, said the following month that it was, ‘a bit of a fallacy to think of it as two products because the reality is that what it ends up being is a continuum’ (Grossman, 2018). By July, FanDuel had opened a sports book at the Meadowlands Racetrack in Northern New Jersey (Rovell and Purdum, 2018). In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, the pretence that skill-dominated games were categorically different from other gambling games seemingly collapsed.

Conclusion Thus, while there have been sharp distinctions drawn between games of chance and games of skill, in fact both have co-existed in the gambling world for millennia. Distinctions between the two varieties of games, and attempts to classify games as one or the other rather than along a skill/ chance spectrum, are relatively recent and, in many cases, self-serving. For that reason, it may be time to stop classifying games as strictly games of chance or games of skill, but to simply acknowledge that many primarily chance-dependent games have important elements of skill, and vice versa. In social gambling, skill and chance-based games existed on fairly even footing, with betting on games as diverse as dice and chess common into the early modern period. The rise of mercantile gambling in the early modern period gave gaming operators an incentive to favour chance games over skill ones. While games of pure skill like chess have never been offered by casinos, some operators do profit by offering poker (although

To Skill, Perchance to Win

they don’t directly take bets on it), and some of the most widely played casino games (most prominently, sports betting, blackjack and video poker) have skill elements as well. In many cases, these skill elements are sufficient to make it possible for players to flip the advantage from casino to player, under the right circumstances. Skill gaming is not a new innovation, but rather has a longer history than many games of pure chance. The history of how those who offer gambling and those who consume it have zigzagged across the chance/ skill continuum is an instructive one, and not merely because it is interesting. As technology enables new ways to gamble (daily fantasy sports will likely not be the last game that new ways of communicating make possible), it is likely that new games will enjoy a mix of skill and chance. Purely chance-based games have a limited depth: a player initiates the randomizing interface (which may be a classic one-armed bandit or a loot box) and either gets a prize or does not. Games that mingle skill and chance might offer genuinely novel gameplay, rather than the simple reskinning of an age-old game. So the history of gambling, particularly how skill and chance coexisted, has value for today – and tomorrow. How players and operators succeeded and failed in negotiating that continuum may, in the end, hold some clues for how gambling will continue to evolve.

References Barnhart, R. 1987. The Invention of Roulette. New York: Russell T. Barnhart. Bellhouse, D. 2005. ‘Decoding Cardano’s Liber de Ludo Aleae’. Historia Mathematica, 32(1). Accessed at https​:/​/ww​​w​.sci​​enced​​irect​​.com/​​scien​​ce​/ ar​​ticle​​/pii/​​S0315​​0​8600​​40004​​00# Cardano, G. (Jerome Cardan). 1930. The Book of My Life, trans. J. Stoner. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company. Cardano, G. 1961. The Book on Games of Chance, trans. S. H. Gould. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Cotton, C. 1674. The Compleat Gamester, Fifth edn. London: J. Wilford. Accessed at https​:/​/bo​​oks​.g​​oogle​​.com/​​books​​?id​=6​​-lYAA​​AAYAA​​J​&pri​​ntsec​​ =fron​​tcove​​r​&sou​​rce​=g​​bs​_ge​​_summ​​ary​_r​​&ca​d=​​0​#v​=onepage​&q​&f​=false Golladay, S. M., trans. Alfonso X’s Book of Games. Accessed at https​:/​/bo​​oks​ .g​​oogle​​.com/​​books​​?id​=6​​-lYAA​​AAYAA​​J​&pri​​ntsec​​=fron​​tcove​​r​&sou​​rce​=g​​

55

56

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

bs​_ge​​_summ​​ary​_r​​&ca​d=​​0​#v​=onepage​&q​&f​=false http:​/​/jns​​ilva.​​ludic​​um​ .or​​g​/HJT​​2012/​​Booko​​​fGame​​s​.pdf​ Griffiin, P. 1986. Theory of Blackjack: The Compleat Card Counter’s Guide to the Casino Games of 21, 3rd edn. Davis: Faculty Publishing. Grossman, E. 2018. ‘How FanDuel and DraftKings are taking aim at the world of sports gambling: “The whole marketplace is going to evolve”’. New York Daily News, 29 June 2018. Accessed at http:​/​/www​​.nyda​​ilyne​​ ws​.co​​m​/spo​​rts​/m​​ore​-s​​ports​​/ny​-s​​ports​​-fand​​uel​-d​​raftk​​ings-​​sport​​s​-bet​​tin​ g-​​20180​​628​-s​​tory.​​html McManus, J. 2009. Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Murray, H. J. R. 1913. A History of Chess. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ore, O. 1965. Cardano: The Gambling Scholar. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Parlett, D. ‘Bridge: Card game’. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Accessed at: https​:/​ /ww​​w​.bri​​tanni​​ca​.co​​m​/top​​ic​/br​​idge​-​​card-​​game Parlett, D. ‘Whist: Card game’. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Accessed at https:// www​.britannica​.com​/topic​/whist Rovell, D. and Purdum, D. 2018. ‘FanDuel to open sportsbook at Meadowlands in New Jersey’. ESPN, 12 July 2018. Accessed at http:​/​/www​​ .espn​​.com/​​chalk​​/stor​​y/_​/i​​d​/240​​77347​​/fand​​uel​-o​​pen​-s​​ports​​book-​​meado​​ wland​​s​-ra​c​​etrac​​k​-new​​-jers​​ey Schwartz, D. G. 2006. Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling. New York: Gotham Books. Schwartz, D. G. 2013. Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling. Casino Edition. Las Vegas: Winchester Books. Schwartz, D. G. 2018. Nevada Gaming Win 2017. Las Vegas: Center for Gaming Research, University Libraries, University of Nevada Las Vegas. World Series of Poker. 2018. Main Event – By the Numbers – 49th Annual World Series of Poker. Press release, Caesars Entertainment. Young, S. 2015. ‘I believe daily fantasy sports is a game of skill, and here’s the proof ’. Legal Sports Report, 2 April 2015. Accessed at https​:/​/ww​​w​.leg​​alspo​​ rtsre​​port.​​com​/8​​20​/vi​​ew​-wh​​y​-dfs​​-is​-a​​​-game​​-of​-s​​kill/​

Part II Poker 4

5 6

‘An hour’s commercial for the Horseshoe’: Popular memory, sports television and the World Series of Poker Be a Pal: Women’s intrusions into men’s poker play on TV sitcoms Poker fiction: Romance, possible worlds and magic circles

58

4 ‘An hour’s commercial for the Horseshoe’ Popular memory, sports television and the World Series of Poker Alexander Kupfer

Chapter Outline Prehistory of the WSOP Professionalizing the WSOP New celebrities and the WSOP on TV Henri Bollinger The worldwide leader The Moneymaker effect New owners

61 63 65 70 73 75 76

In February 2018, ESPN announced that it would broadcast daily coverage of the World Series of Poker (WSOP) $10,000 buy-in NoLimit Texas Hold ’Em Championship tournament. In blocks of airtime

60

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

ranging from two to five hours, the event, also known as the Main Event or World Championship, aired nearly live on ESPN or ESPN2 daily from 2 July to 14 July. (Gaming regulations mandated a thirty-minute delay to allow the hole cards to be revealed.) This was a significant increase in the company’s coverage to poker. ‘We’ve never had this everyday live coverage’, explained Seth Palansky, WSOP vice president of corporate communications. ‘It’s the biggest commitment we’ve had in terms of televising the event’ (Dewey, 2018). The World Series of Poker began in 1970 at the Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in downtown Las Vegas. The WSOP consists of multiple tournaments, covering a range of poker variations. The Main Event has always been the largest tournament within the Series, and has received the lion’s share of media and public attention each year. Today, the WSOP would be hardly recognizable to Benny Binion, who brought the event to Las Vegas to promote the Horseshoe’s high-limit gambling. In 2018 ESPN telecast over 40 hours of live WSOP coverage, and planned to air an additional 130 hours of originally produced episodes (Card Player, 2018). The scale of ESPN’s coverage reflects the enormity of the Main Event, as John Cynn won $8.8 million for outlasting over 7,800 entrants. By contrast, in 1973, when the WSOP was broadcast for the first time on television, Walter ‘Puggy’ Pearson defeated thirteen other entrants to win the $130,000 winner-take-all prize for first place. The popularity of televised poker, particularly the WSOP, has increased tremendously over the years, and has become a prevalent genre of sports television in its own right. Yet, the genre’s capacity to invoke and shape representations of Las Vegas and poker history remains underexplored. The discourses used in the television coverage of the WSOP and Benny Binion have made the tournament and televised poker ‘useful’ for corporations like ESPN and Caesars Entertainment (which purchased the Horseshoe and the WSOP in 2004) that have transformed the WSOP into a major sporting event.1 Television has historically played a central role in legitimating the WSOP as a sporting event through shaping the popular memory of the event’s history and Benny Binion. Popular memory, as

The Binion’s Horseshoe collection at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, contains extensive print and audiovisual material related to the WSOP and the Casino. Binion’s Horseshoe Casino Records on Poker, 1960–2002. MS-00325. Special Collections, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada. 1

‘An Hour’s Commercial for the Horseshoe’

Lynn Spigel contends, is ‘history for the present, it is a mode of historical consciousness that speaks to the concerns of contemporary life’ (Spigel, 2001: 363). The tournament organizers along with the media covering the event invoked and organized the memories of the WSOP through rewriting Binion’s criminal past and positioning the Horseshoe at the centre of poker culture in the United States. Many of the key narratives that have historically been used to discuss the WSOP and poker more generally came directly from the Horseshoe’s publicity efforts, especially the work of public relations directors Jimmy ‘the Greek’ Snyder followed by Henri Bollinger. Yet, because the WSOP has always been a public event, the process by which poker history has been constructed and refined has been largely overlooked. This chapter examines the intersection of poker history and television and the way that the popular memory of Binion and poker culture in the United States has been promoted and maintained through television. An analysis of the television coverage of the WSOP Main Event in its first thirty-five years reveals how the relationship between casinos and media has shifted over time, and shaped the perception of the tournament and Binion’s Horseshoe by the poker community and the public.

Prehistory of the WSOP The history of the WSOP goes back nearly half a century, and even its earliest moments have been intertwined with the media. Historical accounts of the WSOP consistently foreground the importance of an early promotional gimmick by Benny Binion where he set up a public high-stakes poker game in order to publicize his new casino. This is often accompanied by the recognition that Binion was the first to recognize that poker could be a spectator sport since the public wanted to see top players challenging each other with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars at stake. Binion had arrived from Dallas in 1946 with a lengthy rap sheet after having been accused or convicted of serious crimes including illegal gambling, bootlegging and even two murders. He used the money he made running illegal craps and policy numbers games to invest in the Las Vegas Club on Fremont Street. After some tension with his partners, Binion opened The Westerner Casino in the same space after the Las

61

62

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Vegas Club moved across the street. In 1951, he would purchase the El Dorado Club, and rename it Binion’s Horseshoe Casino. At the Westerner, Binion set up a no-limit poker game between Nick ‘the Greek’ Dandalos and Johnny Moss at the entrance of the casino. Although considered to be one of the seminal events in poker history, differing accounts of the match continue to circulate in books, in articles, and on television. Many of the basic facts of the Dandalos-Moss game are in dispute, including the exact date and even the location.2 As the mostrecounted version of the story goes, Dandalos arrived in Las Vegas in 1949 after claiming to have won $60 million and busted every high-stakes gambler on the East Coast. He asked Binion to set up a one-on-one, nolimit winner take all game. Recognizing the potential publicity opportunity, Binion agreed to arrange a match on the condition that the game would be played on the casino floor, in full view of the public. Benny asked his friend Johnny Moss, a Dallas poker player, to fly out. Surrounded by huge crowds, the two men played virtually non-stop from January to May, until Moss won all of Dandalos’ money, between $2 and $3 million. Afterwards, Moss claimed that Dandalos stood up and delivered the Bogart-esque coda to the event, ‘Mr. Moss, I have to let you go’ (Jenkins, 1981: 10). Poker historians and bloggers have questioned the historical significance of the game because of the problems and inconsistencies that have emerged over the years (McManus, 2009: 241). They have for instance challenged fundamental assumptions of the game’s influence including that the MossDandalos match-up was a massive publicity boon to Binion. There do not seem to be any written accounts or photographs of the game while it was taking place. Michael Craig has pointed out that there were no references to the game in Dandalos’ front-page obituaries in both the Las Vegas Sun and Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1966. And the game is not mentioned in a Life magazine profile published shortly after Dandalos’s death (O’Neil, 1967). Despite the supposed importance of their game to the prehistory of the WSOP, Binion himself rarely referenced it. For instance, in two lengthy

The game most likely occurred in 1949 at the Westerner casino, but because the Horseshoe later became so closely associated with high-stakes poker, many continue to incorrectly assume it took place there in 1951. 2

‘An Hour’s Commercial for the Horseshoe’

oral history interviews in the 1970s, Benny never brings up the game even though he discusses Dandalos along with numerous key moments in the early history of the Westerner and the Horseshoe.3 While these major questions remain, the stories about Moss and Dandalos continue to circulate. Taken as a whole, they illustrate how fact and fiction become intertwined in poker history, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of recreating well-plotted narratives of these events. Especially outside of the WSOP, poker developed in extralegal contexts where media coverage was something to be actively avoided. As a result, participant bias, mythologizing, and incomplete memories have shaped subsequent recollections of poker’s growth. This illustrates Dominick La Capra’s contention that the documentary record in any historical account is not a neutral record of data, but has been ‘textually processed before any historian comes to it’ (LaCapra, 1985: 35). Whether they had intentionally meant to deceive or not, the sources who developed and shared the stories of Moss and Dandalos serve as a reminder of how embedded poker history is within particular narrative strategies. The mythology around the game has bolstered Binion’s legacy in two key ways. First, it reinforces the Horseshoe’s claim to being the centre of American poker culture after the Second World War (even if the game took place at the Westerner). Second, the legend offers a teleological rereading of the success of the WSOP, crediting Benny Binion with having the foresight to see how high-stakes poker could be a useful way to promote his Horseshoe casino and a popular spectator sport. This not only highlights the blurry nature of recollections about poker’s history, but also how its past has been written and rewritten to prioritize certain narratives.

Professionalizing the WSOP In his book the Biggest Game in Town, Al Alvarez contends that in the first years of the WSOP, ‘everything about the occasion was amateur except

Perry Kaufman, ‘Interview with Benny Binion’, Oral History Interview, c. 1975–77; Lester Ben ‘Benny’ Binion, ‘Some Recollections of a Texas and Las Vegas Gambling Operator’, Mary Ellen Glass, Collector, Reno: University of Nevada Oral History Program, 1973. Both are located in Binion’s Horseshoe Records, UNLV. 3

63

64

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

the players’ (Alvarez, 1983: 73). It even took time to set the now-familiar structure of the tournaments. The first World Series in 1970 did not involve a tournament. Rather, Johnny Moss was voted ‘best all-around player’ by his fellow participants after several days of high-stakes cash games. Ted Thackery, a feature writer for the Los Angeles Times, and one of the few media members to cover the inaugural event, suggested to Binion that he needed to turn the WSOP in an actual sporting event to get the attention of the press. ‘You’ve got to find some way to make it a contest’, Thackery suggested, ‘create some drama, and make it a real tournament’ (Grotenstein and Rebcak, 2005: 24). The WSOP moved to a freeze-out structure the following year, a tournament where players cannot rebuy if they are out of chips and which is played until one player remains. This opened up the potential for any entrant, pro or amateur, to win the event. It also provided a narrative structure, with a clear beginning, middle and climactic end resulting in a definitive winner. This potential for a dramatic finish became even more important with the televising of the Main Event since the networks typically only covered either the final table (the final nine players) or even just the ‘television final table’ (the last six players). The freeze-out structure helped ensure high-stakes showdowns that would play well on the air. As part of the WSOP’s professionalization and transformation into a sports media event, Jimmy Snyder, a well-known bookie and television sports personality, handled the tournament’s publicity. Snyder was best known as a co-host of CBS’s The NFL Today pregame show where he would predict the scores of the upcoming games. He had volunteered to promote the WSOP for free to further his new public relations business. With Snyder’s guidance, the Horseshoe actively courted reporters, including offering to pay for their trip to cover the World Series. At the 1972 WSOP, there was not only a special section close to the action set up for reporters, but Benny spent much of the tournament regaling them with jokes and stories of his illicit past. The reporters were enamoured with the folksy Texan and even in the 1970s considered him to be a relic of ‘old’ Las Vegas. Benny was selfeffacing and a remarkably charming person who could rally people to support his ideas. Former WSOP publicity director Tex Whitson recalled that ‘Benny could talk to a post and get information’.4 Binion claimed that the World Series received mention in 7,000 newspapers that year, with many

Tex Whitson Oral History Interview, 4 September 2015. Binion’s Horseshoe Records, UNLV.

4

‘An Hour’s Commercial for the Horseshoe’

of them focusing on his outsized personality.5 Although the number of publications cited by Benny was likely apocryphal, he was unquestionably a central topic in articles about the WSOP, cementing his role as the public face of poker in the United States.

New celebrities and the WSOP on TV The first widespread exposure that the World Series had on television did not come from the tournament itself, but rather through Thomas Austin Preston, better known as Amarillo Slim. The gregarious and affable Texan was a renowned high-stakes gambler and winner of the 1972 WSOP Main Event. The 1972 WSOP was an intimate affair with only eight entrants, who each put up a $5,000 entry fee. It was not broadcast on television, but a video camera was placed over the poker table to relay the action via closed-circuit televisions placed throughout the casino for the crowds that came to watch. Binion matched the entry fee, raising the prize pool to $80,000 for the winner, since he believed that a nice round number of a $10,000 buy-in made for more impressive newspaper headlines. After winning the title, Slim became a touring ambassador for poker, making dozens of television and radio appearances, and had a cameo in Robert Altman’s California Split (1974). Given an audience, Slim tirelessly promoted himself, poker and the Horseshoe, and helped cement the association between high-stakes poker and the casino for the American public. This strategy seems to have been preplanned. In his 2003 autobiography, Slim claimed that Benny told him to promote poker since, ‘You’re the only sonofabitch that can get this off the ground’. Several other casino owners then asked him to help clean up poker’s reputation and legitimate it by explaining to the public how poker required incredible skill, and not just luck (Preston and Dinkin, 2003: 174). Slim discussed gambling on The Tonight Show eleven different times, 60 Minutes three

Lester Ben ‘Benny’ Binion, ‘Some Recollections of a Texas and Las Vegas Gambling Operator’, Mary Ellen Glass, Collector, Reno: University of Nevada Oral History Program, 1973. Binion’s Horseshoe Casino Records on Poker, 1960–2002. MS-00325. Special Collections, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada. 5

65

66

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

times, along with Good Morning America and the Mike Douglas Show. He was also on the game shows To Tell the Truth, What’s My Line, and I’ve Got a Secret. Slim became such a renowned celebrity that poker lessons from him were even the featured product in the Neiman Marcus catalogue shortly after he won the WSOP title. The lessons cost $50,000, more than half the prize pool for the 1972 championship (Preston and Dinkin, 2003: 175). Slim’s constant presence on television was another sign of the growing prestige associated with the World Series Main Event title as well as the growing interest in poker as a spectator sport. Slim’s success as a television personality also pushed Binion towards the medium. After accidently neglecting to mention the Horseshoe Casino during one of his Tonight Show stints, Slim arranged for a joint appearance with an initially reluctant Binion on NBC’s The Tomorrow Show, a latenight talk show hosted by Tom Snyder. On 29 May 1974, the two men put on what Slim described as ‘an hour’s commercial for the Horseshoe’ (Swanson, 2014: 265–5). Benny used the opportunity to explain to a national audience his casino’s uniqueness in his own folksy way. Snyder asked at one point, ‘Why is it that these places out there on the Strip in Vegas have a $500 limit and you’ve got no limit?’ To which Benny replied, ‘Well, they got great big hotels and little biddy bankrolls. I got a little biddy hotel and a great big bankroll.’ Benny must have considered the appearance a success since two years later he went on the Merv Griffin Show, along with poker pro Jack Straus and actor Jack Klugman, best known as the poker-playing Oscar Madison on the CBS’s The Odd Couple. He was a guest on the show again in 1979, this time with the previous year’s WSOP champion Bobby Baldwin. Benny and Slim used these talk shows to shape their versions of the popular memory of the WSOP, all while promoting and framing the significance of the tournament for the public. Following Amarillo Slim’s media blitz, the 1973 Main Event was the first poker tournament to be filmed for television. The increasing mainstream interest in the WSOP at the time was further evidenced by a lengthy New York Times profile of the event. The piece opened with Amarillo Slim joking around with some of the 250 spectators gathered at Binion’s. Slim was famous enough that the author of the piece did not feel that it was necessary to explain who he was. Slim even seemed to be more widely known than the game of no limit hold ’em, as the piece explained the rules of hold ’em in detail, including the unlimited bet sizes, since the variation of poker was ‘all but unknown in the East’ (NYT, 1973).

‘An Hour’s Commercial for the Horseshoe’

For the 1973 telecast, Jimmy Snyder served in the dual capacity of executive producer and narrator of the taped hour-long special that aired on CBS. It followed the action as the thirteen entrants were whittled down over two days to just Puggy Pearson. The special was visually and acoustically distinct from subsequent WSOP television broadcasts: the filmmakers used handheld cameras that were constantly in motion, panning and titling around the tables and the surrounding crowd.6 Zoom lenses were frequently employed for close-ups of hands riffling poker chips or the faces of anxious players as they contemplate their next move. The WSOP special employed an ‘observational style’, or what documentary scholar Bill Nichols defines as a mode, ‘characterized by indirect address, speech overheard rather than heard since the social actors engage with one another rather than speak to the camera’ (Nichols, 1991: 39). This style provided viewers with what Nichols describes as, ‘a shared, historical construct. Instead of a world, we are offered access to the world’ (Nichols, 1991: 109). The CBS Special evokes the images and sounds of the direct cinema documentaries of Robert Drew or the Maysles Brothers. The microphones pick up the different speakers, while the ambient soundscape of Horseshoe is prominent in the background. Along with Snyder’s voice-over narration, we hear constant murmur of the crowd, clattering of chips and the players talking among themselves. Along with following the inherent drama and excitement of the Main Event, the stylistic choices give audiences closer access to the players along with the world of the Horseshoe during the WSOP. The emphasis on the ambience at the WSOP enabled Snyder to directly integrate a lengthy advertisement for the Horseshoe Casino into the CBS Special. Over a montage of people gambling, Snyder explains that Binion’s games appeal to all: From the nickel slot players to the dollar blackjack enthusiasts to those who are willing to pit their luck in the highest limit crap games in the world. There is no limit in any game as far as Benny Binion is concerned. If you got the money put it on the table, he’ll take the bet.

Handheld cameras were one of the innovations that ABC Sports president Roone Arledge implemented in the 1960s. However, their prevalence and the self-reflexive use of the techniques position for the 1973 WSOP closer to observational documentaries than other types of sports television. 6

67

68

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Anticipating the increased convergence of the Horseshoe’s public relation efforts and the television coverage of the WSOP in the 1980s, Snyder here overtly merged his roles as the Horseshoe’s publicist and executive producer to promote the WSOP and the casino to a national audience on one of the three major broadcast networks. Despite this product placement, the 1973 WSOP Special draws upon the relative cultural value of direct cinema to position tournament poker as more exciting and even more sophisticated than other types of televised sports. Benny made a short, dialogue-free cameo appearance in the 1973 broadcast, watching the action from the stands among the crowd alongside his wife Teddy Jane and his son Ted. The discourses about the WSOP were still in the process of being established, as Snyder first admits, ‘As a spectator sport, poker watching doesn’t rate with some of the great events of this century.’ However, he does acknowledge that it is a unique draw, explaining, ‘It has a fascination all its own. Even Benny Binion, an old homesteader out of Texas, got the family for a close-up look at the action.’ The use of the phrase ‘homesteader’ here is significant, implying that Benny came to Las Vegas as part of the long American tradition of moving to the Western frontier to find a better life, and not to escape his criminal past in Dallas. Both the number of entrants and media coverage of the Main Event steadily increased each year. After Doyle Brunson won back-to-back Main Event titles in 1976 and 1977 – both times holding 10-2 in the final hand to make a full house – newspaper articles across the country discussed the drama and excitement of the WSOP. Thanks to the publicity from Brunson’s victories, the WSOP returned to television in 1978 as part of the CBS Sports Spectacular anthology series. Like its more famous counterpart, ABC’s Wide World of Sports, the CBS series rotated between different events each week, often focusing on less-popular sports like fishing, offroad racing or bull riding. Inspired by the commanding performance of twenty-eight-year-old champion Bobby Baldwin, who would become the youngest player to win the Main Event, hosts Snyder and his NFL Today co-host Brent Musberger emphasized the differences between young and old players. The debate was reduced to a consideration of the differences between mathematically inclined approaches to poker versus more instinctual ones, typically honed by decades of experience. This topic had already been a consistent theme in press releases published by the Horseshoe during this period, as

‘An Hour’s Commercial for the Horseshoe’

well as something that was highlight in print coverage of the WSOP.7 During the 1978 broadcast, former champions Johnny Moss and Pearson were interviewed about the potential threat the younger players posed to the older generation of gamblers. This topic provided a ready-made narrative template while also forging a nostalgic framework for the older Texas road gamblers who were closely associated with Binion (particularly Moss, Slim and Brunson) and who were seemingly under constant threat of being usurped by younger players. CBS returned to the Horseshoe the following year, hoping to exploit the connections between the World Series and Kenny Rogers’ pokerthemed number one single, ‘The Gambler’ The 1979 WSOP telecast opened with a montage set to the song of players arriving and rushing to the Horseshoe. The final shot is Amarillo Slim riding a horse down Fremont Street and handing the reins to Benny in front of the casino. ‘To greet them all’, announcer Frank Glieber explains, ‘the legendary Benny Binion, whose golden rule is those who have the gold make the rules’. Glieber’s comment highlights Benny’s Texas past while also portraying him and his casino as the centre of the poker world to which the players from around the country are drawn. For unclear reasons, the 1979 tournament was Benny’s last appearance in a World Series broadcast, but he continued to be frequently referenced, and discourses about him continued to influence how the event and poker were portrayed on television. The Horseshoe further bolstered its claim to being the centre of poker culture and history when it established the Poker Hall of Fame in 1979. The casino installed plaques honouring each inductee. Among the six members of the inaugural class were Nick ‘the Greek’ Dandolos and Johnny Moss. Over the years, the Hall of Fame inducted many of Binion’s closest friends and associates. (Benny was inducted in 1990 and Jack in 2005.) The Hall of Fame reinforced the idea that success in the WSOP, as opposed to say in high-stakes cash games, is the most important criterion for the determining the legacy and even historical importance of individual poker players.

See for instance, ‘The New Breed vs. The Old School’, 1979 press release; ‘College Educated Youth Graduate to Poker’, 1983 press release; Gasson (May/June 1979): 37–54; (1979). Box 1, Folders 3, 6, 29. Binion’s Horseshoe Records, UNLV. 7

69

70

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

The Hall of Fame once again illustrates how television actively shaped the popular memory of the WSOP. Spigel explains that popular memory diverges from official, professional history since the former acknowledges its subjective and selective status. It is a form of storytelling less concerned with historical ‘accuracy’ than with the uses that memory has for the present (Spigel, 2001: 363). In addition to being another public attraction for the Horseshoe, the Poker Hall of Fame offered a platform for sharing personal memories on television, which again foregrounded the Horseshoe’s importance to poker. The 1979 CBS broadcast, for instance, included an interview with legendary pool player Minnesota Fats in front of the plaques, which he used as a way to discuss the inductees Johnny Moss and other Hall of Famers that he personally knew. The host made no attempt to intervene while Minnesota Fats was speaking, letting him organize the memories of the gamblers for the public. The Hall of Fame display at the Horseshoe served as a physical backdrop for television interviews during the WSOP, as well as a consistent reminder for television viewers and casino visitors of the connection between the casino and poker history.

Henri Bollinger Jimmy Snyder’s plug for the Horseshoe during the 1973 CBS Special was part of a pattern of an increasingly close relationship between the casino and television. The Binions promoted the tournament in part through a set of discourses that helped legitimate the WSOP as a unique sporting event while shaping the popular memory of Benny’s role in the development of poker. In 1978, to further expand media coverage of the tournament and the Horseshoe, the Binions hired highly regarded publicist Henri Bollinger. He had worked extensively in Hollywood, co-producing two features and working for film and television stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Ernie Kovacs and Julie Andrews.8 Each year, Bollinger wrote dozens of press releases for the Horseshoe that established a set of narratives about the

The two features were Fools (Tom Gries, 1975) and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (Juan López Moctezuma, 1975). 8

‘An Hour’s Commercial for the Horseshoe’

World Series, the Horseshoe and Benny. Bollinger also produced the annual World Series television broadcasts. In 1981, after CBS declined to pick up its broadcast option for the WSOP, Bollinger’s Translor Films took over, and produced a one-hour special for syndication. Since it did not have a network home, Translor hired well-known celebrities – renowned sportscaster Curt Gowdy and 1978 WSOP champion Bobby Baldwin – to make the production as appealing as possible to local stations. Jerry Adler, who had produced the WSOP telecasts for CBS, continued to handle the production duties, giving the show a consistent visual and editing style. The Horseshoe’s promotional efforts orchestrated by Bollinger strongly emphasized the ever-expanding role of amateurs and women. This helped make the tournament more inviting to new entrants and even more accessible to a wider public audience when it aired on television. After Hal Fowler became the first amateur to win the Main Event in 1979, numerous press releases touted the uniqueness of the World Series as a sporting event where amateurs could compete directly with top professionals. Bollinger also highlighted notable accomplishments by female poker players each year at the WSOP, and published the proceedings of the annual Women’s Championship tournament, started in 1977. Notably though, other groups that were under-represented at the WSOP, particularly African Americans, did not receive the same treatment from Bollinger or the Horseshoe, and their involvement in the event never took off in the same way. In an appeal to both the viewing public and potential advertisers, Binion’s Horseshoe consistently claimed that there were between forty and fifty million poker players in the United States. This unconfirmed figure was frequently reprinted in newspaper and magazine articles about the WSOP.9 Media about the WSOP also consistently placed Benny within this sizeable group, incorrectly characterizing him as a lifelong highstakes poker player.10 Although he had learned how to play poker and gamble as a teenager, Benny gave up gambling early on. ‘I never was able to play anything, dice or cards, or anything, myself ’, he explained in an

See for instance ‘Poker World Series Triggers Big Boom’, Star International 16.3 (April 1986): 28–9. Box 2 Folder 11, Binion’s Horseshoe Records, UNLV. 10 Gasson (May/June 1979). Box 1 Folder 3, Binion’s Horseshoe Records, UNLV. 9

71

72

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

interview. ‘I never was a real good poker player.’11 And certainly after he got to Las Vegas, there is no evidence to suggest that he played poker. But the Horseshoe publicity efforts transformed his behaviour to complement pre-established narratives. This revisionism aligned Binion’s past with the Horseshoe’s desire to be the potential home for all poker players in the country, not just the high-stakes gamblers. Bollinger sought to legitimate the World Series of Poker as a televised sporting event by associating it with well-established individual championships. One press release used consistently over the years, titled ‘Poker as Sport – a New Idea’, compared the WSOP to Wimbledon, the Indianapolis 500 and the Masters.12 And if the World Series was a sports media event, it would follow logically that the participants should be considered athletes as well. This was a significant change from just a few years prior, when during the 1973 CBS broadcast Snyder explained, ‘Maybe poker isn’t anything like a physical game, but the wear and tear of the grind chips away at a man’s nerve center.’ The WSOP press kits in the 1980s constructed identities for poker players as athletes by touting their physical training to prepare for the strain of the event. These press releases sought to counter the perception of professional poker players as slovenly, out-of-shape, degenerate gamblers by highlighting how they engaged in rigorous training to build stamina and prepare for the physical and mental roll of the gruelling WSOP tournaments. The discursive positioning of poker players as athletes was directly incorporated into the television coverage, including the 1987 WSOP broadcast, which was again produced by Translor. One segment that year showed players engaged in conditioning routines to ‘keep them mentally and physically alert’. Houston car dealer Jesse Alto jogs down Fremont Street, and Sven Arndsen, a former Norwegian Olympian, works out with a trainer in the Golden Nugget gym. The segment still adhered to some of the more conventional representations of poker players. It even included footage of former Navy frogman (and 1973 Main Event champion) Puggy Pearson swimming laps in his home

Binion, ‘Some Recollections’, 11. It was first issued in 1981. ‘Poker as Sport- A New Idea!’ Box 1 Folder 15, Binion’s Horseshoe Records, UNLV. 11 12

‘An Hour’s Commercial for the Horseshoe’

pool, although Puggy is interviewed still in the pool while smoking his signature giant cigar. The focus on physical training continues to be important to the media coverage of poker and other ‘non-physical’ sports. In a 2015 ESPN segment, Daniel Negreanu discussed how his healthy lifestyle had directly benefitted his poker-playing. Throughout the piece he is shown working out, lifting weights and running through drills with a soccer coach. Negreanu frames himself as part of a larger trend, explaining, ‘When I go to the gym in the morning, it used to be just empty. Now its full of the high-roller poker players’ (ESPN, 2015). The connection between physical training and competitive success has been central esports coverage. Outlets such as NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and ESPN have explored the training and fitness of esports players from a similar perspective as the 1987 WSOP telecast. The emphasis on physical health programmes has helped legitimize the participants as athletes while contextualizing the coverage of professional video game tournaments within more established sports media tropes.

The worldwide leader The 1987 WSOP was the first one to be broadcast on ESPN. Founded in 1979, ESPN was still trying to build a well-known brand. The same year that it partnered with the Horseshoe, ESPN signed its first contract with the NFL. Yet, the company continued to air sports programming that the broadcast networks were not interested in, along with ‘time-buy’ or ‘brokered’ shows. These were sporting events or sponsored documentaries produced by outside companies, which then paid for airtime, often in exchange for a certain amount of ad time. The Binions were willing to invest a significant amount of money to get the WSOP on ESPN. Jack paid $100,000 to Bollinger and Translor Films to cover the production costs for the 1987 Main Event and purchase the airtime on ESPN. Instead of looking for outside sponsors, the Horseshoe served as the sole source of revenue for the telecast. Translor arranged to have the 1987 WSOP shown on ESPN at least twice. And during the taped broadcast, the company agreed to frequently mention the Horseshoe and show its signage around the casino and on the table felt each time the community cards were

73

74

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

shown. The Translor-produced broadcasts were hour-long infomercials for the Horseshoe that drew on the conventions of sports television. Despite paying ESPN, the Horseshoe still had to convince the company to add the WSOP to its schedule. In a 1987 letter, Bollinger claimed that the 1970s CBS Sports Spectacular programmes featuring the WSOP were the highest rated of the series, and when they were syndicated on a limited-term basis in the early 1980s, they attracted a large viewing audience.13 Given CBS’s sporadic broadcasting of the Main Event, it would appear that Bollinger was exaggerating the historical ratings to suit the current needs of his client. Yet he also wrote to David Ogrean, programme manager at ESPN, clarifying that the Binions were willing to underwrite the full cost of production and were amenable to any suggestions the network might have, including selecting the network’s preferred host for the programme.14 Bollinger’s approach was successful in not only getting the 1987 WSOP, but also initiating an enduring relationship between the WSOP and ESPN. Although he remained a familiar presence at the WSOP, Benny did not appear in any of the telecasts during the 1980s. This was partially a result of his numerous health problems throughout the decade, including suffering three heart attacks. He died on Christmas Day in 1989 at the age of eighty-five, and was recognized as a gaming pioneer and a venerated pillar of the community. Benny and his contributions to poker culture and Las Vegas history were occasionally referenced in the hour-long Main Event specials that aired annually on either ESPN or the Discovery Channel throughout the 1990s. After Benny’s death, the fortunes of the WSOP and the Horseshoe have radically diverged. The Horseshoe casino deteriorated due to the general decline of downtown gaming, scandals surrounding the family (including the death of Ted Binion in 1998) and a protracted legal battle between Jack and Becky Binion Behnen over control of the casino and the WSOP. The relationship between the two reached its nadir in 1998 when Becky acquired controlling interested in the Horseshoe, and Jack was prohibited from running the WSOP for the first time in the tournament’s nearly thirty-year history. The Horseshoe’s situation became so dire that the

Letter from Henri Bollinger to Gordon Smith (Trans World Inc.), 16 September 1987. Box 2 Folder 17, Binion’s Horseshoe Records, UNLV. 14 Letter from Henri Bollinger to David Ogrean, 24 February 1987. Box 2 Folder 17, Binion’s Horseshoe Records, UNLV. 13

‘An Hour’s Commercial for the Horseshoe’

family was unable to maintain its daily operations, and the IRS shut down the casino the week before the 2003 WSOP was set to begin for failing to pay employee health and pension benefits.

The Moneymaker effect While the Horseshoe was struggling to remain open, television executives recognized that the online poker boom could bring in new viewers, and in the early 2000s tournament poker was increasingly prevalent on cable television. In May 2002, the inaugural event of the World Poker Tour, a weekly series on the Travel Channel, was held at the Bellagio Casino. In 2003, ESPN acquired the production rights (in addition to the broadcast rights) to the WSOP, and expanded its coverage of the Main Event to six hours. Fred Christensen, director of programming, recalled that ESPN signed a five-year rights deal with the Binions for which the company ‘paid next to nothing in rights fees’ (Miller and Shales, 2011: 494). ESPN used the savings in rights fees to improve the production values and treated the WSOP like it was a major event in sports calendar. They produced a new opening and upgraded the on-screen graphics to show information such as players’ chances of winning the hand or available ‘outs’, specific cards needed to win. The most significant difference from the earlier WSOP broadcasts was the use of the ‘hole camera’. The small camera built into the inside railing of the table allowed television viewers to see a player’s cards on every hand that was shown (the taped broadcasts were still heavily edited for time). ESPN continued to focus on well-known players, including Brunson and Slim. But the most enduring story of the network’s coverage of the 2003 WSOP was that an online player, a Tennessee accountant named Chris Moneymaker (his real name), won an online $40 satellite tournament, and proceeded to outlast 839 players to win the World Championship and $2.5 million. Moneymaker’s victory was regarded as proof of the Horseshoe’s long-established discourses that any entrant in the Main Event could win it all. He sparked a tremendous interest in online poker and the WSOP. Thanks to what became known as the ‘Moneymaker Effect’ and the widespread public fascination with the WSOP, the following year over 2,500 players entered the Main Event, and Greg Raymer, another online qualifier, won the $5 million first prize.

75

76

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Countless newspaper and magazines articles explored the history and allure of the WSOP. ESPN expanded its coverage of the tournament from six to twenty-two hours. They aired a number of preliminary tournaments including smaller buy-in no-limit hold ’em events, as well as seven-card stud, razz, pot-limit Omaha and the Ladies Limit Hold ’Em Championship. The WSOP appealed to ESPN because in addition to the miniscule rights fees, in contrast with a significant portion of its programming, the WSOP broadcasts could be constantly re-aired on the company’s different networks. The WSOP was such a success that ESPN executive Mark Shapiro boasted in 2011 that since the network acquired the production and broadcast rights eight years earlier, it was their highest rated series other than Sunday Night NFL games and Saturday college football (Miller and Shales, 2011: 495).

New owners The success of ESPN’s WSOP coverage has introduced a broad audience to tournament poker and helped the World Series grow to heights unimagined by Benny or Jack Binion. Over the past decade, there have been an average of 6,856 entrants in each Main Event, with the champion winning $8,573,747. The success on television also significantly bolstered the value of the Horseshoe brand and the WSOP. In 2003, Harrah’s Entertainment purchased Horseshoe Gaming Holding, the Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas, and the rights to the WSOP and Poker Hall of Fame for approximately $1.5 billion. Because of the operational difficulties, the physical casino on Fremont Street represented only a fraction of the price. It was sold the next year to MTG Gaming for $20 million and renamed Binion’s (though no family members were involved with the casino at that point). In 2005, the World Series of Poker was moved to the Rio Hotel and Casino off the Strip to better accommodate the growing number of tournaments and entrants. There were forty-three tournaments that year, and over 5,600 entrants for the Main Event, the majority of whom won their seats in online satellite tournaments. Putting a coda on the relationship between the WSOP and the Binions, the final two days of the Main Event were held at the Horseshoe. Although it was held downtown ostensibly in honour of the

‘An Hour’s Commercial for the Horseshoe’

Las Vegas Centennial, it also commemorated the Binions’ contributions to poker. Despite this less-than ideal ending for Binion’s Horseshoe, the World Series of Poker brand continues to hold considerable value for corporations like Caesars Entertainment and ESPN. The Main Event of the World Series is the most prestigious title in poker as well as the single richest championship in sports. Its history, from Benny’s early appearances in print, to Slim and Benny’s talk show stints to the CBS Broadcasts featuring the Hall of Fame to regular telecasts on ESPN, illustrate how important media was in framing the public’s view of high-stakes poker. Television played an especially critical role in legitimating the WSOP as a sports media event through shaping and organizing the popular memory of the event’s history and positing the Horseshoe as the centre for poker culture in the United States. The telecasts of the WSOP tell us a great deal about how the media influenced the creation of a mythologized conception of the tournament and Binion’s Horseshoe. Although the Horseshoe no longer exists on Fremont Street and the WSOP has been held at the Rio for over fifteen years, the discourses and narratives that were developed to promote the event continue to shape how we talk about poker and gambling today. Through considering how the WSOP was portrayed on television over the years, we can see how televised poker has helped create a mythologized version of the WSOP and Las Vegas history that continue to be useful for corporations and the public.

References Alvarez, A. 1983. The Biggest Game in Town. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Dewey, T. 2018. ‘World series of Poker’s 49 Annual Main Event Starts Monday’. Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1 July 2018. https://www. reviewjournal.com/sports/betting/world-series-of-pokers-49th-annualmain-event-starts-monday/ (accessed 5 August 2018). Dionne, R. 1979. ‘Youth Can Age You’. Sports Illustrated, 14 May 1979. ESPN. 2015. ‘Negreanu’s lifestyle changes lead to success on felt’. ESPN​.com​, posted 20 October 2015. http:​/​/www​​.espn​​.com/​​video​​hub​/v​​ideo/​​clip/​_​/id/​​ 13932​​461​/c​​atego​​ryid/​​cli​p?​​id​=25​​03848​7 (accessed 8 June 2019). Gasson, P. May/June 1979. ‘10th Annual World Series of Poker’. Horn of Plenty. 2(3): 37–54.

77

78

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Grotenstein, J. and Reback, S. 2005. All In: The (Almost) Entirely True Story of the World Series of Poker. New York: St Martin’s Press. Jenkins, D. 1981. Johnny Moss: Champion of Champions. Las Vegas: JM / Johnny Moss. LaCapra, D. 1985. History & Criticism. Cornell: Cornell University Press. McManus, J. 2009. Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Miller, J. A. and Shales, T. 2011. Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Nichols, B. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. NYT. 1973. ‘A Poker game that’s not for Pikers’. New York Times. O’Neil, P. 1967. ‘Nick the Greek’s last roll’. Life, 6 January 1967. Player, C. 2018. ‘2018 world series of Poker Broadcast Schedule Announced’. Card Player, 15 February 2018. https​:/​/ww​​w​.car​​dplay​​er​.co​​m​/pok​​er​-ne​​ ws​/22​​530​-2​​018​-w​​orld-​​serie​​s​-of-​​poker​​-broa​​dcas​t​​-sche​​dule-​​annou​​nced (accessed 8 August 2018). Preston, T. A., ‘Amarillo Slim’ and Dinkin, G. 2003. In a World Full of Fat People: The Memoirs of the Greatest Gambler Who Ever Lived. New York: Perennial Currents. Spigel, L. 2001. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham: Duke University Press. Swanson, D. J. 2014. Blood Aces: The Wild Ride of Benny Binion, the Texas Gangster Who Created Vegas Poker. New York: Penguin Books.

5 Be a Pal Women’s intrusions into men’s poker play on TV sitcoms Danielle Seid

Chapter Outline A full house: Gender trouble, consumption and early TV 81 Poker as ‘soft training’ for American capitalism 83 ‘Hiya fellas!’: I Love Lucy’s ‘Be a Pal’ 85 Just a kiss?: Roseanne’s ‘Five of a Kind’ 89 Whatever happened to dignity?: Living Single’s ‘Five Card Stud’ 92 Conclusion96

On 22 October 1951, millions of Americans watched Lucy Ricardo (played by actress Lucille Ball) transform herself into a Carmen Mirandainspired ‘Latina’ to capture the attention of husband Ricky (played by Desi Arnaz). Only the third instalment of the then-fledgling CBS situation comedy I Love Lucy (1951–9), the ‘Carmen Miranda episode’ (‘Be a Pal’

80

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

S1E3) introduced audiences to many of the central themes of the series – most notably Lucy’s dissatisfaction with proscribed gender roles and her seemingly unquellable anxiety about Ricky’s love for her. Fearful that the romance in her marriage is rapidly dissipating, Lucy complains to her neighbour and best friend Ethel (played by Vivian Vance), who consults a book-of-the-week, self-help book entitled How to Keep the Honeymoon from Ending, written by an ‘expert’ named Dr Humphreys. The episode tracks Lucy’s attempts to foster intimacy in her marriage, ending with Ball’s hysterical parody of the popular Brazilian screen star Carmen Miranda, famously known in American cinema for her Brazilian sambas and fruit-adorned headdresses. While the episode is enshrined in public memory for the scene in which Lucy lip syncs to Carmen Miranda’s song ‘Mamãe Eu Quero’ in the Ricardos’ living room, ‘Be A Pal’ might also be remembered for a notable scene in its second act in which Lucy, feigning interest in her husband’s hobbies, crashes Ricky’s weekly poker game. It is this gambling scene, after all, that informs the title of the episode and sets Lucy up to take on the ‘drastic’ measures in the episode’s last act. Ricky’s poker game, which I discuss in greater detail in the following text, stands as a significant early representation of domestic poker play on US network television that draws our attention to the contours and ideological effects of this trope in relation to post-war domestic ideology – the inherently unstable idealization of marriage, family and home. The staging of domestic poker play on US television sitcoms, I argue, functions as a ‘theater of the social’ in which questions of gender, work and sexuality are all distilled and explored in the game. ‘Be a Pal’ is undoubtedly one of the earliest representations of poker play – or ‘poker night’ – as a domestic leisure activity on US network television. Of course, the trope of poker night, encoded as a male homosocial activity, can be found across post-war US popular culture (in film, theatre, advertising and TV) as ‘a reflection of Americana’ (Duncan, 2015: 37). In these popular representations, a low-stakes, weekly poker game, played primarily for bragging rights, appears on the surface to merely signify a temporary escape from work and a hectic lifestyle. However, as an enduring trope on US television sitcoms, leisure poker play signifies more than an opportunity for weary workers under capitalism to unwind. When viewed critically, the trope, I contend, reflects anxieties about economic and social change in post-war America, drawing

Be a Pal

boundaries around patriarchal power within and outside of the home and exposing the ruse of gender equality under capitalism. How precisely, though, do representations of gambling, specifically leisure poker play, function as and in tension with domestic ideology on US television sitcoms? Before attempting to answer this question, it is necessary to briefly examine the early years of television within the context of shifting post-war cultural values, in particular consumption, and middle-class social and gender norms.

A full house: Gender trouble, consumption and early TV Television’s rapid popularization in the 1950s unfolded alongside shifting gender and class ideologies that reflected ‘significant transformations in U.S. society during the 1950s’ (Lipsitz, 1992: 72). While there was a current of suspicion and doubt in popular discourse of the time about television’s ‘invasion’ of American homes, post-war Americans, nevertheless, ‘installed TVs at a speed far surpassing any previous home entertainment medium’ (Spigel, 1992: 5). The popularization of television in the United States, as scholars have shown, was intimately related to the ‘construction of a new suburbia in the 1950s’ (Gomery and Haralovich). Aided and spurred on by television, the ‘suburbification’ of the United States not only colonized ‘new’ public space but also produced more private and segmented interior space that hinged on consumer consciousness and ownership. Lynn Spigel writes, ‘The suburban housing boom entailed a massive migration from the city into remote farm lands reconstituted by mass-produced housing which offered, primarily to the young adults of the middle class, a new stake in the ideology of privacy and property rights’ (1992: 5). Television kept people ‘connected’ across increasingly sprawling suburban space as it worked to reinforce the very gender and class ideologies that underscored its images and programmes. Inside of the home, kinship and gender norms became intimately linked to a growing consumer consciousness and a spirit of conformity spurred by television. Television networks, working in concert with private corporations and the US government, increasingly sold American

81

82

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

audiences on the ‘good life’, which promised a fair amount of family leisure time. This ‘good life’ hinged on the acquisition of homes filled with consumer goods. While domestic space in the suburbs, then, was certainly less crowded than domestic space in urban areas, gadgets, products and advertisements nonetheless contributed to a ‘full house’. Adjusting to a ‘full house’ in this new consumer-conscious society meant that domestic space had to be reimagined and rearranged, which put significant pressure on gender roles and relations. Television proved vital to these developments. During the first half of the 1950s, ‘a vast production of discourses . . . spoke to the relationship between television, the home and the family’ (Spigel, 1992: 3). As the preeminent metaphor for the nation, the ‘nuclear family’ in many ways owed its existence to television; and yet, television simultaneously threatened its stability. Far from merely serving as a source of entertaining distractions, then, television, as Lipsitz argues, ‘became the most important discursive medium in American culture’ (1992: 73). While in various forums the new medium was almost obsessively debated in terms of its potential negative impacts on heterosexual coupling, masculinity and child development, televisusal representations of American families and homes, like those on popular sitcoms, effectively countered such anxieties by producing imaginary and idealized social relations. Early television sitcoms mediated what Spigel describes as ‘the anxieties and uncertainties of public life’ (1992: 6). One of the central concerns of sitcoms, from the early TV period to the present, is feminine labour and the unseen, unwaged work of reproduction required by capitalism. On sitcoms, women’s work in the home participates in the capitalist system through both reproduction (giving birth to and raising children) and consumption. Analysing class and consumerist ideology on early network sitcoms, Lipsitz points out the ways in which ‘Television delivers audiences to advertisers by glorifying consumption, not only during commercial breaks but in the programs themselves’ (1992: 71). Early network sitcoms that centred on ethnic working-class families depicted families who embraced living beyond their means in an increasingly credit-based economy ruled by corporate interests. Lipsitz writes, ‘television’s most important economic function came from its role as an instrument of legitimation for transformations in values initiated by the new economic imperatives of postwar America’ (1992: 75). American families, television seemed to say, should have a ‘full house’, and women, especially white

Be a Pal

women, whom TV networks had from the earliest days of television broadcasting identified as their target audience, had a particularly important role to play in this new economy. Accordingly, early television representations of women’s work within the domestic space, the subject of family sitcoms, helped to legitimate consumerist values and ‘naturalize middle-class life’ (Haralovich, 1992: 112). A crucial component of this middle-class ‘good life’ was leisure activity – a gendered commodity afforded hard-working Americans. How, though, do TV sitcoms’ representations and tropes of gendered leisure activity, such as ‘masculine’ poker play, reinforce or even undermine domestic ideology and the ‘good life’? And specifically, how does poker play on TV sitcoms stage the power dynamics of gender and capitalism?

Poker as ‘soft training’ for American capitalism Poker has often been explored as a metaphor for capitalism. On TV sitcoms, poker takes place almost entirely within the home as a lowstakes leisure activity, and thus seemingly outside of capitalism’s reach. As such, TV sitcom representations of poker should be distinguished from the cinematic representations of high-stakes poker in public spaces that Hollywood favours, namely saloons in the Old West and modern casinos. As a metaphor for capitalism, poker play as depicted on television sitcoms unfolds in ‘feminized’ domestic space, which in the post-war era is far from a refuge from market forces but instead a vital cog in the consumer–capitalist system. How, though, do the mechanics of the pokeras-metaphor-for-capitalism work within the context of TV sitcoms? There is no question that television representations of poker reveal gambling to be a ‘culturally significant activity’ (Duncan, 2015: 2). Aaron Duncan argues that gambling in American culture is representative of the American Dream, emphasizing ‘the importance of wealth and luck and call[ing] into question how we define work, play, and democracy’ (Duncan, 2015: 2). Since television sitcoms, from the early days of television to the present, powerfully contribute to constructing the American Dream, it follows that poker play on sitcoms would reinforce how ‘work, play, and democracy’ are debated and assigned meaning within society. Poker play,

83

84

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

as an expression of the ‘importance of wealth and luck’, exposes the fiction of meritocracy – that the American Dream is actually within reach of those on the bottom rungs of the social ladder. The persistence of poker as trope in popular culture clearly demonstrates that ‘[w]hen so many people find poker interesting, it is because the game has an eminent capacity to capture a set of existential conditions of life in contemporary society and offer them to the players in a form that allows them to explore, challenge, and play with these conditions’ (Duncan, 2015: 1). Still, it is mere fiction that regardless of the cards a player is dealt (in life), any given ‘player’ within capitalism stands a chance of coming out on top. While TV sitcoms perform the ideological work of naturalizing middle-class life, domestic poker scenes frequently problematize such naturalization. Poker play, perhaps best enacted in domestic space as it is represented on television sitcoms, provides ‘soft training’ for life in a competitive capitalist society. Although it is played in a group, poker is an intensely competitive individual game in which players ‘buy in’ and subsequently manoeuvre for wealth. Ole Bjerg writes, ‘Poker is played against real people with real human tendencies, flaws, and imperfections. The player has to figure out the exact character of his opponent’s playing style, and overestimating the opponent can sometimes be as fatal as underestimating him’ (2011: 34). Even in low-stakes, domestic poker play, strategizing by attempting to figure out (or ‘read’) others in order to win illustrates the American capitalist ethos. On sitcoms, such strategizing and reading by players in poker’s ‘theatre of the social’ presents the possibility of briefly levelling social inequalities. While sitcoms have developed significantly since the early days of television, reflecting major shifts in attitudes about women’s work, race relations and a host of other social issues, certain tropes like poker play persist because of their adaptability to different social contexts and historical moments under US capitalism. Common to the trope of domestic poker play on TV sitcoms, however, is that the relationship of women to such poker play underscores women’s status under patriarchal capitalism by reflecting cultural attitudes about gender and highlighting contemporaneous public discourse about sexual and economic power. As a leisure commodity played in a community of male friends in the domestic space, poker acts as a parodic reflection of a society controlled by men. The makeshift poker table transforms feminized domestic space – whether living room, dining room or kitchen – into ‘men’s space’,

Be a Pal

underscoring public anxiety around ‘feminizing’ influences like television and advertising. The actual poker table, around which men sit and go head-to-head, is visually related to the oval-shaped corporate boardroom table where powerful men meet and secure their ruling-class status (a 1950s configuration dramatized to great effect in Matthew Wiener’s series Mad Men (2007–15)). By and large, in poker play, men hold the cards and control access to the ‘game’ of capital. Parlour-style board games structured upon showing the inherent dangers of capitalism like Monopoly (first patented as The Landlord’s Game in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie, and later revitalized during the Great Depression) and The Game of Life (invented in the late nineteenth century and later known simply as Life) were never taken up as ‘games for men’, whereas poker has come to occupy a masculinized, quasi-sacred status in American culture. Leisure poker play on TV sitcoms turns both on this ‘masculine’ nature of poker and the feminine forces that threaten the ‘sanctity’ of the game. In what follows, I analyse three TV sitcom episodes that feature a feminine disruption of leisure poker play among men: I Love Lucy’s ‘Be a Pal’; Roseanne’s ‘Five of a Kind’ (S2E6); and Living Single’s ‘Five Card Stud’ (S1E23). In different TV decades as well as political and cultural moments, representations of domestic poker play are altered in ways that speak both to the flexibility of the trope and some of its common features and expressions. Although each episode involves a female ‘intrusion’ into the homosocial space of men’s poker play, the specific gender, class, sexual and racial contexts result in differing narrative outcomes and effects.

‘Hiya fellas!’: I Love Lucy’s ‘Be a Pal’ ‘Be a Pal’ opens with Lucy and Ricky sitting at the breakfast table in their New York City apartment. As they eat their breakfast, Ricky reads the newspaper so intently that all of Lucy’s attempts to communicate with him completely bypass him. An exasperated Lucy even begins carrying on a conversation with herself, asking and answering her own questions that mimic polite breakfast patter. Ricky is so distracted that when he goes to kiss Lucy goodbye, she grabs a sliced grapefruit and presents it to an oblivious Ricky to kiss, which he does without even noticing. After Ricky leaves for work, Lucy’s neighbour and best friend Ethel shows up at

85

86

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

the Ricardos’ apartment for a visit. Lucy, in an agitated state, complains to Ethel about Ricky ignoring her every morning over breakfast. Often the instigator for Lucy’s schemes, Ethel suggests Lucy consult the ‘expert’ advice of Dr Humphrey’s book-of-the-week How to Keep the Honeymoon from Ending. The entire scenario established in the opening act of this episode, and indeed for the series on the whole, underscored Betty Friedan’s central argument about (white) women in The Feminine Mystique – that in spite of material comforts, white women, who occupied the position of mother-housewife in the 1950s, were largely unhappy. Many episodes in the series centred on Lucy’s worry and paranoia that Ricky was losing interest in her or becoming interested in another woman. In ‘Be a Pal’, submitting to the ‘doctor’s’ advice and Ethel’s prodding, Lucy tries three strategies for rekindling the romance in her marriage: ‘vamping’ it up with glamour and sex appeal; mothering Ricky by tapping into his childhood memories of his mother; and bonding with Ricky over one of his interests or hobbies. In the episode’s second act, Lucy deploys Dr Humphrey’s ‘Be a Pal System’, intended to bring the wife closer to her husband through a shared interest of his, such as fishing or golfing. ‘Ricky plays poker. I’ll have to take up poking. I’m joining that game!’ Lucy tells Ethel. Ricky’s poker night with the boys in the second act of the ‘Be a Pal’ episode presents Lucy with both an opportunity and a challenge, since Lucy immediately acknowledges to Ethel that she does not know how to play poker. Always prepared to provide assistance, an undeterred Ethel, who responds to Lucy’s not knowing how to play poker with a so what, tells her she can teach her in a couple of hours. ‘It’s a lot like hearts, only you bet, and there isn’t any old maid’, Ethel says. The following scene cuts to a medium shot of four men – Ricky, Fred (played by William Frawley) and two others identified as Charley and Hank – sitting around a dining room table in Ethel and Fred’s apartment. From another camera angle, in a slightly longer shot, Ricky is shown winning a hand with ‘three ladies’ and collecting the pot. In the background, Lucy bursts into the room through a swinging door on the right side of the frame and immediately exclaims ‘Hiya fellas!’ She is dressed in a saloonstyle poker dealer’s costume: dark trousers, long-sleeved shirt with a skinny black tie, an armband and a visor (see Figure 5.1). Lucy’s ‘work outfit’ is in keeping with the series’ obsession with Lucy’s forays into waged work, demonstrating how ‘cultural performance and job performance’ are

Be a Pal

Figure 5.1  Lucy crashes Ricky’s poker game in an attempt to bond with him. Copyright CBS Broadcasting, Inc.

more alike than different (Ngai, 2012: 181). Approaching the table to join the game, Lucy accordions a deck of connected cards. Ricky looks up at Lucy, who stands between him and Fred, and asks, what gives? ‘I thought I would join the game if you fellas don’t mind’, Lucy replies. Ricky tells her that they would love to play with her but that she doesn’t know how to play the game, to which Lucy responds that she learned earlier that day from Ethel, causing Fred to grimace. The men’s bodily comportments and facial expressions register obvious discomfort at Lucy’s invasion. In the poker game, Lucy displays a total lack of knowledge of poker etiquette and gambling paraphernalia – she refers to poker chips as ‘little round things’, not realizing they are worth money. She excitedly reveals the nature of the first two cards she is dealt, exclaiming ‘ooh, a queen!’ and ‘there’s her sister!’ Ricky instructs Lucy that she’s supposed to keep her cards a secret, but as the betting proceeds and Lucy must decide how many cards she would like, she betrays Ricky’s lesson and says, slumped down in her chair, ‘I can’t decide if I should throw away my two queens or three kings’. Lucy’s beginner’s luck not only generates comedy but also suggests the nature of luck embedded in the game of poker itself. In the next round of play, Lucy, keen on actively displaying her ‘interest’ in the

87

88

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

game, deals the cards to the men. Lucy, who only discards her unwanted cards after she deals herself four more cards on the flop, ends up in a standoff with Fred, who calls her a ‘peeping Tom’ after she leans over to try and peek at his cards. Unexpectedly, the camera cuts to a close-up of Ethel peering into the dining room through a partially opened door. When Lucy admits that she has forgotten ‘what beats what’ in poker, Ethel is seen cringing then retreating from the room. The men begin reciting ascending winning hands in chorus, as the camera pans out to take in the entire scene. ‘That’s the one!’ Lucy proclaims upon hearing that a four-of-a-kind beats a full house. When Ricky presses her out of curiosity to reveal what her four-of-a-kind was, Lucy answers confidently that she didn’t have a four-of-a-kind but instead a pair of 9s. She hands her cards to Ricky, and he discovers that in fact Lucy held a six and nine, mistaking the six for a nine because she held it upside down. After sweeping the pot toward her, Lucy, clearly enjoying herself, tells the men they should play a ‘wild game’ with ‘everything wild but the old maid’. The scene ends with Lucy flinging her bound-together deck of cards into Ricky’s face, shown in a close-up shot that illustrates his frustration with Lucy’s transgression. The next morning, Ethel, reading from Dr Humphrey’s book, points out Lucy’s mistake: ‘If you play games with your husband, be sure not to beat him!’ Although Ricky appears to be the most good-natured, relative to the other men, about Lucy joining the game, it is clear that Lucy ruined the men’s game. In the world of I Love Lucy, certain leisure activities, like watching TV, were portrayed as mixed-gender activities, but poker play was clearly marked as an activity for men. ‘Be a Pal’ suggests that the homosocial space where leisure poker play occurs is a place where men should feel, or have the chance to feel, like ‘winners’. This is why the episode’s poker scene begins with Ricky winning a hand with ‘three ladies’. In the early 1950s, much of the public discourse concerning the relationship between ‘television, the home and family’ was devoted to anxieties about men’s status at home and the feminizing influence of television on men. Ricky’s poker game with the boys underscores these anxieties. And yet, Lucy remains woefully ignorant of such anxieties and purposefully resistant to the rules of poker, thus displaying her dissatisfaction with domestic ideology and the notion that women should only occupy certain spaces, both within and outside of the home. The great irony about Lucy’s incompetence and sheer luck at the men’s poker game is that Lucille Ball was an incredibly savvy businesswoman and

Be a Pal

easily the biggest star, and producer, on television in the 1950s. In ‘Be a Pal’, Lucy doesn’t bluff or in any way strategize in the poker game because she doesn’t set out to directly challenge male power, and yet her irreverent, over-the-top ‘incursion’ into the men’s game critiques the quasi-sacred nature of domestic homosocial poker play in American culture.

Just a kiss?: Roseanne’s ‘Five of a Kind’ By its second season, the ABC sitcom Roseanne (1988–97), lauded for its realistic portrayal of a working-class family, was drawing in millions of television viewers that had come to appreciate the show’s distinctive comedic style and ‘heart’. In many ways, the episode ‘Five of a Kind’ highlighted the central themes and tensions in the series, which echoed earlier workingclass sitcoms on US network television like All in the Family (1971–79). Series lead Roseanne Conner (played by actress Roseanne Barr), the wise-cracking matriarch of a Midwestern, working-class white family, is burdened with fending off abject poverty by maintaining precarious bluecollar work while still caring for husband Dan (John Goodman) and her three children Becky, Darlene and DJ. The comedy in Roseanne turns on Roseanne’s brash style of speaking to her family and the show’s ‘honest’ treatment of working-class mothers’ frustrations and exhaustions. While ‘Five of a Kind’ includes many of Roseanne’s characteristically sharptongued barbs, the episode takes an unexpected turn and explores what on the surface appears to be sexual harassment when one of Dan’s poker buddies, Arnie (played by Tom Arnold, at the time Barr’s husband), flirts with and then kisses Roseanne during Dan’s poker night. In contrast to depictions of leisure poker play between men in sitcoms that centre on comfortably middle-class families, the episode ‘Five of a Kind’ and subsequent poker scenes across the series highlight workingclass woes and more urgently present poker play as a much- needed break from the demands of work and family life. Common features of the trope are at once present, but the players’ relationship to power and capital complicates what and how the gameplay signifies. Tasked with setting the scene where the poker play unfolds, Roseanne performs emotional and

89

90

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

physical labour that is far more apparent than women’s work in similar scenes of poker play in sitcoms about middle-class families. The episode ‘Five of a Kind’ begins with Roseanne coming home after a long shift at a restaurant where Roseanne works preparing food. Upon walking into the house, Roseanne exclaims, ‘I hate teenagers!’ after which she barks at daughter Becky and then tells Darlene to shut up when she laughs at her older sister. Roseanne sits down at the dining table in the kitchen where most of the action in the episode takes place. Dan, who is about to run out to the store to pick up snacks for his poker night, asks Roseanne if she would make sandwiches for the guys that are coming over. Roseanne quips sarcastically, ‘I’ve been standing behind the counter preparing food for people all day, and I would say right now there is nothing more I would rather do than make sandwiches for you, Dan.’ Dan replies, ‘But you know what the beauty part is? Once the guys get here, you’ll never have to step foot in this kitchen tonight.’ Roseanne asks Dan if he is banning her from the kitchen space where the poker game will be played, and Dan responds, ‘Kee-rect [correct]’. Roseanne remarks, again sarcastically, that if she’s banned from the poker space, then she will miss out on the men’s fascinating talk. Dan leaves and Roseanne gives some attention to her youngest child DJ and middle child Becky. When the doorbell rings, an exasperated Roseanne crosses through the kitchen and living room to answer the door. Arnie, Dan’s poker buddy, enters the house holding a foldable felt poker board. Roseanne and Arnie exchange friendly conversation about Arnie’s shirt that quickly takes on a sexual tone when Arnie unbuttons the shirt and offers it to Roseanne while saying, ‘If you want it, I want you to have it.’ Arnie begins setting up the poker table in the kitchen while Roseanne continues making sandwiches for the men. Next, Arnie asks Roseanne if she would dispense some relationship advice to him about his girlfriend Sharon, and the two sit down at the kitchen-cum-poker table. Arnie discusses his ambivalence about marrying his girlfriend and suggests that someday he would like to ‘upgrade’ his partner. After Roseanne tells Arnie he should treat Sharon with more care and seriousness, Arnie tells Roseanne she’s right, then follows her to the kitchen counter area where she is preparing the sandwiches and grabs Roseanne in an intimate manner. ‘Roseanne, you are truly a wonderful woman’, he says and wraps his arms tightly around Roseanne’s body while burying his face in Roseanne’s neck for an extended ‘kiss’. The camera moves from a

Be a Pal

straightforward medium shot of the pair to a close-up that reveals Roseanne’s stunned expression as Arnie pulls away. In that moment, Dan and his buddies arrive, and Arnie greets Dan and the rest of the men as they walk into the kitchen through the back door and immediately launch into ‘male’ banter. A slightly shaky camera tracks Roseanne dashing through the kitchen and into the private space of her bedroom, where she picks up the phone and attempts to reach her sister Jackie Harris, a police officer, about a personal ‘emergency’. The next scene shows the guys, a mixed group of working and middleclass black and white men, beginning their poker night. The men open beers, distribute poker chips and shuffle cards for their low-stakes game with a twenty-dollar buy-in. When Darlene and her friend come into the kitchen and rifle around for something to eat, Dan and his poker buddies chase them off, literally barking at them like excited, territorial dogs. A few moments later, after she is unsuccessful at reaching Jackie by phone, Roseanne returns to the kitchen to tend to some dirty dishes in the sink. She enters the room saying, ‘Ah, the smell of testosterone!’ and leaves when Dan asks her to do the kitchen chores later so she doesn’t interrupt the men’s game. Meanwhile, a restless Arnie ‘checks out’ of the game by standing up and leaving to ‘flirt with Rosie’, which gets no rise out of Dan or the guys. Soon, busy with her childcare duties – cutting felt napkin holders for a school bazaar and reading to DJ at bedtime – Roseanne appears to be dodging Arnie’s come-ons as she moves around the house in avoidance of the men’s poker game. Jackie eventually shows up and Roseanne relays her awkward experience with Arnie in the kitchen to her. Jackie and Roseanne attempt to get to the bottom of the ‘kiss’ and what it meant. Roseanne expresses deep ambivalence about whether the kiss was ‘weird’ or crossed boundaries of decency. Meanwhile, at the poker table in the kitchen, the men gossip about their wives and girlfriends, as well as other men in their social circle. One of the guys, Andy, expresses his sexist view that men should be able to cheat on their wives or girlfriends, but women shouldn’t enjoy the same privileges. Dan responds by mildly rebuking Andy for his ‘enlightened’ view, and the men continue to play their hands. In the episode’s final scene, Roseanne sees the men out at the Conners’ front door, where two kitschy paintings of pool-playing dogs hang on the wall, frequently in the frame throughout the series. Men’s leisure activities turn men into dogs, the paintings seem to suggest. Arnie is last to leave Dan’s poker night,

91

92

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

exiting the house by embracing both Jackie and Roseanne, one after the other, with a ‘kiss’ much like the one that occurred between Roseanne and Arnie in the kitchen earlier in the episode. The episode ends on a solemn note, with Dan noticing Arnie’s kissing Jackie but not Roseanne and Roseanne lamenting that it was ‘just a kiss’. Like Ethel did for Lucy in ‘Be a Pal’, Jackie helps Roseanne come to an understanding of her feminine intrusion in the men’s poker game (space). ‘I can see you how you mistook that’, Jackie says when the women are alone after Arnie leaves. ‘Five of a Kind’ uses poker play to comment on the urgency for women to learn to read men and thus sexual and power dynamics in American culture. Roseanne, who is shut out of the game in the already-crowded Conner house, finds Arnie’s kiss a temporary diversion from her workingclass life in ways that raise questions about the norms of heterosexual marriage and the pervasiveness of men’s abuses of sexual power. At the same time, the episode reveals how leisure time and activity, a luxury of the middle-class family under capitalism, is especially denied to workingclass mothers. Dan’s participation in the men’s mixed-class poker game suggests men’s power across socio-economic strata and yet also the potential for emasculation of working-class men by bourgeois gender and sexual norms. ‘Five of a Kind’ highlights the Conners’ collective exhaustion, stemming from exploitation and precarity, occasionally enlivened by flirtatious play with middle-class leisure and the fantasy of American aspirational living signified by the men’s weekly poker night.

Whatever happened to dignity?: Living Single’s ‘Five Card Stud’ The episode ‘Five Card Stud’ of the FOX sitcom Living Single (1993–8) uses poker play to stage a ‘battle of the sexes’ in ways that speak to sexual and gender politics in the early 1990s. Unlike Roseanne, the sitcom centres on singles navigating urban middle-class life. Produced by Yvette Lee Bowser, the first African American woman to create a successful prime time series on network television (Zook, 1999: 67), the show follows the professional and romantic lives of four black women – Khadijah (Queen Latifah) and Sinclair (Kim Coles), who are cousins, Regine (Kim Fields),

Be a Pal

and Maxine (Erica Alexander). Khadijah, the owner of a magazine for and about the black community called Flavor, employs Sinclair, while Regine works as a personal stylist and Maxine practices law. The women share an apartment in a Brooklyn brownstone (Maxine lives nearby but spends a great deal of time at the apartment), and are frequently visited by Kyle (T.C. Carson) and Overton (John Henton), two black men who share a loft-style apartment upstairs from the ladies. Most episodes of Living Single featured all six of the series leads who were alternately, and often simultaneously, friendly and antagonistic to each other. Not unlike other black TV sitcoms popular during and before Living Single’s series run, verbal sparring and ‘checkin’’ (also known as The Dozens) largely structured the show’s comedy and set it apart from TV sitcoms about white singles like Friends, which depicted white social relations in a ‘kinder’ manner and with an emphasis on goofy comedy. On Friends, an immensely popular, long-running sitcom on network television, friendship among white people was presented in an open, ‘revolving-door’ fashion within an imagined racially homogenous city (Manhattan), whereas Living Single’s friendships existed within a more clearly delineated and tight-knit community of black urbanites in historically black New York neighbourhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem. In the episode ‘Five Card Stud’, intimacy and familiarity within the show’s imagined black community, and its relation to a white-dominated society, determine the narrative tension and resolution that plays out over a series of gendered and sexualized poker encounters. After a brief scene of the women discussing the merits of objectifying men and using male models in underwear to help sell Flavor, ‘Five Card Stud’ begins in Kyle’s stylish apartment. Kyle, who works as a stockbroker in a firm, and Overton, the apartment handyman, are cleaning the apartment in preparation for the ‘executive poker game’ with Kyle’s associates. Kyle tells Overton that hosting the poker game presents an opportunity for him to raise his cache with the senior partners at work. In fact, Kyle is on the verge of an important promotion in the firm that rests on the decision of the youngest VP, Lawrence, who will attend the poker game. This set-up, unlike the leisure poker play in I Love Lucy and Roseanne, presents male homosocial poker play in a way that directly reflects male power under capitalism. The promotion Kyle is poised to get is in corporate accounts. Kyle stresses to Overton how hard he’s worked to come as far as he has professionally,

93

94

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

underscoring aspirational striving and the ways that race impacts achieving and maintaining class status. As such, Kyle ‘suits up’ in a luxurious-looking suit and colourful ascot and berates Overton for the working-class ‘Jethro jumpsuit’ he sports. Overton, who represents black working-class masculinity on the show, is suspicious of Kyle’s willingness to ingratiate himself to his superiors at work. He asks Kyle, whatever happened to dignity?, as the two prepare the apartment for poker night. When Kyle’s coworkers show up at the apartment, Lawrence quips, ‘What’d I tell you? The new guy always overdresses!’, putting Kyle in his place. The next scene in Kyle’s apartment shows Overton and Kyle, who has changed into more casual clothing after being called out for overdressing, sitting around a table playing poker with Kyle’s coworkers: Lawrence, Dean and J.T. Instead of poker chips as currency, the men use dollar bills, signifying a form of gambling more commonly associated with street gambling. Moreover, the green bills on the table serve as a more immediate reminder of the substantial material stakes for Kyle. In alternating medium and close-up shots, the scene tracks the men exchanging highly sexualized comments about the new female temp at work that Lawrence stakes a claim on. In a sense, the men’s conversation responds to the increased media visibility around and public discourse about workplace sexual politics in the early 1990s largely pushed to the fore by the high-profile workplace sexual harassment case involving Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. Meanwhile, downstairs, the ladies become suspicious that Kyle is having a party that they weren’t invited to after a pizza delivery guy comes to their door by mistake. The ladies decide to crash the ‘party’ upstairs, unaware of what activity the men are up to. When the women show up at Kyle’s apartment and discover that the party is a poker night, they express immediate interest. Khadijah exclaims, ‘Poker, my game!’, to an unenthusiastic male crowd. The men bristle at the women’s desire to join the game and begin to make cutting remarks to exclude them from the game. Kyle refers to the game as a ‘man’s game’ to which Max responds, ‘What are you saying, we’re too wimpy to play?’ J.T. is especially defensive and more emphatically states, ‘it’s men only’. Sexual interest overrides at least one of the men’s desire to chase the women away. Lawrence, who is coded as the ‘alpha’ male in the group, says the ladies should stay after he sets eyes on Regine, whom he calls Lady Luck. The women sit around the game table, but after Lawrence describes the game

Be a Pal

as a ‘tradition, just a few cavemen and their cards’, they realize they have only been invited to watch and not participate. Whereas the men in Ricky’s poker game on I Love Lucy begrudgingly accepted Lucy’s intrusion, the men on Living Single draw a clear line around the ‘sanctity’ of male homosocial poker play. The women, in solidarity with each other, decide to leave, except for Regine whose romantic interest in Lawrence leads her to betray the ladies. Just as Regine settles into a seat next to Lawrence to observe the game and keep the men company, Kyle pulls her away for a private conversation. Kyle, pointing to Lawrence, tells Regine that his promotion ‘rides on that man’s recommendation’, playing Regine like a card in a hand of poker and establishing the narrative turn that will ultimately test Kyle’s dignity. Later that week, at the ladies’ dining table downstairs, Khadijah, Sinclair and Maxine are depicted practising their poker faces so they can beat the men when they bust into their next poker game. ‘We’re never going to beat those guys if we don’t know their weaknesses!’, Maxine laments. Sinclair proposes the ladies talk to Overton who can ‘read those guys like a book’. (Later in the episode, Overton happily ‘betrays’ his poker-playing friends because he didn’t like how they talked to and about the ladies.) As the women strategize for their eventual head-to-head with the men, Regine returns from her date, which she describes as ‘an evening of bliss’, with Lawrence, who was a ‘perfect gentleman’. She tells the women, plus Kyle who walks in through the back door and joins the group, how the date went – ending with a kiss on the cheek and a plan for a second picnic date. The scene that follows takes place in the office workroom at Kyle’s job where Lawrence describes his date with Regine in direct conflict with Regine’s version of the date. Lawrence intimates that he ‘scored’ with Regine, even going as far as thanking Kyle for the ‘favour’. Kyle finds himself facing a dilemma – whether to confront Lawrence or not about his ‘trash-talking’ and lies. In the final scene of the episode, the women return to Kyle’s poker night with their newly acquired insight about the men’s poker-playing habits. The poker rematch ends with Khadijah, encoded as the ‘butch’ of the four women, in a head-to-head with Lawrence. Knowing that he is bluffing because he sucked his teeth, she beats him with a full house and wins a substantial pot. Lawrence stands up and angrily announces, ‘I didn’t come here to get whacked by these bitches!’ This ‘sets it off ’ for the group of friends, and Kyle, risking the professional fallout, confronts

95

96

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Lawrence for his ‘jacked-up attitude’ and disrespectful treatment of Regine before kicking Lawrence and the other men out of his apartment. In the end, this poker episode espouses a feminist-minded view, showing men (Overton and Kyle) standing up for women and women beating men at their own game. The gendered dynamics of poker in ‘Five Card Stud’ must be understood in relation to prevailing norms and politics of respectability that delimit and constrain black middle-class communities. Turning to community, an always-already-unstable concept, the women in the series temporarily ‘win’ against the ‘studs’ whose power in both public and private realms had been destabilized by expressions of feminist cultural politics begun in the 1970s and carried into the 1980s and 1990s.

Conclusion The trope of leisure poker play on TV sitcoms functions as a ‘theater of the social’, bringing our attention to social inequality under capitalism. Blending gendered leisure play with the competitive, risk-taking spirit of gambling, poker play on TV sitcoms complicates how we understand poker as a metaphor for capitalism. In the domestic scene of sitcom worlds, male homosocial poker play and the feminine disruptions that unsettle such play both reflect upon public attitudes and anxieties about gender and subtly critique men’s power in society. The pleasures generated in sitcom scenes of poker play like the ones discussed earlier are complex, yet all derive from the possibility of women’s power within capitalism: Lucy’s power resides in her feminine disregard for the rules and rituals of ‘men’s games’; Roseanne’s power is in her loving relationships with her family when the cards seem ‘stacked’; and power of the women of Living Single is in their determination to find ways to ‘out-play’ men. On scripted US television, poker proves a vital site for the exploration of shifting and inherently anxious gender dynamics that structure American-style capitalism and class stratification. Thus, for the critical viewer of televisual poker, the idealized gendered, racial and sexual social relations television aims to produce come to appear much like a bluffing poker player whose power, in relation to money and culture, is constantly at risk of being undermined.

Be a Pal

References Bjerg, O. 2011. Poker: The Parody of Capitalism. Detroit: University of Michigan Press. Dalton, M. M. and Linder, L. R. 2005. The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed. Albany: State University Press of New York. Duncan, A. 2015. Gambling with the Myth of the American Dream. New York: Routledge. Haralovich, M. B. 1992. ‘Sit-coms and suburbs: Positioning the 1950s homemaker’. In L. Spigel and D. Mann (eds), Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, 111–43. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Lipsitz, G. 1992. ‘The meaning of memory: Family, class, and ethnicity in early network television programs’. In L. Spigel and D. Mann (eds), Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, 71–111. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Ngai, S. 2012. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Boston: Harvard University Press. Spigel, L. 1992. ‘Installing the television set: Popular discourses on television and domestic space, 1948-1955’. In L. Spigel and D. Mann (eds), Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, 3–41. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Zook, K. B. 1999. Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television. New York: Oxford University Press.

97

6 Poker fiction Romance, possible worlds and magic circles Paul Wake

Chapter Outline Poker and romance: The American Dream 101 Possible worlds and magic circles 105 Conclusion113

In his introduction to Dead Man’s Hand, an anthology of short stories about poker, Howard Lederer notes the game’s ‘rich tradition of nonfiction’ before going on to claim that ‘poker fiction, until now, has been nearly non-existent’ (Penzler, 2008: 2). Lederer, whose words recall Mark Twain’s remark that ‘[t]he game of poker is all too little understood in the higher circles of this country’ (Twain, 1877), overstates the novelty of poker in literary culture. Works such as Bret Harte’s The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1869), Twain’s Science vs. Luck (1870), Stephen Crane’s ‘A Poker Game’ (1900), Jack London’s Burning Daylight (1910), Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Four Men and a Poker Game’ (1926), W. Somerset Maugham’s Straight Flush (1929), Richard Jessup’s The Cincinnati Kid (1963), John Updike’s

Poker Fiction

‘Poker Night’ (1984) and Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance (1990), to name but a few of the more prominent examples, all attest to poker’s long (and notably male-authored) literary history. Poker’s rich literary history notwithstanding, Lederer is correct in identifying a rapid increase in the number of novels about or featuring poker in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first century. The briefest of surveys of the novels published in English over the last twenty years makes clear the extent of the rise in poker fictions (searching on Amazon​.c​om the tag ‘poker’ brings up over 1,000 ‘literature and fiction’ titles published since the year 2000). An indicative list, far from exhaustive, might include the following: popular and literary fiction, Jill A. Davis’ Girls’ Poker Night (2002), Louise Wener’s The Big Blind (2003), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero (2007), Ted Heller’s Pocket Kings (2012), Helen Beal’s Rich in Small Things (2013) and Michael Kardos’ Bluff: A Novel (2018); fictionalized autobiographies, Brandon Adams’ Broke: A Poker Novel (2006) and Alexander J. Adams’ The Prodigal (2013); anthologies, Otto Penzler’s Dead Man’s Hand (2007) and Anthony Holden and Natalie Galustain’s He Played for his Wife and Other Stories (2017); crime fiction, James Swain’s ‘Tony Valentine’ Series (2001–10), Milton T. Burton’s The Rogue’s Game (2005), Pete Hautman’s The Prop (2006) and Jackie Chance’s ‘Poker Mystery’ series (2007–8); Westerns, J.A. Johnson’s Killer Poker (2011) and Glenn Taylor’s A Hanging at Cinder Bottom (2015); and erotic fiction, of which Carol Lynne’s Poker Night: Pocket Pair (2009) and Madison Faye’s Five Card Studs (2017) are but two examples taken from a genre for which the allure of poker’s milieu is matched only by a seemingly insatiable indulgence for wordplay in book titles. This rise in poker in fiction can be mapped directly onto a dramatic rise in the global popularity of the game arising from the impact of televised poker in shows such as World Series of Poker in the United States (ESPN) and Late Night Poker (Channel 4) in the United Kingdom, the dramatic increase in online gaming, and the democratizing effect of Chris Moneymaker’s $2.5 million win at the 2003 World Series of Poker. As Victoria Coren puts it, ‘Late Night Poker was the first scatter of gunpowder, internet technology fattened the pile, and Chris Moneymaker’s win is the spark required for a global explosion’ (2009: 171). The increasing frequency with which poker appears in fiction, theatre and film is, then, hardly surprising. Poker and life, particularly American life, have long been connected, with poker’s historians drawing on books such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s

99

100

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Democracy in America (1835), Herbert O. Yardley’s The Education of a Poker Player (1957) and John Scarne’s Complete Guide to Gambling (1961) to argue that poker is ‘a peculiarly American game’ (Alvarez, 2008: 125). As Al Alvarez puts it in relation to Yardley’s memoir, poker stories are ‘the mythology of America on the move, the winners winning, the losers going under’ (2008: 126). In a similar vein, Walter Matthau, who played the poker-playing sportswriter Oscar Madison in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple (1965), famously quipped, ‘Poker exemplifies the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great’ (quoted in Bjerg, 2011: 2). This line of argument is well established, most notably in John Lukacs’ oftquoted essay ‘Poker and the American Character’ (1963), in David Hayano’s Poker Faces (1982) and more recently in James McManus’ history Cowboys Full (2009) and Ole Bjerg’s Poker: The Parody of Capitalism (2011). Poker has been regarded as America’s game since the nineteenth century – ‘America has now not only a literature and a language, but a game of her own. We do not speak of Base-ball, but of Poker’ (Saturday Review, 1882) – and remains so in the twenty-first century – ‘Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn poker’ (New York Times 2003, quoted in McManus, 2009: 20). The extent of poker’s integration into American life is evident in the import of its terminology into everyday language and culture. As Alvarez notes: American vernacular is full of fossilized poker terms: ‘bluff,’ ‘showdown,’ ‘something up your sleeve,’ ‘above board’ (that is, with your cards on the table, not under it), and ‘passing the buck’ (the ‘buck’ is a marker that goes around the table to indicate who is dealing; these days it is usually an oval disk marked ‘dealer,’ but in frontier times it was a clasp knife with a buckhorn handle). As [a] kid grows up he will learn that ‘four flushers’ aren’t to be trusted and that if he has to ‘play against a stacked deck’ and ‘the odds are against him’ his ‘ace in the hole’ will be to ‘play his cards close to his chest,’ to ‘up the ante,’ ‘stand pat,’ and rely on adult virtues like fortitude – ‘keeping a poker face’ – and honesty – ‘putting his cards on the table.’ He will learn, in fact, that there is a poker expression for almost everything. (2001: 25)

These terms represent but a small part of poker’s extensive and colourful vocabulary. Alvarez concludes his book with a seven-page glossary of poker terms, many of which – ‘bullet’, ‘cowboy’, ‘drawing dead’, ‘gutshot’, ‘rush’ and ‘showdown’ – reveal the game’s roots in American frontier

Poker Fiction

culture. Such glossaries are common in books on the game. The glossary in Maryann Morrison’s Women’s Poker Night extends to eight pages, that in Holden’s Big Deal to eleven pages, while McManus’ runs to fourteen closely typed pages in Cowboys Full. The adoption of many of these terms in English outside of the United States goes some way towards confirming that poker, once regarded as an American pastime, has become, as McManus puts it, ‘the world’s card game’ (2009: 419) and its language the world’s language. Recognizing the game’s global character, this chapter brings together novels from the United States and the United Kingdom alongside writing on literature and poker drawn from a predominantly European tradition. Broadly speaking, the chapter has two parts. The first part considers poker as a metaphor for contemporary life. Considering the game and its fictions in relation to Jackson Lears’ suggestion that ‘the language of “recreation” provided a new idiom for orchestrating the recapture of lost spontaneity’ in the twentieth century (2004: 227), I offer readings of Jill A. Davis’ Girls’ Poker Night: A Novel of High Stakes and Louise Wener’s The Big Blind, arguing that the game provides a new (secular) magic in contemporary Romance in what is both a celebration and a critique of the experience of risk in contemporary life. In the second part, I consider poker in terms of its underlying structures, turning to Michael Kardos’ Bluff and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man in order to explore possible connections between poker and reading as activities characterized by predictive inference and formalized outcomes. Running throughout my readings of all four novels is a tension, present in both games and literature, between ambiguity and resolution, and the suggestion that poker, a game of managed risk, operates as a timely metaphor for early twenty-first-century life.

Poker and romance: The American Dream Jill A. Davis’ Girls’ Poker Night is the fictional memoir of newspaper lifestyle columnist Ruby Capote for whom a weekly game provides an important social space: ‘It’s Wednesday night. Poker night. We drink margaritas and smoke cigarettes and talk about books and sex and jobs

101

102

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

and men’ (2003: 15). In terms of the novel’s plot, poker is all but incidental; rather, the game functions as a lens through which Capote can interpret her life, offering a means by which to explore emotional risk and romantic reward. In one of many direct addresses to the reader, Capote, recently single and new to New York, remarks: I fold. I pass. I don’t risk anything. Three of a kind? No, sorry, I won’t bet big. Nope, because someone else could still easily pull off a better hand. Might as well just right fold now. Get out before I get too far in. I want you to know that it’s not lost on me. That I realize this game is a metaphor for my life. (2003: 15)

The emotional interpretation soon follows: I am a person who will stay in a relationship for three years because I know that this relationship will never hurt me. I will park my love here because here I will never experience great joy, but more important, I will never be devastated. (2003: 36)

This aligns closely with the common perception that poker provides a metaphor for life, that ‘Character’, as the playwright David Mamet puts it, is what ‘the game of poker is all about’ (1986: 52). Indeed, poker, as McManus demonstrates in Cowboys Full, proves to be a popular and elastic metaphor that is regularly employed in discussions of all aspects of life, both private and public, ranging from love and politics, to finance and war. Poker as a metaphor for the American Dream – ‘in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement’ (Adams, 1931: 404) – finds clearer expression in Wener’s transatlantic romance The Big Blind. The novel brings together the dreams of British maths genius Audrey Ungar and poker-playing American-in-exile ‘Big’ Louie Bloom, both of whom regard poker as the means to change their lives. Despite Louie’s remark that the ‘Card table’s no place for romantics’ (2004: 132), Wener’s novel shares certain features with Romance fiction (it is at its heart a love story) in its narrative of the overcoming of obstacles in the pursuit of individual happiness. The novel also invites reflection on the fantasy of fulfilling the American Dream in Audrey’s (temporary) flight to the United States in search of both fortune and happiness. Specifically, the narrative is concerned with Audrey and Louie’s pursuit of future happiness. Audrey is looking for her long-absent father, Louie,

Poker Fiction

for the funds to buy a garden. The opening lines make clear the nature of these desires: The thing Big Louie wanted more than anything else in the whole world was a garden. . . . This desire to have a garden consumed most of Big Louie’s day. . . . If he was feeling especially optimistic he’d plan on building an elaborate sprinkler system with hoses and a remote control. He liked to imagine the sound it would make. (Wener, 2004: 1)

This language of ‘wanting’, ‘desiring’ and ‘imagining’ – which slips into the future tense with a series of perhapses: ‘perhaps it would be the expensive kind that spun around in circles’ (Wener, 2004: 1) – is indicative of the character’s fantasies of alternative futures. For Louie, the route to this future is clear; he must find a poker player: ‘a person could turn twenty thousand pounds into a small fortune overnight’ (Wener, 2004: 2). Audrey, faced with the prospect of settling down and moving from London to a village in the English countryside and having a midlife crisis at the age of thirty-two, has her own fantasy: she will settle her demons by finding her poker-playing father, Harry Ungar. So the pair’s unlikely relationship begins: Audrey, needing access to the world of high-stakes poker, becomes Louie’s partner in crime in a high stakes poker scam that eventually takes her to Las Vegas where, it is suggested, both Louie’s fortune and her father await. Wener’s draws widely on poker’s rich history. Readers might note certain resemblances between the book’s characters and Simon’s ‘Odd Couple’ Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar (borrowing a surname, reprising their exaggerated slovenliness and fastidiousness, and making for an undeniably ‘odd’ couple). Audrey’s surname has, as Louie remarks, a ‘real pedigree’ (Wener, 2004: 61), connecting her to Simon’s play and to the three-time World Series of Poker winner Stu Unger. Louie shares more than passing resemblance to Doyle Brunson, whose book Super/System (1979) he loans to Audrey: both are large men – Brunson has been described by Katy Lederer as a ‘Jabba-the-Hut-like creature’ (2003: 126) – both are Texans, and both were star basketball players who turned to poker full time after their athletic careers were halted by injury. Despite these connections to the world of poker, the novel’s most revealing intertext, underscoring a connection to the ‘myth’ (Stiglitz, 2015: 144) of the American Dream, is the folk tale ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, a story Bruno Bettelheim describes as ‘the odyssey of a boy striving to gain independence

103

104

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

. . . and on his own achieving greatness’ (1976: 194n) and which manifests in the United States as the ‘Jack Tales’ in which ‘[t]he American Jack differs from his European predecessors in that his success depends less on using magic than his own “mental resources”. . . . They are, as a former American Folklore president says of Jack, “unafraid, iconoclastic, and inventive’’’ (Morgan, 2013: 79). The parallels between Wener’s novel and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ are clear, as indeed are the parallels between the story and the frontier myths of American culture. Audrey plays Jack to Louis’ giant, ‘The kind’, she says, ‘Hans Christian Andersen has restless dreams about when he’s eaten too much cheese’ (Wener, 2004: 59), his highly developed sense of smell – he can ‘smell ripened cheese through two foot of solid steel’ (Wener, 2004: 163) – recalling the giant’s ‘Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum,/ I smell the blood of an Englishman’ (Jacobs, 2002: 55). The pair’s initial encounter follows the opening of the folk tale closely. In Wener’s retelling, the magic beans, thrown out of the window by Jack’s exasperated mother, take the form of a window box Audrey delivers to Louie. Louie’s flat, high up on the fifteenth floor of a sixties concrete tower block, takes the place of the Giant’s house – ‘a great big tall house’ (Jacobs, 2002: 55) – the rattling lift making for an unlikely urban beanstalk. Having driven off Louie’s accomplice, the card mechanic Karl, Wener’s story diverges from the original Jack tales, in having Audrey take on the role of the giant’s Golden Goose: ‘I have a flight to book and a stranger to find, and a bona fide giant to save’ (2004: 286). Accordingly, Audrey-Jack’s ascent to an upper/ heavenly realm is reprised by a business class flight to Las Vegas, where the protagonists’ final rewards await. Davis’ Girls’ Poker Night and Wener’s The Big Blind, while very different in their treatment of poker, share in fantasies of alternative futures. Written in the mode of the romance – a mode characterized by Northrop Frye in one of ‘wish fulfilment’ (1957: 186) and by Jessica Richard as ‘the form that celebrates unpredictable chance, that rewards the gamble’ (2011: 187) – the two novels rely on poker as a justification for dramatic action. For the contemporary reader, bereft of faith in magic, poker takes the place of the ‘scandalous and archaic activity of fantasy’ relied upon by the plots of classical romance (Jameson, 1975: 145). The nature of this new fantasy, in which the apparently inexorable movement towards happy endings takes the form of a dynamic risktaking mobility, is itself bound to the contexts out of which these twenty-

Poker Fiction

first-century romances emerge. Appropriately neoliberal subjects, the protagonists of these two novels are ‘anxious selves . . . entrepreneurial subjects and observed, objectified labouring bodies’ (Moore, 2018: 21), living what Anthony Elliott and John Urry describe as ‘mobile lives’ in which ‘[e]xperimentation and danger, possibility and risk, jostle uneasily’ (2010: x). As Davis’ Ruby Capote notes, recalling Anaïs Nin, ‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage . . . happy endings are not for cowards’ (2003: 222). While Ruby embodies the apparent necessity of individual risk (set against, and required by, managerial conservatism), Audrey’s gambling in Wener’s novel is an act of political resistance that challenges what Lears describes as ‘dominant ideas of control and accumulation’ (2004: 326): ‘there’s nothing’, says Audrey apparently without irony, ‘like a savage restructuring of your daily life to make you feel more at peace with the world’ (2004: 78).

Possible worlds and magic circles While in much, perhaps most, poker fiction the game functions as a recognizable backdrop, an alluring milieu of wealth, sex, risk and reward, before which other stories play out, Davis and Wener’s novels suggest the potential of poker as a metaphor by which to explore the tension between risk and control that might be said to characterize contemporary life. In this section, I pursue this suggestion, paying close attention to the structure of poker, and of games more generally, in order to explore the extent to which an understanding of the game might afford insight into both the fictions that employ it as a metaphor and the structures of fiction more broadly conceived. More precisely, poker is taken as a metaphor for reading in discussions of two contemporary novels: Michael Kardos’ Bluff and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. In the first, picking up on Davis’ celebration of risk-taking in Girls’ Poker Night, I explore the transfer of risk from characters in fiction to readers of fiction. In the second, I am again interested in reading and/as risk, approaching DeLillo’s novel in terms of a more conservative response to risk in which readers and characters retreat into the regulation offered by both games and fiction in response to what Ulrich Beck described as the World Risk Society, ‘a phase of development of modern society in which the social, political, ecological and individual

105

106

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

risks created by the momentum of innovation increasingly elude the control and protective institutions of industrial society’ (1999: 72). Beck’s World Risk Society thesis, in which ‘[t]he concept of risk reverses the relationship of past, present and future’ and in which ‘[b]elieved risks are the whip used to keep the present day moving along at a gallop’ (1999: 137), has much in common with the structures of games and books in its emphasis on the constructed and the fictitious. Books and games are similarly driven by a focus on (and drive towards) resolution. As Frank Kermode remarks, writing on fiction, ‘In a novel the beginning implies the end . . . all that seems fortuitous and contingent in what follows is in fact reserved for a later benefaction of significance in some concordant structure’ (2000: 148). Defining games, Elliott M. Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith, place a similar emphasis on endings, describing games as ‘an exercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between forces, confined by procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome’ (7). Divergent in many ways, books, as concordant structures, and games, as self-contained systems in the sense intended by Avedon and Sutton-Smith, proceed by setting out both starting points and conclusions. We ‘read forward’, Peter Brooks tells us, ‘seeking in the unfolding of the narrative a line of intention and a portent of design that hold the promise of progress toward meaning’ (1984: xiii). ‘Fun from games’, Raph Koster tells us, ‘arises out of comprehension’ (2014: 40). These doubtless overly bold claims about games and fiction serve here as provocations, inviting further commentary on the points of commonality in terms of structure shared between games and books, and their players and readers. Alvarez’s description of Texas Hold ’Em provides a starting point for my analysis of these shared structures: each player is dealt two cards face-down, ‘in the hole.’ The two players to the left of the dealer are forced to bet ‘blind’ – before they see their cards. The other players either call the blind bet or raise it or fold. Then three communal cards, called the ‘flop,’ are dealt face-up in the centre of the table, and there is another round of betting, although this time the players may check. Then two more communal cards – known as ‘Fourth Street’ or ‘the turn,’ and ‘Fifth Street’ or ‘the river’ – are dealt face-up, one at a time, with a round of betting after each. The five cards in the centre are common to all the players, who use them in combination with their hole cards to make the strongest possible hands. (2008: 129)

Poker Fiction

This summary sets out the formal structure of a hand of poker, marking out beginning, middle and end and suggesting something akin to the three-part structure of conventional fictional narrative. While it is perhaps labouring the point to recall Aristotle’s insistence on the necessity of ‘wholeness’ to dramatic plot, his discussion of tragedy connects neatly to this understanding of games: A whole is something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is an item that does not itself follow anything by necessarily upon something else, but which has some second item following necessarily upon it. Conversely, an end is an item that naturally follows, either necessarily or commonly, upon something else, but has nothing following it. (2013: 26)

Thus, just as fiction moves towards resolution, each poker hand moves from equilibrium, through uncertainty, to resolution via a series of established moves. Poker tournaments are structured along similar lines, opening with a large field of players which is reduced in the middle game before reaching the final table where the end-game begins. Both, games and fiction, then, engage their player-readers with the promise of ‘mastery’ or ‘concordance’. Despite a shared emphasis on endings – poker identifies its winners and books, generally speaking, end – both activities mask a certain failure in terms of ‘textual’ mastery. As Alan Palmer tells us, the storyworlds of fictional narratives ‘differ ontologically from the real world because they are incomplete . . . fiction is necessarily incomplete and full of blanks where nothing is said about a part of the storyworld and gaps where something but not everything is said’ (2008: 34). A similar claim might be made of poker, which is, as poker player David Einhorn reminds us, a game of ‘incomplete information’ (Anderson, 2006). That players fold during the game, discarding their cards unseen, makes it possible, likely even, that at the end of a hand, players will remain unaware of the values of all of the cards in play, leading to an ‘incompleteness’ of information that is perhaps the root of Lukacs’ claim that ‘cards count in poker, but they count less than in any other game’ (1963: 57). In these shared features of partial, and competing, information poker and fiction might be seen to align through their player-readers’ negotiation of ‘possible worlds’ which are understood as those ‘things we can talk about or imagine, suppose, believe in or wish for’ (M.J. Cresswell, quoted in Doležel, 1998: 14).

107

108

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Marie-Laure Ryan’s summary of possible worlds theory provides a language by which it might be possible to account for some of the ways in which books and poker might align. She writes: The foundation of PW theory is the idea that reality – conceived as the sum of the imaginable rather than as the sum of what exists physically – is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct worlds. This universe is hierarchically structured by the opposition of one element, which functions as the center of the system, to all the other members of the set. The central element is known as the ‘actual’ or ‘real’ world (henceforth AW) while the other members of the system are alternative, or non-actual possible worlds. (Ryan, 2013)

While poker, to state the obvious, is not fiction, and undoubtedly the discussions of possible worlds in narrative theory prove an imperfect fit, the outcome of a hand of poker is fairly described as being reliant on logically possible but not necessarily actualized outcomes. In other words, it is not the actual cards (the actual world) players hold that decide the outcome, but the hand (world) held to be actual in the minds of the game’s players. It is this aspect of the game that makes the appeal to possible worlds theory, and to work on reading in particular, so helpful in understanding what is at stake in a game that places such an emphasis on inferences derived from partial, and evolving, information. The notion of reading as inference finds its clearest expression in the work of Umberto Eco, who, writing in The Role of the Reader, describes the activity of the reader in terms of ‘inferential walks’ (1984: 214). Distinguishing between ‘naïve’ first readings and subsequent readings, Eco undertakes a first (naïve) and a second (critical) reading of Alphonse Allais’ Un drame bien parisien in order to demonstrate the ‘mischievous innuendos’ (1984: 206), made by readers in response to the text’s many points of indeterminancy. Readers, Eco suggests, infer meaning from incomplete, and at times misleading, information: At the level of discursive structure the reader is invited to fill up various empty phrastic spaces (texts are lazy machineries that ask someone to do part of their job). At the level of narrative structures, the reader is supposed to make forecasts concerning the future course of the fabula. To do this the reader is supposed to resort to various intertextual frames among which to take his inferential walks. Every text, even though not specifically narrative, is in some way making the addressee expect (and foresee) the fulfilment of every unaccomplished sentence. (1984: 214)

Poker Fiction

In short, readers, like the players around the poker table, respond to texts by both filling in gaps left by textual indeterminacies and by predicting, based on the information at hand, future possibilities. Eco’s ‘inferential walks’ describe well the demands of poker, a game that invites, if not requires, the calculation and recalculation of a series of (diminishing) possible outcomes. The pursuit of, and necessary deviation from, game theory optimal poker, begins with an understanding of the mathematics behind what Matthew Janda calls ‘equity’ – ‘the odds that a hand will win after the river card is dealt’ (2013: 6) and ‘expected value’ – ‘how much we expect to win on average’ (2013: 11). These calculations are based on the information at hand, but poker, as Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenmann note, is a ‘multi-street game’ (2006: 51) that tasks players with making decisions that take into account a series of possible future events. Eco’s essay, itself an example of textual playfulness, makes the parallels between reading and games of incomplete information clear. Exploring similar ideas in his Six Walks in the Woods, Eco makes the connection to gambling explicit: ‘In a narrative text, the reader is forced to make choices all the time. . . . Whenever the speaker is about to end a sentence, we as readers or listeners make a bet (albeit unconsciously): we predict his or her choice, or anxiously wonder what choice will be made’ (1994: 6). Where poker and literary criticism diverge is in the fact that the only reading that matters in a poker tournament is the first. Second, critical, readings come too late and, in poker parlance, either take the form of ‘bad beat’ stories which ‘long winded and ill-tempered . . . never have a happy ending’ (Alvarez, 2001: 87) or, for players of a more sanguine mindset, form part of an ongoing analysis intended to inform future play. Michael Kardos’ Bluff: A Novel, which plays with readerly expectations in a manner well suited to its title, provides an example of the ways in which these inferential walks appear in fiction. Telling the story of Natalie Webb, a close-up magician-turned card mechanic who joins con artist Ellen to cheat in a $1.5 million poker game, Bluff enacts a literary con by exploiting the division between story (events) and discourse (their telling). (Mis)directing the reader’s attention to the action taking place in the home of Natalie and Ellen’s mark, the millionaire Victor Flowers, the novel sends the reader off on a series of inferential walks in order to set up a doubletwist ending. Presented from Natalie’s point of view, the novel trades on a familiarity with first-person narrative to bluff the reader through the very deliberate

109

110

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

control of information. A sentence such as ‘I gave her the silence she seemed to want’ (Kardos, 2018: 99) taken from early in the novel is indicative of the narrative voice, establishing access to Natalie’s mind (‘I’) and limiting access to the perspective of others, in this case Ellen (‘she’). While this form of first-person narrative (fixed focalization) typically invites the reader to empathize with the protagonist, in Kardos’ novel the promise of subjective experience of the fictional world comes with no guarantee of access to all of the thoughts of the perceiving character. For readers habituated to the intimacy of first-person fiction, the novel takes an ‘unnatural’ turn on the discovery that it has provided access to only selected information available to Natalie. At this point, the disparity between reader and character comes to the fore, situating the reader, shockingly and pleasurably, outside the Natalie’s consciousness. In having its first-person narrative mask the deliberate artifice of the narrative, the conclusion of Kardos’ novel confirms Mieke Bal’s insight that in narratives in which ‘[t]he speaking agent [the narrator] does not mention itself . . . it might just as well have done so’ (2017: 13), while, of course, trading on the common-sense pretence that this is not the case. Ejected from the consciousness of the protagonist, and informed of the infelicity of the likely inferences drawn, the reader is momentarily aligned with the victims of Natalie’s (now Kardos’) elaborate double bluff. The effect of this is to radically, if only temporarily, unsettle any sense of narrative mastery felt on the part of the reader and (briefly) figures Kardos as the reader’s opponent in a novel whose ludic structure finally becomes clear. If reading appears here to be aligned with risk – the risk of misreading or of losing the plot – this state of anticipation should be regarded as the impetus of a narrative desire that ultimately seeks certainty. The reader of Kardos’ Bluff, momentarily blindsided, regains control as the novel returns to a state of equilibrium. DeLillo’s Falling Man replaces Kardos’ emphasis on poker as a game of deception and chance with an alternative narrative that presents the game as one of managed risk in which an understanding of its rules (both constitutive and social) moves it from the realm of chance towards a professional activity characterized by regulation and order. Keith Neudecker, the New York lawyer and survivor of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, is, we learn early in the novel, the host of a weekly poker game: ‘He had his poker game, six players, downtown, one night a week’ (DeLillo, 2007: 29). In these early games, prior to the

Poker Fiction

September 11 attacks, poker stands for tradition, for ritual, mastery, stasis and control. This embracing of regulation is clearly, absurdly, evident in Keith’s early poker games, on which the players impose a series of increasingly absurd regulations: In the beginning they played poker in a number of shapes and variations but over time they began to reduce the dealer’s options. The banning of certain games started as a joke in the name of tradition and self-discipline but became effective over time, with arguments made against the shabbier aberrations. (DeLillo, 2007: 96)

The limitation on the forms of poker played is soon extended to the game environment: ‘No food. Food was out. No gin or vodka. No beer that was not dark. They issued a mandate against all beer that was not dark and against all dark beer that was not Beck’s Dark’ (DeLillo, 2007: 98). Building on this, the players attempt to limit the permissible topics of conversation: ‘Somebody wanted to ban sports talk. They banned sports talk, television talk, movie titles. Keith thought this was getting stupid. Rules are good, they replied, and the stupider the better’ (DeLillo, 2007: 99). This goes on until ‘Somebody got hungry and demanded food’, and soon the weekly game reverts to a ‘wallow of wild-man poker’ (DeLillo, 2007: 100). Charles Sumner argues that the rules imposed on Keith’s game afford the players with a sense of control: Poker is, after all, a game of chance. In order to reduce the seeming lack of control over the element of chance, the games become more and more disciplined, so that a series of rules is instituted . . . thereby delivering some sense of mastery to the players whose lives are seemingly governed by chance. This desire to control and order a situation over which they have little or no control stems from impersonal forces that govern their lives outside the poker game. (2014: 16)

While Sumner overstates the role of chance in poker, the suggestion that control is central to Keith’s games is helpful, particularly in reading the novel’s closing section in which the submission to regulation appears absolute. This acceptance of regulation is a feature of games. As Bernard Suits argues in The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia: [t]o play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where

111

112

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity. (2014: 36)

This description of the rules of play in terms of inefficiency is one of the things that most clearly demarcates the game space itself. As Suits notes, it is this that makes the activity possible and the game identifiable as a game (distinct from the activities of ‘real’ life). It is this sense of the game as distinct from ‘life’ that characterizes poker in the novel’s closing section. Keith’s long-standing game night ends with the events of 11 September – ‘The card games ended after the towers fell’ (DeLillo, 2007: 29) – when two of the players are killed and another is badly injured. By the novel’s end, Neudecker has returned to poker, but it is not the poker of his regular game night. Now he plays in Las Vegas, staying in the city for extended periods and playing in a series of high-stakes tournaments. The move to the casinos of Las Vegas locates Neudecker in a radically different space. Here, in stark contrast with the emphasis on tradition and memory of the Keith’s early games, the ‘rules of the game’ – arbitrary but consensual – become a form of forgetting. Removed from the familiar setting of his New York apartment, Neudecker enters what has come to be called gaming’s ‘magic circle’, a term which comes originally from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course . . . forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart. ([1955] 2016: 10)

This notion of the game space aligns with D.B.C. Pierre’s imagined poker table, invested with ‘the sanctity of a shrine, a monument to the maths and the light and somehow even the yelling . . . a table of miracles’ (Holden and Galustian, 2017: 74) and to Alvarez’s description of real-world poker as being played in a space apart: ‘[t]he wives are living in the real world of groceries and clothes and dentists’ bills, whereas the husbands are temporarily in a dreamland where play’s the thing and money isn’t quite real’ (2001: 68). Alvarez’s off-hand connection of poker and masculinity is recalled by the parallel DeLillo offers in Falling Man between Keith’s gaming and the ‘storyline sessions’ run by Liane, his estranged wife: ‘also weekly, in the afternoon, a gathering of five or six or seven men and women in the early

Poker Fiction

stages of Alzheimer’s disease’ (DeLillo, 2007: 29). Where Keith recognized a ‘certain symmetry’ (DeLillo, 2007: 29) between those sessions and his New York poker games – both are shared activities that are concerned with memory, tradition and repetition – here the parallels are inverted. While the storyline group seeks to forge connection to the past through storytelling and ritual, Neudecker turns to gaming in Las Vegas in search of the ‘anonymity’ of life with ‘no stories attached’ (DeLillo, 2007: 204): ‘the times when there was nothing outside, no flash of history or memory that he might unknowingly summon in the routine run of cards’ (DeLillo, 2007: 225), and at which ‘He wondered if he was becoming a self-operating mechanism, like a humanoid robot that understands two hundred voice commands, far-seeing, touch-sensitive but totally, rigidly controllable’ (DeLillo, 2007: 226). According to such a reading, the playing of poker in Falling Man suggests an abnegation of self that is at odds with the celebratory fantasies played out in many representations of the game. In this sense, game-based play becomes limiting rather than liberating (or perhaps liberating through its limitations). Here the language of recreational gambling is not so much an idiom by which to recapture lost spontaneity as it is a means by which to retreat to regulation and containment in the face of global risk.

Conclusion The initial claim made in this chapter, that there exists an extensive body of poker, dating back to the game’s early history in the work of authors such as Harte and Twain in the nineteenth century, and increasingly evident in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century fictions, is perhaps relatively modest. Parallel to this recognition of poker’s extensive literature, I hope to have indicated some of the ways in which these fictions chart the state of the cultures in which the game plays such a significant part. All four novels selected for discussion here use the game of poker as a means by which to consider the experience of chance and risk in contemporary life. Davis’ Girls’ Poker Night poker is taken up as a metaphor by which to explore the pursuit of individual happiness in what becomes a celebration of individual risk. As Ruby Capote, a woman who learns to gamble on life, puts it, ‘Every day the opportunity exists to change your life’ (2003: 4).

113

114

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

For Wener’s Audrey Ungar risk-taking is compulsory, as the book’s title The Big Blind suggests, and while the book is well described as a fantasy of individual wish fulfilment it nonetheless affords a critique of the conditions by which risk is transferred from the state, or corporation, to the individual through Ungar’s resistance to the everyday measures of success represented by marriage and settled life in semi-rural Britain. Kardos’ Bluff advances a similar narrative of risk and reward – it is effectively a modern retelling of Robin Hood – while aligning the reader uncomfortably with the dominant male players who are duped by the risk-taking Natalie. By way of contrast, evincing a very different response to the climate of global, rather than individual, risk, DeLillo’s novel reappraises this celebration of risk, through an exploration of poker’s ritual aspects that suggests the negation of self through the submission to regulation. Parallel to this account of poker’s literature, I hope to have gone some way to suggesting an approach to literary texts that takes seriously the insights of game studies and that indicates a possible approach to reading and to the structures of fictional narratives that is informed by a sense of the simultaneously liberating and limiting nature of rule-based play. Specifically, my focus has been on the parallels between the activities of playing and reading. Often described in terms that stress their points of divergence – ‘there’s a direct, immediate conflict between the demands of story and the demands of a game’ (Costikyan, 2007: 6) – reading is, as I take Eco’s work to suggest, a ludic activity in which participants engage with a form of regulation that might otherwise be understood as being prescriptively linear and fixed. While the text of print fiction is quite literally fixed (‘set’ in ‘forms’ to use the language of typesetting), texts as experienced by readers remain full of gaps, inconsistencies and misdirection and are thus always in a state of renegotiation. In this way, books are, then, close to games, of which poker is a prime example, in which potential ‘stories’, multiple at the outset, emerge from a similar drive towards resolution.

References Adams, B. 2008. Broke: A Poker Novel. Lincoln: iUniverse. Adams, J. T. 1931. The Epic of America. Boston: Little, Brown.

Poker Fiction

Alvarez, A. 2001. Poker: Best, Bluffs, and Bad Beats. London: Bloomsbury. Alvarez, A. 2008. Risky Business; People, Pastimes, Poker, Books. London: Bloomsbury. Anderson, J. 2006. ‘Hedge Fund manager who plays his cards right’. New York Times, 11 August 2006. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​006​/0​​8​/11/​​busin​​ ess​/1​​​1hedg​​e​.htm​l (accessed 3 August 2018). Aristotle. 2013. Poetics, trans. A. Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Avedon, E. M. and Sutton-Smith, B., eds. 1971. The Study of Games. New York: Wiley & Sons. Bal, M. 2017. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Beal, H. J. 2013. Rich in Small Things. London: Carapace. Beck, U. 1999. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity. Bettelheim, B. 2010. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage. Bjerg, O. 2011. Poker: The Parody of Capitalism. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press. Brecht, B. 2015. ‘Four men and a Poker game or too much luck is bad luck’. In J. Willett and R. Manheim (eds), The Collected Short Stories of Bertolt Brecht, trans. Y. Kapp, H. Rorrison and A. Tatlow. London: Bloomsbury. Brooks, P. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Oxford: Clarendon. Brown, A. 2006. The Poker Face of Wall Street. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Burton, M T. 2013. The Rogues’ Game. New York: Minotaur Books. Chance, J. 2007. Death on the Flop. New York: Berkeley. Chen, B. and Ankenman, J. 2006. The Mathematics of Poker. Pittsburgh: ConJeiCo LLC. Coren, V. 2009. For Richer, For Poorer: A Love Affair With Poker. Edinburgh: Canongate. Costikyan, G. 2007. ‘Games, storytelling, and breaking the string’. In P. Harrigan and N. Wardrip-Fruin (eds), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, 5–13. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Davis, J. A. 2003. Girls’ Poker Night: A Novel of High Stakes. New York: Random House. DeLillo, D. 2007. Falling Man: A Novel. London: Picador. Doležel, L. 1998. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eco, U. 1984. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eco, U. 1994. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

115

116

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Elliott, A. and Urry, J. 2010. Mobile Lives. London: Routledge. Frye, N. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hautman, P. 2006. The Prop: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hayano, D. 1982. Poker Face: The Life and Work of Professional Card Players. Berkeley: University of California Press. Holden, A. and Galustian, N., eds. 2017. He Played for His Wife… And Other Stories: Short Stories of Long Nights at the Poker Table. London: Simon & Schuster. Huizinga, J. 2016. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Games. Kettering: Angelico Press. Jacobs, J. 2002. English Fairy Tales and More English Fairy Tales, ed. D. Haase. Santa Barbara: ABC Clio. Jameson, F. 1975. ‘Magical narratives: Romance as genre’. New Literary History, 7(1): 135–63. Janda, M. 2013. Applications of No-Limit Hold ‘em: A Guide to Understanding Theoretical Sound Poker. Henderson: Two Plus Two Publishing LLC. Johnson, J. A. 2011. Killer Poker. New York: Pinnacle. Kardos, M. 2018. Bluff: A Novel. New York: Grove Atlantic. Kermode, F. 2000. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. Koster, R. 2014. A Theory of Fun for Games Design. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, Inc. Lears, J. 2004. Something for Nothing: Luck in America. New York: Penguin. Lederer, K. 2003. Poker Face: A Girlhood among Gamblers. New York: Three Rivers Press. Lewis, M. 1989. Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Lukacs, J. 1963. ‘Poker and the American character.’ Horizon, 5(8): 56–62. Lynne, C. 2009. Poker Night: Pocket Pair. Spridlington: Total-E-Bound Publishing. Mamet, D. 1986. ‘About men: The things Poker teaches.’ New York Times Magazine, 20 April 1986, 52. McManus, J. 2009. Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Moore, P. V. 2018. The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts. London: Routledge. Morgan, W. 2013. The Trickster Figure in American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ondaatje, M. 2007. Divisadero. London: Bloomsbury.

Poker Fiction

Palmer, A. 2008. Fictional Minds. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Pavel, T. 1986. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Penzler, O., ed. 2008. Dead Man’s Hand. London: Quercus. Petrovic, P. 2014. ‘Children, terrorists, and cultural resistance in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 55(5): 597–609. Richard, J. 2011. ‘“Putting to hazard a certainty”: Lotteries and the romance of gambling in eighteenth-century England’. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 40: 179–200. Ryan, M.-L. 1980. ‘Fiction, non-factuals, and the principle of minimal departure’. Poetics, 9(4): 403–22. Ryan, M.-L. 2013. ‘Possible Worlds’. Living Handbook of Narratology. http:​ /​/www​​.lhn.​​uni​-h​​ambur​​g​.de/​​artic​​le​/po​​ssi​bl​​e​-wor​​lds (accessed 3 August 2018). Saturday Review. 1882. ‘Poker’. Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 54(1415) (London): 759. Stiglitz, J. E. 2015. The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them. New York: Norton. Suits, B. 2014. The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. Peterborough: Broadview Press. Sumner, C. 2014. ‘Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the protective shield against Stimuli’. American Imago, 71(1): 1–27. Swain, J. 2006. Deadman’s Poker. New York: Ballantine Books. Twain, M. 1877. ‘His speech on the presentation of his new play, Ah Sin, in New York’. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 4 August 1877. http:​/​/twa​​in​.li​​b​.vir​​ ginia​​.edu/​​onsta​​ge​/pl​​ayscr​​ipts/​​ahs​in​​art02​​.html​ (accessed 2 August 2018). Wener, L. 2004. The Big Blind. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

117

118

Part III Money and class 7 Cards, banking games and the normalization of finance 8 ‘Pitch and toss’: Casinos of hope and despair in working-class Britain 9 Selves in play: Pop-up casinos and discontinuous persons in Greece 10 Honourable risks and dishonou­rable certainties: Naiveté and cynicism at play over the card table in Imperial Russia

120

7 Cards, banking games and the normalization of finance Joyce Goggin

Chapter Outline Introduction121 History: Whence cards? 122 Accounting and cards 125 Culture and cards 130 Other cultural connections 132 Conclusion137

. . . both commerce and games that combine chance and calculation, speak to an epistemology of social life – an epistemology of the social that they capitalize on and that they help inculcate. – Ed LiPuma, The Social Life of Financial Derivatives (256)

Introduction Just about everyone, on any given day, will almost certainly encounter playing cards or card games, on something, on someone or in something, in

122

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

forms ranging from tattoos, edibles and clothing, to signage, knickknacks and art objects. These small, familiar bits of cardboard serve a multitude of functions as signifiers, markers, omens and randomizers that are woven seamlessly into the fabric of daily life. However, it is arguably the very ubiquity of these so-called ‘trivial’ objects that gives them the capacity to hide in plain sight and to slip by unnoticed, demanding little active, conscious attention, while impacting so resoundingly on our collective, historic (un)conscious. Due indeed to their constant presence and deep penetration into the daily lives of people around the globe from Macau to Las Vegas – from those who never or rarely play with cards, to professional gamblers, and prestidigitators – cards are generally taken for granted. Beyond the observation that cards blend quietly into the backdrop of daily life, my intention in this chapter is to work towards an understanding of the role that cards have played – and continue to play – in some of the greater systems that govern our world, and to which we attribute far more significance than we commonly do to card games. In what follows, I will argue that cards, and the games that began entering Europe with them in the fourteenth century, helped to familiarize people with systems of accounting that have been foundational for modern banking, as well as for economics more generally. I will therefore discuss the relationship between banking, finance and card games, beginning with their early history, followed by a discussion of examples in support of my argument, including seventeenth-century banking games; an eighteenth-century commemo­ rative novelty deck; and a novelistic card game from nineteenth-century literature. Bringing my argument forward, I will conclude with a discussion of contemporary versions of poker which will likewise serve to shed light on the role that cards play in the greater economy, and the perception thereof, at important junctures since their arrival in the West many centuries ago.

History: Whence cards? I now turn to the history cards and how they have persisted over the centuries to be played with in ‘activities which are taken for granted in social practice’ and which are, therefore, among the most revealing

Cards, Banking Games and the Normalization of Finance

(Mullin, 2015: 36). Card playing, as an unassuming yet deeply embedded social activity, affords important insights into foundational cultural and, as I will argue here, economic practices. In the following and necessarily selective account of the history of playing cards then, I will begin with largely fictional narratives of their ancient, mystical roots in the East, as well as the first recorded evidence of their arrival in Europe in the fourteenth century. This history is also undertaken as a means of opening a discussion of new kinds of numeric literacy and abstract thinking that arrived with, and were normalized by, cards in Europe. Early histories of cards by French protestant pastor Court de Gébelin (1725–84) and, a century later, by Mrs John King van Rensselaer (1848– 1925), New York socialite and historian, are both speculative and amusing. De Gébelin and van Rensselaer researched and fabricated fascinating accounts of how playing cards came into being, supposedly as the invention of Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of writing, numbers and games of chance. According to van Rensselaer, the pips on cards – hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs – derive from the carved tips at the ends of rods that priests shook and tossed as randomizers, and which would then point to hieroglyphics painted on the inside walls of Thoth’s temples (37). One’s lot would be read from these signs which, over time, Thoth’s priests began copying onto parchment. The sheets of parchment – another of Thoth’s inventions – which the priests bound as books, slowly made their way into Europe with pilgrims and Roma people, hence the nickname ‘Bible of the Gypsies’ for tarot and playing card decks. Once in Europe, where people were unfamiliar with these bound parchment leaves or Books of Thoth, they were disassembled and used for fortune telling and as markers in games (39). In this version of card history, the origins of the tarot deck, of seventyeight cards, can be traced to the leaves of Thoth’s books, and likewise the later streamlined, now standard, deck of fifty-two playing cards. For those who subscribe to this theory, the cosmic origins of the deck are still evident in how even standard playing cards reflect greater systems; hence, the fifty-two weeks in a year correspond to the number of cards in a deck, just as there are four seasons each represented by one of the four suits. Likewise, the number of cards in each suit equals the weeks in a season, and the cards in the deck add up to 364 plus 1 for the joker, thereby equalling the number of days in a year. The mystical, changeable figure of the joker, who can stand in for any other card in the deck, is also seen by some as a direct

123

124

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

descendant of Thoth himself, and is supposedly another of the remaining vestiges of cards’ mystic origins.1 While these pseudo-histories have been debunked by contemporary scholars such as Decker, Depaulis, Dummett and Sostric, the mystical connection made in the work of de Gébelin and van Rensselaer between cards and the ancient Egyptian god who supposedly invented mathematical annotation and accounting is certainly worth noting. This is to say that, while their work is largely based on subjective fantasies awakened by associations with the images printed on cards, both authors intuitively connect cards with bookkeeping and economy through Thoth. Historians who cite more reliable sources also maintain that cards were carried into Europe from various locations in the East by pilgrims, Romani and other itinerants; however, their stories begin in the early modern period with the first documented reference to cards in European history cited in a Catalan epistle from 1331. While this source is itself somewhat dubious given that it occurs in the ‘Golden Epistles’ of Guevara, which exist only in a translation dated 1539 (Chatto, 1848: 66), an inventory taken in 1380 of the household of Nicolás Sarmona, Calleón San Daniel lists ‘a game of cards in forty-four pieces’ [unum ludum de naypes qui sunt quadraginta quatuor pecie] (Etienvre 68). In Perpignan in the same year, there is also a record of Rodrigo Borges, who set up shop as a painter and card maker [pintor y naipero], and two years later there is mention made of an ordinance issued in Barcelona against the use of playing cards among other games of chance (Denning, 1996: 16). Similarly, an ordinance was issued in Florence on 23 May 1376, in which the city elders voted ninety-eight to twenty-five to prohibit the playing of ‘a certain game called naibbe, which has recently been introduced into these parts’ (Hoffmann, 1970: 12). An ordinance was also decreed in 1387 by Juan I of Castile against the use of playing cards and, in the Istoria della Citta di Viterbo of 1379, and an entry occurs which makes specific reference to card games along with other games to be banned or discouraged.2

For a detailed discussion of the relationship between Thoth and the joker in Charles Williams’ The Greater Trumps, see Goggin 2014, pp. 411–439. 2 Note that the word for playing card in contemporary Spanish is naipe and comes from the same origin as the original Italian word naibbe, which is no longer in use. The original text of the Istoria della Citta di Viterbo (1379) reads, ‘Non giuocare a zara, ne ad altro giuoco di dadi, fa de’ 1

Cards, Banking Games and the Normalization of Finance

A few decades later in France, there is a record of a special set of cards which were commissioned in 1393 to entertain Charles VI, who became mentally handicapped as a result of a sunstroke suffered in childhood. The document in which they were commissioned is cited in Ménétrier’s Bibliothèque curieuse et instructive (1704), and suggests that cards were already well known in France by this time, so that a custom-made set could be ordered for the entertainment of the young monarch (Chatto, 1848: 72). And in Germany, the first-known reference to playing cards is the Tractus de moribus of 1377, written by the monk Reinfelden of Fribourg. The tract describes, in some detail, the form and function of cards without actually explaining how games are played with them, which would seem to indicate that cards were still a recent phenomenon in Germany at that juncture. Following Reinfelden’s tract, cards are mentioned frequently in Northern Europe, for example at St Gall in Brabant in 1380, in Nuremberg, Flanders and Burgundy in 1382, in Constance in 1388, in Zurich in 1389, in Holland in 1390, at Augsburg in 1391, and in Frankfurt in 1392 (Hoffmann, 1970: 22). And about eighty years later in Augsburg, a significant volume was printed entitled The Golden Game [Güldin Spil] (c. 1472) by Dominican friar Ingold, who, in his compendium of gaming, condemns card playing as a wicked occupation.3

Accounting and cards While the first mentions of cards on the European continent in household inventories and public records date from 1331, cards are first mentioned in England roughly a century later. Here it is interesting to note that cards were welcomed as a leisure activity rather than prohibited and, more importantly, the first-known document that mentions cards promotes their

giuochi che usano i fanciulli ; agli aliossi, alla trottola, a’ ferri, a’naibi, a’coderone, e simili’ (Singer 1816: 202). 3 The passage is cited in Chatto: ‘Now this game is completely treacherous, and as I have read, it first came to Germany in that year, which counting from Christ’s birth, is 1300’ [Nun is das Spil vol untrew; und, als ich gelesen han, so ist es kommen in Teutschland der ersten im dem iar, da man zalt von Crist geburt, tausend dreihundert iar] (Chatto 74).

125

126

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

manufacture. In an act passed in the parliament of Edward IV in 1463, the importation of expensive, foreign-made playing cards from Spain and the Low Countries was expressly prohibited, and a law was passed to encourage the establishment of card makers’ guilds and the development of card-making as an industry at home (Chatto, 1848: 96q). Another document frequently cited as an early record of cards’ arrival in England comes in the form of a letter to Sir John Paston written by his wife on 4 December 1484. In her letter, Lady Paston reports a Christmas party at Lady Morlee’s home where ‘there were no dicing, or harp [playing], or lute [playing], or singing, or loud disports, but playing at the tables, and chess, and cards; such disports she gave her folks leave to play and none other’ (Benham, 1968: 25).4 So as cards and card games were embraced in England as an acceptable leisure activity, their arrival in Britain awakened the realization that cardmaking could become an industry, hence a connection was very quickly made between cards and commerce. This may well have to do with the state of trade and commerce in England when cards were introduced there in the fifteenth century, or perhaps this is an indication of what would, a few centuries later, become known as the ‘commercial instincts of Englishmen and Britons’ (Haseler, 1996: 107). Moreover, taking the supposed commercial leanings of the English as a given, Janet Mullin conjectures that this inclination accorded well with ‘the careful score-keeping, the accounting of amounts won and lost, and the order and discipline of [English] players’ favourite card games echoed, and fully suited, their tidy lives’ (35). Therefore, if it seems far-fetched to connect score-keeping in card games with mathematical annotation and accounting by claiming that cards were the invention of the Egyptian god of writing, numbers, games of chance based on the writings of de Gébelin and van Rensselaer, the examples from cards’ arrival in Britain suggest that there are other reasons for making this connection. Indeed, the games that entered Europe with cards would help to make zero-balance, double-ledger accountancy familiar to a wide sector of the population through score-keeping which

The original reads, ‘ther wer non dysgysyngs, ner harpyng, ner lutyng, ner syngyn, ner non lowde dysports, but pleying at the tabyllys, and schesse and cardes; sweche dysports sche gave her folkys leve to play and non odyr’ (my translation). 4

Cards, Banking Games and the Normalization of Finance

generally relies on this system; the same system that facilitates complex calculations and bookkeeping, and that is central to banking and credit economies. Notably then, both innovations – cards and double-ledger accountancy – came into Europe from the East at roughly the same historical juncture, impacting on economies and, by extension, on human interrelations in ways that I will discuss presently. Furthermore, when money is wagered and exchanged in card games, they become an activity of an economic order. This is true of the many banking games that people have played over the centuries, beginning in the early modern period with games such as Lansquenet [Landesknecht], Trente et Quarante, Faro [Pharaon], Baracca-Banque, and later Newmarket, Speculation, Basset and Piquet. All of these games require that one player act as banker ‘who deals the cards . . . and acts as a centre for the redistribution of wealth, using the same method of accounting on which modern banking is based, albeit in a simplified, miniature form (Parlett, 1991: 75). And the same holds true for players who need to keep track of their cards, and to be able to weigh out probabilities in order to project and wager on possible outcomes. More concretely still, the link between cards and money has manifested itself at times of economic crisis – in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Lower Canada, the Maritimes and New England, during the French Revolution, and much later in the Weimar Republic – when playing cards were substituted for devalued currency, or replaced coinage when it became scarce. The injection of cards into the circulation of monetary signs effectively introduces a new denomination into the flow of currency in any given economic system, and – perhaps somewhat remarkably – at times of financial crisis people will unproblematically accept playing cards as a suitable substitute for other currencies. Card money is therefore, like the examples of cards in culture that I have discussed, suggestive of an innate connection or similarity between cards and money, and a generally perceived natural affiliation between cards and economic practices.5 But there are yet more significant correspondences between cards and card games, as well as money, and economic practices such as speculation

This same perceived inherent likeness between cash and cards accounts for the suit of coins in early Italian decks of playing cards. The suit of coins (along with batons, cups and swords) was previously in use all over Europe until the standardization of the deck in the seventeenth century, and these cards are still commonly used in certain games in Spain, Italy and Luxembourg. 5

127

128

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

that are notable at the deeper level of ‘mind set’ or the mentality required to engage in these activities. The financial revolution that began late in the seventeenth century gave birth to numerous instruments for the circulation of wealth such as paper money and mortgages, all of which are more portable, ephemeral repositories of value than precious metals, coin, land or material items that one might trade. At the same time, financialized or speculative economies require constant projection, or abstraction and forward thinking in order to wager on the future value of property and stock. It was at this moment, moreover, that ‘banks and joint-stock companies [began using] the magical device of credit to fund royal debts and colonial expansion’, and this major development required a parallel shift in how people thought about what constitutes wealth and how they themselves were constituted as subjects in this new, rapidly financializing economy (Gleeson, 1999: 14). Shortly after the introduction of complex banking practices beginning roughly in 1688, the first major international financial crash occurred. In 1720, the South Sea Bubble radically upset the British economy, while in France the analogous Mississippi system on which the first French national bank was founded was also the cause of an enormous crash (Dale, 2004: 2). Rather fittingly, the latter scheme that caused the crash in France was the brainchild of John Law, a Scottish gambler who arrived in Paris from the tables at Bath with a plan for economic recovery which we would now call a ‘pyramid scheme’, and which Louis XIV supported on the advice of his Regents. Law himself was known for many things, such as his charm and ability ‘to demystify complex subjects . . and his willingness to linger for hours over games of cards and dice’ (Gleeson, 1999: 15). Interestingly enough, following the crash of Law’s system, his contemporary SaintSimon wrote that the Scottish gambler was also a card sharp; ‘a man of systems, of calculation and comparison . . . the kind who, without ever cheating, had everywhere won immense sums at gambling because he could predict . . . the sequence of the cards’ (quoted in Kavanagh, 1993: 98). In other words this man, known as one of history’s first millionaires, brought his expertise in counting cards to the market and, ultimately, revolutionized the French economy for better or worse.6

See for example, Janet Gleeson’s Millionaire in which she explains that the term was invented when ‘Law sparked the world’s first major stock-market boom, in which so many made such vast 6

Cards, Banking Games and the Normalization of Finance

I cite these examples to illustrate the historical connection between cards, finance and gambling since the earliest days of stock jobbing at the end of the seventeenth century. Indeed, because of the close kinship of the two, speculation and the instruments of credit it entails – paper money, mortgages, insurance, stocks – necessitated a long, culturally assisted process of normalization in order to make the unfathomable intelligible for the general public. And because this shift in the generation and circulation of wealth required careful bookkeeping and abstract thinking, people had to learn to visualize the market, and its effect on their lives. Card games, such as the banking games noted earlier, arose at this same historical juncture and played a role in making this kind of abstract thinking and accounting familiar, if not popular. In other words, scorekeeping in card games familiarized double-ledger accounting which would ultimately lay out a new world of order and transform the gains and losses of mercantile life into tidy, manageable columns of figures (Mullin, 2015: 28). This last point has deep implications for what it means to be human, as common expressions such as ‘fiscal profile’ and ‘personal investment portfolio’ would attest, both terms implying that one’s personhood and bank account are inseparable. Richard Rosenthal has suggested the same where money wagered in gambling and card playing are concerned; hence, money on the table represents more than its own cash value – it is also indicative of aspects of players self-worth, judgement and standing (Mullin, 2015: 35; Reith, 1999: 146). And again, both operations – speculating and gambling – require the ability to keep specific, complex kinds of information in one’s head and to be able to project future market scenarios or predict the next card one’s opponent might play. Indeed, the ‘orderly, forward-looking thinking required by many strategic games was second nature to the merchant and professional classes [in the 18th century . . . and] the systematic framework provided by increasingly detailed rules and play-systems would have posed no puzzle to people accustomed to methodical business procedures’ (Mullin, 2015: 33). Card games therefore seem a fitting past-time for people living in an economy wherein social and financial status began to depend on understanding the same kind of accounting as that operative in the games themselves. And

fortunes that the word “millionaire” was coined to describe them’ (15–16).

129

130

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

this likewise applies to money itself; hence, as Susan Strange wrote in Casino Capitalism, because financialized thinking is forward thinking ‘money today is . . . always about money tomorrow’ (Strange, 1986: 71, 77).7

Culture and cards Thus far, I have discussed the introduction of cards into the West in the early modern period, along with the modes of economic thinking and accounting that cards and card games helped to make familiar beginning in the late seventeenth century. In this section I want to address several ways in which this process has been assisted and popularized by various forms of culture, and in ways that suit their historic and economic context. The examples I will discuss have all, in some respect, reinforced the acceptance and popularity of cards as well as the kind of thinking and calculating that card games necessitate, from the accountancy that arrived with the new, increasingly market-driven economy, to the kinds of social interaction that grew up in Europe around the card table. The deeply commercial character of the English is a cultural stereotype that took hold in the eighteenth century, if not earlier. Similarly, a particular Netherlandish orientation to money and finance are captured in the many English and Dutch idioms that refer to ‘the deeply commercial character of Dutch society’ (De Bruyn, 2000: 33). However much or little truth resides in these cultural stereotypes, it is tempting to draw a connection between the English and Dutch national stereotypes and the fact that decks of economic bubble-themed playing cards were published in Britain and the Dutch Republic in 1720 to commemorate the bubble of that year, and to lampoon investors and stock-jobbers. In Britain, the first such deck was published on 10 December 1720 together with a notice that explained that ‘a new pack of Stock Jobbery Cards . . . representing the Tricks of the Stock-Jobbers . . . with a Satyrical Epigram upon each card’ could be purchased at various locations

It is notable in this context that ‘projector’ had become the popular term for speculator or trader by the nineteenth century, that is, someone who projects a view of future wealth streams. 7

Cards, Banking Games and the Normalization of Finance

including Exchange-Alley (Whiting, 1978: 164). And just days later, on 20 December 1720, a deck was printed entitled All the Bubbles in which each card tells the story of one of the South Sea Bubble companies – many not genuine – that were set up for the purpose of trading shares (Whiting, 1978: 175). These cards then ‘depicted [stock jobbers and investors] as making profits out of nothing’, as well as legitimate companies such as the Rose Fire-Office Insurance Company, the Corral Fishery. So while providing an opportunity for mirthful Schadenfreude, such decks also made familiar the practice of taking risks with one’s money which had come to ‘underline the power structure of the age’, while perhaps also trading on the irony that ‘playing cards are used for gambling’ (Paul, 2011: 96–7). In the Dutch Republic, a printer known as ‘Pasquin’ published his ‘Wind Cards on the Wind Trade’ [Windkaart op de Windnegotie], which bore the inscription ‘These new Wind Cards were made for the purpose of idleness by Little Law of Scotland under the Gold-seeking Cock’ [Dese niewe Windkaarten worden gemaakte en verkogt te Nullenstun bij Lautje van Schoften in den gold zoekende Haan] (Morely, 1989: 128; Hoffmann, 1970: 47, 48; Goggin, 2020: 149–150). Unlike the English cards, the Dutch cards were published as an uncut sheet in a compendium of comic prints, poems and plays, entitled The Great Mirror of Folly [Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid], which lampooned John Law, speculators on the various bubbles of 1720, and market mania more generally. These ‘Wind Cards’ commemorated the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles, as well as Dutch speculative gambles that were all part of what the Dutch called ‘Wind Trade’ [Windhandel], a metaphor that captures finance’s magical capacity to produce enormous sums seemingly out of thin air. While the prints and the scripts from the plays invite various lines of inquiry, the inclusion of playing cards in the collection is striking because cards are, quite obviously, instruments for gambling and, as one nineteenth-century commentator suggested, ‘one could also read as a play on the uncertain game of speculators’ in the cards.8 Moreover, the Bubble Cards graphically illustrate the relationship between play and economy, and gambling and

Meijer (1892), 119: ‘In de speelkaarten kan men ook zien een toespeling op het onzekere spel van de speculanten zien’ (My translation above). 8

131

132

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

speculation, suggesting that speculating, gambling and card playing were, by the eighteenth century, strongly linked in the public imagination.

Other cultural connections From their arrival in Europe, cards and card games have been featured in literature of various genres, from Pietro Aretino’s Le carte parlanti (1545), a political satire, to Samuel Rowlands’ The Knave of Clubs (1609), also a satirical political poem in five cantos, to contemporary literature such as Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance (1990), a novel whose plot revolves around Poker. According to Ronald Paulson, following the invention of banking games of the late seventeenth century noted earlier, ‘the card games that channel themselves into the eighteenth century have plots concerning an individual who pits himself against a number of other individual players and/or against a bank (or dealer or house) or some manifestation of chance or providence’ (Paulson, 1979: 87). Perhaps the most famous example of an eighteenth-century contest between individuals conducted around a literary card game is Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714), a mockheroic epic that describes a romantic conquest involving the theft of a lock of the heroine’s hair, lost over a game of Ombre. This trick-taking card game made its way into England in the fifteenth century from Spain where it was known as Hombre, or the game of man, which ‘easily becomes a metaphor for – or indeed a representation of – courtship or some other activity of the great world’ (Paulson, 1979: 88). And while eighteenthcentury literary card games mirrored contests between individuals, they also reflected new economic practices and modern banking, which according to Paulson, focused attention on finding ‘a way to control the environment with prudence, calculation and regularity’ like the card games of that century (102). This was an era with a newfound emphasis on controlling and predicting unpredictable outcomes (Johnson, 2018), rather than only emphasizing specific individual moments of play. In the nineteenth century, authors used card games to tell a different story, writing as they were from within an ‘international monetary system unfalteringly focused on the creation of credit as the central issue’ (Strange, 1986: 7). By the nineteenth century, people had become accustomed to the

Cards, Banking Games and the Normalization of Finance

increase of credit and with it, an increased tendency to embrace risk as a means of generating wealth. Hence, as sociologist Ed LiPuma explains, an ‘ethos of speculation’ had taken hold in the nineteenth century whereby, ‘as long as you don’t cheat, then risk-taking and speculation are positive personal and social traits, a matter of calculating the odds, making a skillful wager, and then having the gumption to stand behind it’ – and this applied both in the market and at the card table (258). Exemplary of the nineteenth-century ethos of speculation is an episode from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), wherein an evening is spent playing cards. Here, the very name of the game that the characters play – Speculation – is revelatory of the ethos of romantic speculation that informs not only this scene, but also the speculative economy in which Austen penned her novel. Hence, Henry Crawford, a corrupt and manipulative cad, proves himself a sly gamester and a superb player of Speculation, ‘pre-eminent in all the lively turns, quick resources, and playful impudence that could do honour to the game’ (249). Crawford’s style of play in fact epitomizes LiPuma’s ‘ethos of speculation’, whereby calculating odds, risk-taking and cheating – as long as you don’t get caught – is the recipe for success. The unleashing of the characters’ acquisitive passions in this scene is mitigated and justified therefore, not by virtue, but by the skills of sociability at which Henry Crawford, for example, excels. The OED defines Speculation as a ‘round game of cards, the chief feature of which is the buying and selling of trump cards, the holder of the highest trump card in a round winning the pool’. While buying and selling align the game with the market, the noisiness of Speculation as reported in Hoyle’s Games simulates the atmosphere of the stock exchange.9 Moreover, unlike Whist, which was also popular at the time, Speculation depends on chance, rather than skill, and the shortage of information which typifies financial speculation is simulated in Speculation by the rule against looking at one’s own cards. It is also quite possible that the representation of Speculation in Mansfield Park was influenced by the stock-market fraud of 1814,

In this section, I am greatly indebted to Emma Clery’s ‘Speculation in 1814: The Gamble of Mansfield Park and the Economics of Defeating Napoleon’, presented on Saturday 16 May 2014 at the British Association for Romantic Studies, Senate House, London. 9

133

134

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

which would have provided a context for the first readers of the novel, and reflected the recognition that the world of 1814 had become profoundly speculative. To continue in this line of reasoning – without debating the ‘literariness’ of my next example – the card game in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953), along with its adaptation for the screen in 2006, provides another example of what I am arguing here. One significant, if subtle, detail in the latest film adaptation of Fleming’s first 007 novel is the substitution of Texas Hold ’Em poker for a game of Baccarat from Fleming’s text, which not only changes the style of play, and the place that chance is given in the narrative, but parallels a paradigmatic economic shift that took place in the years intervening between the publication of Flemings novel and the release of the film. In the novel, Fleming devotes many pages to Bond’s detailed explanation of the rules of Baccarat, a luxury that the film can ill afford but which, along with the history of the game, is particularly revealing in the present context. Baccarat, or Baracca-Banque, as the game was originally known, is one of the banking games enumerated earlier and requires a banker, thereby aligning the game with commerce and banking. Fleming was aware of this connection and describes Le Chiffre, the Baccarat banker in Casino Royale, as having ‘knowledge of accountancy and mathematics’, making him a ‘fine gambler’ (Fleming, 2002: 014). That these forms of knowledge, which are more institutionally acceptable than counting cards, make Le Chiffre a good gambler is important because, as readers are told, a Baccarat ‘banker should be able to win by . . . first-class accountancy’ (Fleming 060). In other words, Baccarat, at least in Fleming’s opinion, is a risky game which, like the market, should be statistically manageable. Fleming also writes that ‘the “Bourse” is too slow’ for Le Chiffre, who sees gambling as a viable alternative, suggesting that Fleming anticipated the development of an even faster, riskier, more highly speculative economy (Fleming 011). This comes to the fore in the film’s producers’ decision to change Baccarat to Texas Hold ’Em, which was more familiar to audiences than Baccarat by 2006 when the film was released, so that updating the card game increased audience appeal while cashing in on the popularity of televised Poker tournaments and the multibillion online gambling industry that had made Texas Hold ’Em hugely popular. According to LiPuma, by 2005 this American

Cards, Banking Games and the Normalization of Finance

hybrid of various old-world gambling games had become constitutive of ‘a new social imaginary: poker nation’ (LiPuma, 2017: 257). As LiPuma explains: the social imaginary of a poker nation reflects and reproduces . . . a deeper transformation in the character of capitalism. Not just capitalism in the abstract, but the capitalism that sustains us as people, the economy in terms of which we define ourselves as worthwhile goal directed subjects. (257)

When Fleming was writing the textual Bond in 1953, the world had yet to undergo what has come to be known as ‘the financialization of daily life’, wherein our economic profiles and virtually everything we do is somehow linked to investment banking and the financial markets. Replacing Baccarat from the novel with Texas Hold ’Em in the film appealed to new audiences because financialization, which incurs more dependency on risk as an economic driver, is deeply connected with the cultural politics of poker, as evidenced in the no limit aspect of both the game and today’s market. To explain this last point in greater detail, I turn to Ole Bjerg’s Poker: The Parody of Capitalism, in which he discusses the cultural politics of Poker and the game’s development over time. In describing the three main forms of poker – Draw, Stud and Hold ’Em – Bjerg argues that these Poker forms emerged and became popular at three specific historical junctures and exhibit ‘structural homologies to key elements in the functioning of capitalism at different times in history’ (Bjerg, 2011: 203). Beginning with Flat Poker, a simple game of chance, he argues that the growth of Poker into a game of various kinds of strategies over time is comparable ‘to the development of market-immanent mechanisms for the determination of exchange value in capitalist society’ (Bjerg, 2011: 208). Therefore, rather than simply waiting for luck or making one’s own, the skilled Draw poker player will strategize in an effort to ‘extract more value from the sphere of exchange than he puts into it, simulating the laws of the market whereby value is systematically redistributed’ in ways not necessarily corresponding to the use value fed into it (Bjerg, 2011: 209). This may be compared to the later Poker variant, Seven Card Stud, a game that players approach as though it were an efficient market, caring less about ‘targeting individual weak opponents than about playing the cards and the game mathematically optimally’ (Bjerg, 2011: 215). This is because in Stud seven cards are visible on the table before the first round of

135

136

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

bidding so that the player has more knowledge of what cards are in play, what she/he may be dealt and what other players are holding. In the more recent Poker variant, No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em, each player is dealt two hole cards and then five face-up community cards are dealt on four consecutive betting rounds (Bjerg, 2011: 216–17). For LiPuma, this feature of Hold ’Em necessitates a ‘speculative, reading of the present moment . . . at which the dealer turns over (or flops) three common cards for those who have survived the first round of betting’, followed eventually by three more rounds of betting (LiPuma, 2017: 256). This feature of Hold ’Em lends the game a ‘more ferocious and intricate level of speculative intensity’ that Stud Poker and other previous versions of Poker do not share. It is, moreover, the flop that connects Hold ’Em more solidly with the current market, and provides one more indication that in financialized society ‘speculation has gone public and global’ (LiPuma, 2017: 256). For LiPuma and Bjerg, it is the unveiling that occurs in the flop – ‘that moment at which the emergent habitus of risk taking and speculation becomes conscious of its own immanence’ – that makes each game ‘a microcosmic instance of an encompassing poker macrocosm similar to the way acts of buying and selling aggregate into the market’ (LiPuma, 2017: 259). According to LiPuma, why expert players appreciate and invest heavily in Hold ’Em is not related to the ‘distribution of cards (which, because the game is a closed system, will in the long run produce an efficient market in hands) but about the speculative construction of their subjectivity’ – that is, the ways that the market constructs contemporary subjects as speculative beings (261). According to LiPuma, the ascent of Poker also chronologically parallels that of the derivative or the slicing and dicing operation that dominates the market and makes it possible to tranche, regroup and repackage debt obligations such as mortgages in order to resale and generate new income streams. As he conjectures, the key to understanding how and why Poker tournaments garner so much attention in the global popular imagination is the fact that ‘the rules of Hold’em are a variant on already known games and that, like the housing market, offer ordinary persons with no special skills other than calculation and courage the opportunity to speculate and win large’ (LiPuma, 2017: 259). At the same time, speculation reigns supreme in No-Limit Hold ’Em ‘to the point where one can go ‘all in’ with the lowliest hand imaginable’, and bet everything they have, compelling the other players to either match or fold. This aspect of this particular

Cards, Banking Games and the Normalization of Finance

contemporary variant of Poker has made it ‘the game of choice for the expression of an expanding global speculative impulse’ (260).

Conclusion In The Age of Chance, Gerda Reith discusses the close relationship of gambling games to economic development at large, arguing that ‘speculation and risk in economic life [have] their corollary in the speculation and risk involved in gambling games’, because gambling embodies the ‘speculative, numerical spirit of the time’ in which they are played (Reith, 1999: 59–60). In this chapter, I have attempted to trace the development of the relationship between cards and card games and the economies in which they are were invented and played, beginning in the fourteenth century, in order to make explicit the relationship of card games to the greater economy, while highlighting increasing reliance on finance in both. In particular I have addressed a number of factors in the development of card games, including where they were played, the cultural productions in which they were embedded (novels, plays, movies) and how they helped to normalize the market practices in force when specific games were popular. In so doing, I hope to have shown how card games at various junctures over the last several centuries have framed and shaped players as contestants, risk-takers, entrepreneurs or cool-headed businessmen, from Ombre to Texas Hold ’Em.

References Auster, P. 1990. The Music of Chance. New York: Viking Press. Benham, W. G. 1968. Playing Cards: The History and Secrets of the Pack. London: Spring Books. Bjerg, O. 2011. Poker: The Parody of Capitalism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chatto, W. A. 1848. Facts and Speculations on the Origin of Playing Cards. London: John Russell Smith. Dale, R. 2004. The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

137

138

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

de Bruyn, F. 2000. ‘Reading Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid: An emblem book of the folly of speculation in the bubble year 1720’. EighteenthCentury Life, 24(2): 1–42. Denning, T. 1996. The Playing-Cards of Spain: A Guide for Historians and Collectors. London: Cygnus Arts. Fleming, I. 2002. Casino Royale. London: Penguin Books. Gébelin, Court de. 1983. Le Tarot. Paris: Berg International Editeurs. Goggin, J. 2014. ‘Charles Williams and the metaphysics of otherness’. In E. Auguer (ed.), Tarot in Culture, 411–37. Clifford: Valleyhome Books. Goggin, J. 2020. ‘Culture and finance: Langendijk’s Wind Traders’. In Comedy and Crisis: Pieter Langendijk, the Dutch, and the Speculative Bubbles of 1720, 149–69. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Gleeson, J. 1999. Millionaire: The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance. New York and London: Simon & Schuster. Haseler, S. 1996. The English Tribe: Identity, Nation and Europe. London: Palgrave. Hoffmann, D. 1970. Le monde de la carte à jouer. Leipzig: Éditions Leipzig. Johnson, M. R. 2018. The Unpredictability of Gameplay. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Kavanagh, T. M. 1993. Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. LiPuma, E. 2017. The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk and Time. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Meijer, C. H. P. 1892. ‘Inleiding’. In Quincampoix of de Windhandelaars en Arlequyn Actionist van Pieter Langendyk. Zutphen: W. J. Thieme & Cie. Morely, H. T. 1989. Old and Curious Playing Cards. Secaucus: Wellfleet Press. Mullin, J. E. 2015. A Sixpence at Whist: Gaming and the English Middle Classes, 1680–1830. Rochester: Boydel Press. Parlett, D. 1991. A History of Card Games. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paul, H. J. 2011. The South Sea Bubble: An Economic History of Its Origins and Consequences. Routledge: London and New York. Paulson, R. 1979. Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Reith, G. 1999. The Age of Chance: Gambling and Western Culture. London: Routledge. Rensselaer, J. K. van. 1912. Prophetical, Educational, and Playing Cards. London: Hurst and Blackett. Singer, S. W. 1816. Researches into the History of Playing Cards; With Illustrations of the Origin of Printing and Engraving on Wood. London: Bensley and Son.

Cards, Banking Games and the Normalization of Finance

Strange, S. 1986. Casino Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Whiting, J. R. S. 1978. A Handful of History. Bath: Redwood Burn Ltd.

Film cited Casino Royale. 2006. Dir. Martin Campbell. MGM/Sony.

139

8 ‘Pitch and toss’ Casinos of hope and despair in working-class Britain Graham Taylor

Chapter Outline Introduction: Casinos of hope and despair A ‘bit of a flutter’? Working-class gambling as rational and respectable Pitch and toss: Working-class gambling as violence, machismo and excess Steel city blues: Pitch and toss in ‘Little Chicago’ Beyond ‘Sky Edge’!: Labour politics and the new age of the fruit machine

140 142 146 150 154

Introduction: Casinos of hope and despair Gambling was central to the development and reproduction of workingclass culture and communities in Britain during the nineteenth and early

‘Pitch and Toss’

twentieth centuries. Despite constant attempts by religious leaders and middle-class reformers to construct legislative and moral obstructions to working-class gambling, pre-industrial preoccupations with the ‘fancy’ were transformed into a range of increasingly commercialized gambling pursuits (Clapson, 1991, 1992). These developments have been explored in a range of historical surveys that have tended to focus on the moderate, restrained and increasingly skilled nature of working-class gambling as a ‘bit of a flutter’ and as evidence of the increasingly rational nature of gambling among an increasing affluent and educated working-class (Clapson, 1991, 1992; McKibbin, 1979). There is, however, another side to working-class gambling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that is often marginalized in these accounts: the enduring persistence of informal, spontaneous and illegal gambling schools that involved games of chance and luck with coins, dice and cards. This chapter explores the game of ‘pitch and toss’, which was the most popular game played with coins in Britain during this period. Forms of this game not only failed to decline in the context of rationalized gambling but grew in intensity and scale and peaked during the period of post-war economic recession and mass unemployment in the 1920s and 1930s. Pitch and toss has all the hallmarks of a casino game, but it was never played in the wealthy and salubrious casinos inhabited by upper- and middle-class gamblers. Pitch and toss was a popular form of gaming within working-class communities that was played illicitly and furtively in the hidden casinos of hope and despair located on canal banks, slag heaps, courtyards and waste ground. The game was illegal under the Vagrancy Acts and played under the constant threat of police raids, arrest and punishment. These casinos of hope and despair formed a parallel and mostly hidden world of gaming that was emblematic of the exclusion of the British working-class from the state and society. In many cases, ‘tossing rings’ were small-scale and informal and involved five or six men gambling in an alleyway or street corner. However, during the early twentieth century, pitch and toss became increasingly large scale and could attract hundreds of gamblers and spectators. The game was often associated with the excessive consumption of alcohol, and the larger gatherings often had a carnivalesque or fairground atmosphere. The larger tossing rings were often either organized by or involved the participation of professional working-class bookmakers. The organizers of games could make large amounts of money by either taking a cut of the stakes or taking side bets on the outcome of the games. In some places,

141

142

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

this encouraged the formation and organization of gangs; as highlighted in the ‘Little Chicago’ episode of working-class history in Sheffield, where violent patch-based gang warfare broke out between rival bookmakers and their henchmen over control of the tossing rings. This chapter explores development of pitch and toss during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and focuses specifically on the developments associated with the violent gang-based milieu surrounding pitch and toss in Sheffield during the early 1920s. It highlights the enduring tension between ‘respectable’ and ‘dangerous’ forms of working-class gambling and the way in which this shifting tension was framed by the contradictory dynamics of capitalist development and the changing composition of the working class. The analysis presented in the chapter highlights and reinforces the argument that games and gambling only have meaning and significance within the specific socio-historical context in which they develop (McMillen, 1996: 6–7). Pitch and toss could not endure into the age of the machine and commercialized mass consumption, and in the age of Fordism it was replaced by the fruit machine and the one-armed bandit as the dominant forms of gambling with coins in British working-class culture.

A ‘bit of a flutter’? Working-class gambling as rational and respectable The development of working-class gambling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was marked by the increasing commercialization of pre-industrial forms of gambling and the increasing rationalization of gambling and gaming pursuits (Clapson, 1991, 1992). This reflected the broader commercialization of working-class leisure during the nineteenth century, which was given further impetus from the 1870s owing to rising levels of wages and a shorter industrial working week (McKibbin, 1979). Working-class gambling became increasingly organized and commercialized, and, by the 1920s, had become an important industry despite being highly controlled and regulated. Estimates suggest that gambling had become the second-largest industry in Britain with an

‘Pitch and Toss’

annual turnover of £300–£400 million, amounting to £20–£25 billion as an estimated contemporary equivalent (Jones, 1986: 36). The nineteenth century witnessed the decline and legal prohibition of many pre-industrial sporting pursuits associated with gambling, including cockfighting, bear baiting, dog fighting and bare-knuckle fighting, which were increasingly seen as cruel and uncivilized. Many pre-industrial forms of gambling persisted, such as gambling with coins, cards and dice, but alongside these a range of modern leisure pursuits emerged that became associated with gambling including horse racing, pigeon racing, bowling, football, greyhound and whippet racing as well as direct forms of gambling in the form of raffles, sweeps, tombola and bingo. The increasing scale and commercialization of gambling developed in parallel with constant attempts to outlaw and curtail working-class gambling by non-conformist religious leaders and middle-class reformers who campaigned to promote more rational and restrained forms of working-class leisure. Gambling, alongside sex and alcohol, was part of a ‘holy trinity’ that was seen to threaten the bourgeois virtues of hard work, thrift and self-denial. The success of the anti-gambling lobby was reflected in the legislative constraints on working-class gambling that were introduced during the nineteenth century. Anti-gambling legislation did not, however, prevent a growth in the scale and scope of working-class gambling. The attempt to outlaw lotteries in the early nineteenth century led to a proliferation of small-scale lotteries organized by publicans and working-class entrepreneurs including regular sweeps in pubs, clubs and workplaces. In respect to gambling on horse racing, the 1853 Betting Houses Act was designed to eradicate the ‘common gaming houses’ frequented by the working class, but this legislation was too late to reverse the development of commercialized mass betting and was fundamentally flawed as it made off-course betting on horses illegal and intensified the clandestine nature of working-class gambling. A further 1874 Act to prevent street betting led to police inaction and collusion and the spread of gambling to clubs that were not designed for gambling. Public gambling with coins, cards and dice endured through the nineteenth century and continued to be policed vigorously through the Vagrancy Acts. The development of working-class gambling culture mirrored the processes of commercialization and rationalization that were occurring in wider British society, but also embodied organizational and moral autonomy owing to its legal and moral censure. The persistence and

143

144

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

growth of working-class gambling in the nineteenth century highlighted the enduring existence of ‘sub-political’ attitudes towards crime within working-class culture (Thompson, 1963: 64) and a range of institutions and networks emerged to support illegal gaming activities within workingclass communities. During the nineteenth century, the working class inhabited a ‘self-contained social world’ and were largely excluded from the public sphere and the state. As Eric Hobsbawm noted, the horizons of both skilled and unskilled workers were increasingly bounded by the world of manual labour and, despite their differences, were increasing pressed into a single class owing to their exclusion from the rest of society (Hobsbawm, 1984: 206). Gambling developed within working-class communities and reflected a distinctly working-class culture. In this context, gambling has been portrayed as the most successful form of working-class self-help in the modern era, an illegal but almost totally honest network of financial transactions stretching into every proletarian street and every workshop (Hobsbawm, 1984; McKibbin, 1979). Gambling articulated a politics of hope among a working-class population with limited formal education that were able to wager small stakes based on rational prediction (McKibbon, 1979). Within working-class culture, gambling was widely understood as a practice that could reduce the inequities and inequalities of everyday life: a form of self-help that could both enliven and enchant everyday existence and offer the occasional financial windfall to temporarily alleviate poverty and deprivation. Bookmakers entered this world as ‘working-class entrepreneurs of gambling’ and were key agents in the construction, maintenance and exploitation of optimism and hope in the self-contained world of workingclass life (Downs, 2015: 2209). Bookmakers and gambling entrepreneurs were largely drawn from the ranks of the working class. These were ‘penny capitalists’ whose success required venture capital, a site from which to operate and the control of labour in the form of lookouts, agents and ‘runners’ (Clapson, 1991: 26–7). Their importance should not, however, be overstated as this can obscure the wider agency of the working class in the oftenspontaneous organization of games such as pitch and toss. Indeed, the involvement of bookmakers in pitch and toss was usually a post hoc attempt to control and exploit tossing rings that had developed spontaneously. Furthermore, the involvement of working-class bookmakers was often in response to unemployment and the growth of the informal economy following a squeeze on profits from more commercialized forms of gambling.

‘Pitch and Toss’

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the politics of workingclass gambling became intimately tied to discourses of crisis and decline. This was reflected in the coalition of social forces that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century to campaign for further controls and restrictions. The campaign was led by the National Anti-Gambling League (NAGL) from a coalition of Non-Conformist Protestant Churches and attempted to equate mass gambling with national decline and the decline of the ‘work ethic’. Equally ardent critics of gambling were to be found among leaders of the British labour movement. Beatrice Webb described bookmakers as ‘parasites’ that were eating the life out of the working class and thereby discrediting and demoralizing working-class life and culture. Labour leaders including Ramsey McDonald and John Burns were also nonconformists and were regular contributors to the NAGL Bulletin. The campaign was opposed by pro-gambling interests in the form of bookmakers and the sporting press but overcame this opposition to secure the passing of the 1906 Street Betting Act – a law designed to standardize the control of popular betting. The 1906 act was widely lambasted by gambling interests as a monstrous piece of ‘class legislation’ and was to prove unworkable and unenforceable owing to widely shared perceptions of its unfair and class-biased nature (Dixon, 1980). Commercialized forms of mass gambling continued to grow and most historical surveys of workingclass gambling in Britain have highlighted its rational, responsible and restrained nature and the absence of any discernible relationship between gambling, crime and poverty (Clapson, 1991, 1992; McKibbin, 1979; Laybourn, 2008, 2009). These accounts tend to give gambling a meaning and significance that is divorced from socio-historical context and downplay the extent to which gambling reflects rather than constitutes the everyday lives of social actors. The development of commercialized and rational mass gambling reflected the increasing affluence and leisure time of the ‘respectable’ working class. However, gambling had alternative meaning and significance for the marginal and demoralized sections of the working class, and, in this context, pitch and toss developed as a form of gambling that embodied violence, machismo and excess. As working-class hope and optimism collided with economic deprivation and social and political exclusion, pitch and toss endured and grew as the dark and dangerous underbelly of ‘rational’ and ‘respectable’ working-class gambling.

145

146

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Pitch and toss: Working-class gambling as violence, machismo and excess Gambling with coins was popular in pre-industrial Britain, and, along with drunkenness, begging and other forms of outdoor nuisance, was punishable under the 1873 Vagrancy Act. Pitch and toss was the most common form of coin gambling played in Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the mid to late nineteenth century, the game was mostly small-scale, informal and spontaneous. The early versions of the game involved groups of male participants who played in a ‘tossing ring’ often located on waste ground or on the edge of towns and cities. A hole was dug, or an object was placed in the centre of the ring, and participants would ‘pitch’ coins against the hole or object; the participant nearest to the target would be banker and responsible for ‘tossing’ the coins. Coins were tossed into the air or flipped from the back of the hand in such a manner that the coins were seen to visibly spin and bets were placed on the combination of heads and tails. The simplest form of the game was known as ‘Heads and Tails’. In this version of the game, coins were tossed in the air and players gambled on the number of heads and tails that would land. In some versions, the banker kept all the coins that displayed heads. In others, the banker won if all the coins displayed heads, lost if the coins were all tails and tossed again if a combination of heads and tails were produced. If the coins were seen not to be spinning, the toss could be challenged before the coins landed and the coins would be tossed again. There were wide regional variations in how the game was played (Clapson, 1991: 82–3). In Manchester, the game was known as ‘Nudges’: five coins were tossed in the air and the players gambled on the number coins that would land heads-up. In Newcastle, it was known as ‘Pitch the Scrapper’, as coins were pitched into the metal rainwater drains in pavements known as a ‘scrapper’. In Boston, Lincolnshire, it was an indoor or undercover game known as ‘Shaking the Hat’. The coins were placed in a hat, the hat was shaken by all the participants of the game and then the hat was turned over to reveal the coins. In Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, pitch and toss was played in a derelict brickyard on Sunday lunchtimes and often involved a crowd of

‘Pitch and Toss’

Figure 8.1 Working-class men playing pitch and toss in Nottingham, 1926; available at https​:/​/ww​​w​.ant​​iques​​navig​​ator.​​com​/a​​rchiv​​e​/201​​7​/01/​​24​ /15​​2​3999​​24922​​.jpg.

forty or fifty men, mainly colliers who worked down the local mines, who played while drinking beer from a local working men’s club (Curtis, N.D.). Two lookouts were paid with beer for ‘keeping konk’ to warn of approaching police officers. This version of the game included six players, and once the pitch had determined who the banker should be, six old pennies were tossed or spun into the air and the ‘tosser’ would keep all the coins showing heads. The next player would keep the coins showing tails, and so on. In addition, there would be a host of side bets on how the coins would land or which player would pitch closest to the marker. Pitch and toss was underpinned by both organized and spontaneous elements. Often a tossing ring would emerge spontaneously. An individual would place coins on the ground and challenge others to bet against him. Once the challenge had been accepted, it followed a closely proscribed structure. Lookouts would be posted to warn off approaching police officers, and someone, often a local ‘hard case’, was selected to ensure the bets were properly covered and that no cheating occurred (Clapson, 1991: 84). In some cases, illegal bookmakers would turn up at a tossing ring and took bets upon the outcome of the games.

147

148

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

This rendered the playing of pitch and toss much riskier as the legal penalties for the bookmaker and those betting with him were much harsher under the street betting acts than under the Vagrancy Acts. The culture surrounding pitch and toss was highly gendered and reflected the patriarchal assumptions and practices that pervaded working-class life in Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. Participants were predominantly male, although women and girls often watched or were used as lookouts (Clapson, 1991: 82). Pitch and toss was an important component of a male peer group culture based on risk and bravado and often connected with the culture of the public house and the consumption of alcohol. Participation in the tossing ring has been described as part of a gender-based learning process in which marginalized young men were able to demonstrate and prove their manliness to compensate for the lack of a steady job or in response to the humiliations and deprivations of poverty (White, 1985). This was a process that could have tragic and negative effects for the wives and families of young men if caught and punished. This included the material deprivations that ensued when participants were fined or sent to gaol and the often-brutal domestic violence that could follow a financial loss at pitch and toss. Involvement with pitch and toss became emblematic of the dangers of ‘excess’, and involvement in pitch and toss became the essential definition of a ‘bad’ husband or father (Davies, 1991). In the interwar years, the scale and organization of pitch and toss stated to change in the context of the economic crisis and the resulting unemployment and poverty. The size of the tossing rings started to increase, and major pitches could attract many hundreds of gamblers and spectators There is evidence that gambling schools became an important haunt of the unemployed during the interwar period. The tossing rings offered many unemployed individuals both an opportunity to earn money and an inducement to spend it. The role of lookout was often undertaken by individuals with no resources to take part in the gambling; who were rewarded for the role and were then able to participate in the gambling. In areas where participation in more commercialized forms of leisure was constrained by unemployment and poverty, the tossing ring became a form of entertainment which provided a free spectacle to non-participants and a means to earn extra income for those taking part (Davies, 1991: 106). Pitch and toss gained notoriety during the 1920s as it was increasingly used by bookmakers and petty entrepreneurs as a money-making scheme.

‘Pitch and Toss’

The game became particularly popular in Liverpool, and a tossing ring near Nelson was reported to attract hundreds of men and youths each day (Chinn, 2004). The game was also popular throughout Lancashire, the North East and Yorkshire and throughout the coalfields of the Midlands. In Salford, a tossing ring at Greengate attracted 300–400 people to regular Saturday afternoon pitching rings. Following a police raid in 1920, which resulted in twenty-five convictions, the police described the event as having a ‘fairground atmosphere’ (Davies, 1991: 103). Despite being illegal and the venues of tossing rings being well known, the police were generally unable to effectively prevent the rings taking place or successfully prosecute a significant number of participants. The collusion between the police and bookmakers in respect to the operation of the 1906 Street Betting Act have been well documented (Davies, 1991, 1998). However, the tossing rings depended almost entirely on lookouts to prevent successful police raids and arrests, and there is no evidence of widescale collusion between police and participants of the tossing rings. Pitch and toss was policed through the 1873 Vagrancy Act. Culprits were often caught by lightening raids that could often be violent and, unlike street betting on horses where bookmakers and their agents were punished, involved the direct arrest and punishment of gamblers. The levels of police violence were an important factor in shaping a marked distrust of authority among the victims of police raids, and this contributed to a more generalized working-class mistrust of civil authority (Clapson, 1991: 82). In 1927, for example, Manchester Police made 505 arrests under the Vagrancy Act against illegal gaming (Davies, 1991: 105). Punishment ranged from a small fine of a few shillings for a first offence through to larger fines and three months hard labour for repeat offenders. The success of police raids tended to be undermined by the lack of public support, and there is evidence of sympathetic neighbours allowing gamers into their homes to evade arrest. The response to pitch and toss in late Victorian society has been presented as part of a moral panic that reflected social fragmentation, economic decline and a crisis of morality among the young manifested in a disrespect and disregard for the law (Clapson, 1992: 81). Throughout the nineteenth century, the playing of pitch and toss was mainly associated with the young, marginal and dissolute male poor (Clapson, 1992: 79–80). Witnesses to the 1844 Select Committee on gambling highlighted the popularity of gaming with coins among boys and young men of ‘loose

149

150

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

habits’ and ‘irregular propensities’. In his survey of the London poor, Henry Mayhew highlighted its popularity amongst costermongers and barrow boys. Throughout the nineteenth century, pitch and toss was often associated with poverty and social exclusion. Access to the increasingly commercialized forms of gambling was denied many members of the working class in the context of the unemployment and poverty, and this became particularly acute following the severe economic downturn of the 1920s. While the playing of pitch and toss was also subject to commercialization and rationalization, it was politically and culturally more dangerous than modern forms of gaming. Pitch and toss heightened the cultural contradictions of gambling in capitalist society: a pre-modern game that articulated the inherent riskiness of capital accumulation while signalling the potential of a rupture through its articulation in a form that harnessed primordial memories of pre-modern carnivals of gambling and excess. In his Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin argued that in the act of gambling unconscious forces are revealed in a ritualistic game that possesses a double value: the exchange value underpinning the capitalist economy and the unleashing of a hidden and vestigial energy (Rosenthal, 2012: 264). During the 1920s, this hidden and vestigial energy emerged as part of a wider project of working-class resistance and struggle against the insecurity, unemployment and austerity associated with the post–First World War crisis of liberal capitalism and the crisis of the liberal state. In the next section, the intensity of this resistance and struggle is illustrated through an exploration of the violence, conflict and gang warfare that developed around pitch and toss in Sheffield during the 1920s.

Steel city blues: Pitch and toss in ‘Little Chicago’ During the early 1920s, pitch and toss in Sheffield developed in scale and became controlled and coordinated by organized gangs of bookmakers. Conflict over control of the tossing rings erupted into a protracted period of violent gang warfare and resulted in Sheffield gaining the epithet ‘Little Chicago’ during the 1920s. The conflict around pitch and toss emerged in the context of the severe economic depression following WWI and

‘Pitch and Toss’

the generalized poverty and squalor that existed in the city at that time (Bean, 1981: 5–6). Sheffield was the most industrialized, manufacturingbased city in Britain (Price, 2008: 113) and, therefore, the post–First World War economic crisis and the global decline in demand for steel products had a particularly severe impact on the city. This resulted in mass unemployment and a marked increase in industrial unrest and militancy in the engineering and mining industries including a series of strikes and lockouts. In 1921, 69,500 men were unemployed from a total population of 512,052 (Tanner, 2008: 134). During the 1920s, Sheffield was marked by high levels of urban squalor. The slum dwellings that dominated the inner city were mainly ‘back-to-back’ houses, ‘court’ houses or tenements, and were overcrowded and insanitary. Furthermore, this poor housing became increasingly unaffordable for large numbers of tenants as wages and benefits were cut in response to the economic crisis (Tanner, 2008: 137). While limited unemployment insurance schemes had been introduced in the early twentieth century, these could not cope with the mass unemployment of the 1920s, and most of the unemployed fell back on the Poor Law that had become increasingly archaic and unable to adequately support modern mass unemployment (Hopkins, 1991: 29–31). Contemporary estimates suggest that by 1921, 20 per cent of Sheffield residents had become reliant on ‘outdoor’ relief (Tanner, 2008: 135). The Board of Guardians, which administered the Poor Law, became nearly £100,000 in deficit leading to pressure to reduce poor relief. Sheffield Corporation was forced to increase local taxation to pay for poor relief and employment creation schemes, but this further exacerbated the fiscal crisis of the local state owing to domestic nonpayment of rates and the relocation of businesses. Amidst the devastation and despair generated by this poverty and unemployment, gambling provided a welcome glimmer of hope, and the city was gripped by a gambling fever. Contemporary estimates suggest that as many as 90 per cent of working-class people in industrial areas either engaged in gambling or assisted others in betting, and this gambling mania was facilitated by around 1,000 mostly illegal bookmakers. The trade of local bookmakers boomed, and prominent bookmakers at the time were known to earn £75–£100 per day, and each employed as many as forty ‘runners’ whom they paid between 1/6d and 2/- in the Pound commission. (Bean, 1981: 6). This is the context in which an increasingly organized and commercialized form of pitch and toss developed during

151

152

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

the early 1920s. Throughout the early 1920s, there developed an increasingly violent struggle between rival gangs for control of the tossing rings. This endured until the middle of the decade when a concerted and violent police strategy was successful in containing and demobilizing the gangs. The most important tossing ring took place on Sky Edge. Sky Edge is a promontory that overlooks the infamous Park District of Sheffield, which at the time was a warren of courtyard slums. Sky Edge was an ideal location for illegal and clandestine activities owing to its elevated and inaccessible position. Sky Edge had been a favoured meeting place for the Sheffield Chartists during the 1830s, and it had gained a radical heritage through its use for protests and meetings by successive generations (Navickas, 2016: 239). The form of pitch and toss played in Sheffield involved the tossing of three coins and the placing of bets on the proportion of heads to tails. The large pitching rings were run on strict business lines (Bean, 1981: 6–8). The boss was known as the ‘towler’ or ‘toller’, and he collected a ‘toll’ on the bets made – a typical amount being 2/6d in the pound. The ‘toller’ paid henchmen known as ‘ponters’ or ‘pilners’, who were armed with sticks and paid to keep order. There were also lookouts, known as ‘pikers’ or ‘crows’, who were employed to warn of approaching strangers or police officers. The tossing rings were located at strategic locations so that it was easy for lookouts to spot an impending police raid and to enable organizers to pocket the money and for the crowd to scatter in the event of a police raid. The prosecution of organizers was difficult because, unlike bookmaking, there was no betting paraphernalia involved and no betting slips that could be used as evidence in court. As the game began, the ‘toller’ would shout ‘Heads a pound’ or some other amount and wait for another punter to come up with an equivalent amount to ‘Tail’ it. The stake money was placed in the centre of the ring, and the toll, paid by the initiator of the bet, was placed in the pocket of the ‘toller’. At Sky Edge, three halfpenny coins were tossed by a man known as the ‘tosser’. Once the coins had fallen to the ground, they were picked up by the ‘ponter’, who officially announced the result as heads or tails. The ‘toller’ would then pay out any winnings and betting would begin again. Winnings were often left in the ring which doubled the stakes for the following toss. There were also cross-bets between individuals on which the organizers did not levy a toll. The rings were generally run on sound sporting lines, and if anyone was dissatisfied with the execution of the

‘Pitch and Toss’

toss, he could shout ‘barred’, and the ‘ponter’ would kick the coins as they reached the ground and the coins would be retossed. In general, there was little trouble while the gambling was taking place, but violent disputes flared over control of the rings leading to a protracted series of gang wars. Gambling gangs had existing in Sheffield throughout the First World War, but in the turbulent years following the war a struggle for control of the tossing rings erupted into a violent gang war. The struggle for control of the tossing rings developed between two rival gangs: the ‘Mooney Gang’, led by George Mooney of the West Bars district of the city, and the ‘Park Brigade’, led by Sam Garvin of the Park District. The gang war erupted into a series of violent assaults involving guns, knives, knuckledusters, pokers and ‘life-savers’ (a short, heavy cosh made from either a hollowed-out chair leg filled with lead or a truncheon with a nail through the end). In addition to their activities around the tossing rings, the gangs were involved in a variety of confidence tricks, pick-pocketing, mugging and protection rackets often preying on genuine bookmakers. The assaults were initially dealt with quite leniently by magistrates. There was a widescale belief that magistrates were being intimidated by the gangs, and the Sheffield Mail accused the authorities of complacency. There were also ‘junior gangs’ who roamed the streets and public houses attacking and intimidating publicans and ordinary citizens. The gang wars culminated in 1925 with the murder of William Plommer, a non-gang member who had foolishly intervened in a fight involving a member of the Park Brigade, by a group of men belonging to the Park Brigade in the Attercliffe district of the city. Two members of the Park Brigade, Wilfred and Lawrence Fowler, were ultimately hanged for the murder of Plommer and other gang members were imprisoned with lard labour for a variety of related offences. The murder provided the context for a police initiative to regain control of the streets and to marginalize and demobilize the gangs. The chief constable of Sheffield, Lt Col Hall-Dallwood, under increasing pressure from the Home Office, launched a ‘Flying Squad’ to crack down on the gangs. Members of the Flying Squad were recruited based on their size and fighting skills. These included P.C. Walter Loxley, a 6ft. 2ins., 18 stone 8 lb giant, champion shell carrier from the Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA) during the War in France and established scourge of the gangs from his experience in Central Division and P.C. Herbert Lunn a former heavyweight boxer and also a veteran of the RGA (Bean, 1981: 109). The

153

154

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Squad operated in plain clothes and followed gang members around public houses and instructed landlords not to serve gang members. When this tactic resulted in a fight, gang members were arrested and charged with assaulting the police. The police crackdown broke the grip of the gangs and reasserted the rule of law in Sheffield. However, the ‘vestigial energy’ produced by the gambling mania of the early 1920s was also channelled into broader and more organized forms of resistance and struggle that resulted in the political ‘triumph of labour’ in the municipal elections of 1926. The social, cultural and political significance of pitch and toss was to extend well beyond Sky Edge and the gang violence it produced.

Beyond ‘Sky Edge’!: Labour politics and the new age of the fruit machine The events surrounding pitch as toss in Sheffield confirm that the meaning of gambling is always intimately bound up with the economic, political and sociocultural context in which it occurs (McMillen, 1996: 6). The persistence and growth of tossing rings in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries only make sense in the context of the ongoing political and legal exclusion of the working class from British state and society. In general, the development of working-class gambling in Britain reflected an autonomous impulse of mutual self-help in the face of the ongoing legal and moral censure. The development of commercialized mass gambling that enabled the working class to have a ‘bit of a flutter’ remained subject to legal sanction but was widely condoned and enabled by corrupt and complicit police officers, politicians and magistrates. This form of rational and restrained gambling did not challenge the calculating and individualized rationality of bourgeois society, while simultaneously confirming the political, social and cultural marginalization of the working class from British state and society. In this context, working-class gambling can be understood as an individualized response to everyday insecurity and deprivation: a way of ‘getting by’ or ‘coping’ with material insecurity and ‘getting back’ at those responsible through engagement with and

‘Pitch and Toss’

support of illegal gambling (See Lister, 2004: 124–57 for an elaboration of this model of agency and poverty). Those sections of the working class that were subject to the most intense levels of material deprivation such as the young, the insecure and the unemployed were marginalized and excluded from commercialized betting; and as the post–First World War recession intensified, this was generalized throughout the working class. In this context, the everyday response to material deprivation shifted from rational and commercial forms of gambling towards forms of gambling associated with violence, machismo and excess. The case of Sheffield highlights the ultimate logic of individualized forms of ‘getting back at’ poverty and insecurity in the form of the violent criminality associated with gang warfare. The case of Sheffield also highlights, however, how the oppositional energy and resistance that was generated and displayed at the large-scale pitch and toss events was increasingly harnessed and transformed into a strategic collective project among the unemployed and marginalized to ‘getting organized’ (Lister, 2004: 149–56) in order to challenge the structural causes of unemployment and poverty and the political exclusion of the working class from the British state and society. In Sheffield, 1926 witnessed the political ‘triumph of labour’. This enabled the Labour Party to secure control of the City Council for the first time following decades of working-class support for the Conservative and Liberal parties, and it was the first time that organized labour had taken control of any major British city. The unemployed that were central to the gambling fever that had gripped the city also played a vanguard role in the mobilizations against the negative effects of the postwar economic downturn and the inadequacy of the Poor Law (Tanner, 2008). The dominant discourse of the mobilizations was that returning war heroes were being turned into paupers. The unemployed mobilizations can be understood as part of a wider struggle against the state (Tanner, 2008: 139) in an era when the leaders of Sheffield labour considered themselves to be at war with their own government (Mendelson et al., 1958: 67). The mobilizations were based on the articulation of two key arguments: that war, capitalism and government ineptitude were the causes of unemployment and that the nation state had an obligation to tackle unemployment and support the unemployed. The violent police repression of the criminal gangs and the tossing rings was mirrored by the violent repression of the political mobilizations of the unemployed including the imprisonment of activists and police attacks on demonstrations.

155

156

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

The triumph of labour in Sheffield and the growing strength of the organized working class more generally did not, however, lead to an immediate liberalization of working-class gambling. The leaders of organized labour remained steadfastly opposed to the reform of the gambling laws despite the manifest class bias of the legislation. This reflected the dominant discourses of religious and secular puritanism within the leadership of the movement (McClymont, 2008; Laybourne, 2008) and the ideological specificity of ‘labourism’ as a complex amalgam of Methodism, Fabian gradualism and Marxism (Nairn, 1964; Saville, 1967). Nevertheless, an autonomous philosophy of labour had entered the state and the public sphere to accompany the death throes of liberal capitalism and the liberal state. The process of capital, state and class recomposition that followed would result ultimately in the development of Fordism and the Keynesian Welfare State. Following 1945, Fordism developed as a total way of life in which mass production, standardization and mass consumption became supported by an aesthetic of labour and the commodification of culture (Harvey, 1989: 135). Of course, this is not to argue that pitch and toss contributed in any meaningful way to the crisis and restructuring of liberal capitalism and the liberal state, but rather to highlight the ways in which the form and meaning of workingclass gambling can only be adequately grasped in the context of these structural dynamics and contradictions. Pitch and toss would not endure into the brave new world of Fordism. Gambling with coins became absorbed into a Fordist culture defined by mechanization, individualization and consumer culture. Gambling with coins was mechanized and commercialized through the increasing popularity of gambling on fruit machines and ‘one-arm bandits’. This resulted in the further commercialization of working-class gambling because, while pitch and toss had recirculated money within workingclass communities, the profits from gambling on fruit machines was appropriated by business interests in the form of the Amusement Caters Association and the Showman’s Guild (Clapson, 1991: 89). Gambling on fruit machines shared with pitch and toss the elements of sociability of gathering, an association with action and a flirtation with pure luck, but the battle between gambler and machine was more individualized (Clapson, 1991: 89). Gambling on a fruit machine shared with pitch and toss the vertiginous aspects of play, the feeling of disequilibrium and the vicarious feeling of letting go before order is restored with the stopping

‘Pitch and Toss’

of the reals or the landing of the coins (Caillois, 2001: 181–4). Ultimately, however, the fruit machine reflected the dynamics of a Fordist and Taylorite labour process: an opportunity to beat the machine in an age dominated by the machine. In an age when reciprocity with technology was increasingly impossible, it came to symbolize both the worker’s position in a complex division of labour and an ideological resistance to it (Mott, 1975: 68–9). The fruit machine reflected the meaning and significance of gambling with coins in the brave new world of Fordism and a reimposition and intensification of the rationalized commo­ dification challenged by the vestigial energy of the casinos of hope and despair in the tossing rings of the 1920s and 1930s. The decline of autonomous forms of working-class gambling such as pitch and toss and the growing popularity of the commercialized forms of gambling associated with fruit machines can thus be explained by the changing economic, political and cultural conditions of working-class life in midtwentieth-century Britain. The casinos of hope and despair reflected the collective experience of and response to the intense inequalities and exclusions of liberal capitalism. In the new age of the fruit machine, the meaning and significance of gambling with coins reflected the incor­ poration of the working class into the individualized and commodified institutions of British state and society. In this context, the meaning of working-class gambling was transformed: from an expression of collective working-class resistance to an increasingly individualized expression of enchanted escapism in response to the rationalizing dynamics of the Fordist workplace and consumer culture.

References Bean, J. P. 1981. The Sheffield Gang Wars. Sheffield: D & D Publications. Caillois, R. 2001. Man, Play and Games. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Chinn, C. 2004. Better Betting with a Decent Feller: A Social History of Bookmaking. Aurum: London. Clapson, M. 1991. ‘A bit of a flutter’. History Today, 41(10): 38–44. Clapson, M. 1992. A Bit of a Flutter: Popular Gambling in England c. 1820 to 1961. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cosgrave, J. and Klassen, T. R. 2001. ‘Gambling against the state: The state and the legitimation of gambling’. Current Sociology, 49(5): 1–15.

157

158

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Curtis, A. N. D. The Game of Pitch and Toss in Mansfield: The Brickyard Ring. Available online at http:​/​/www​​.ourm​​ansfi​​eldan​​darea​​.org.​​uk​/pa​​ge​/ th​​e​_gam​​e​_of_​​pitch​​_and_​​toss_​​in​_ma​​nsfie​​​ld​?pa​​th​=0p​​2p19p​​70p (accessed 08 August 2018). Davies, A. 1991. ‘The police and the people: Gambling in Salford, 1900– 1939’. The History Journal, 31(1): 87–115. Davies, A. 1998. ‘Street gangs, crime and policing in Glasgow during the 1930s: The case of the Beehive Boys’. Social History, 32(2): 349–69. Dixon, D. 1980. ‘“Class law”: The street betting Act of 1906’. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 8: 101–28. Dixon, D. 1989. From Prohibition to Regulation: Bookmaking, Anti-Gambling and the Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Downs, C. 2015. ‘Selling hope: Gambling entrepreneurs in Britain 1906– 1960’. Journal of Business Research, 68: 2207–13. Harvey, D. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Hobsbawm, E. 1984. Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hopkins, E. 1991. The Rise and Decline of the English Working Classes 1918–1990: A Social History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Jones, S. G. 1986. Workers at Play: A Social and Economic History of Leisure. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Laybourne, K. 2008. ‘“There ought not to be one law for the rich and another for the poor which is the case today”: The labour party, lotteries, gaming, Gambling and Bingo, c. 1900-c. 1960s’. History, 93(310): 201–33. Laybourne, K. 2009. In Search of Phantom Fortunes: Working Class Gambling in Britain c. 1906–1960s. Barnsley: Warncliffe Books. Available online at http://eprints​.hud​.ac​.uk​/id​/eprint​/6435/ (accessed 08 August 2018). Lister, R. 2004. Poverty. Cambridge: Polity. McClymont, G. 2008. ‘Socialism, puritanism, hedonism: The parliamentary labour party’s attitude to gambling, 1923–31’. Twentieth Century British History, 19(3): 288–313. McKibbin, R. 1979. ‘Working-class gambling in Britain 1880–1939’. Past & Present, 82: 147–78. McMillen, J. 1996. ‘Understanding gambling: History, concepts and theories’. In J. McMillen (ed.), Gambling Cultures: Studies in History and Interpretation. London and New York: Routledge. Mendelson, J., Owen, W., Pollard, S. and Thornes, V. M. 1958. Sheffield Trades and Labour Council 1858–1958. Sheffield: Sheffield Trades Council.

‘Pitch and Toss’

Mott, J. 1975. Popular Gambling from the Collapse of the State Lotteries to the Rise of the Football Pools, Paper given to the Society for the Study of Labour History Conference on Work-Class Leisure. Nairn, T. 1964. ‘The English working class’. New Left Revie, 24: 43–57. Navickas, K. 2016. Protest and the Politics of Place and Space, 1789–1848. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Price, D. 2008. Sheffield Troublemakers: Rebels and Radicals in Sheffield History. Phillimore: Chichester. Rosenthal, M. A. 2012. ‘Benjamin’s wager on modernity: Gambling and the arcades project’. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 87(3): 261–78. Saville, J. 1967. ‘Labourism and the Labour Government’. In R. Miliband and J. Saville (eds), The Socialist Register, 43–71. London: Merlin Press. Tanner, J. 2008. ‘“The only fighting element of the working class”? Unemployed activism and protest in Sheffield, 1919–24’. Labour History Review, no. 1: 133–44. Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working-Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin. White, J. 1985. The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, Between the Wars. London: Routledge.

159

9 Selves in play Pop-up casinos and discontinuous persons in Greece Thomas Malaby

While doing ethnographic research on gambling in 1994, in the city of Chania on the island of Crete, I was regaled with many stories of remembered figures from the local gambling landscape. One such gambler, known as Dhekaleptos (‘Ten Minutes’), handled the state of his ‘luck’ in quite public ways, according to Manolis, a well-known local commercial property owner who first mentioned him to me. When Dhekaleptos lost, Manolis said, he would walk directly home, grab his fishing rod, and head straight for the historic lighthouse that overlooks the picturesque old harbour of Chania and begin to fish. For three to four days he could be seen fishing and refusing any conversation. When he believed his luck had returned, he would stride back to his favourite haunts and begin playing again. I witnessed and in 1999 wrote about a similar effort by a Chaniot poker player who, after a striking run of bad luck (losing the equivalent at the time of several hundred US dollars), ventured to the bathroom, in the tiny gambling coffeehouse where I sat watching the game, ‘na kapso trikhes’ – to ‘burn hairs’. To find a moment to pluck several pubic hairs and burn them was one way one’s luck could be changed and thereby

Selves in Play

one’s situation could be transformed. Games, in their shifts of outcomes, for these gamblers rendered a verdict, at least for a time, on their selves – were they in alignment with the turns of chance? More gravely, I saw this relationship expressed in the quiet and focused countenances of dice gamblers, their eyes watching every tumble of the dice before them, alone together in distinctly asocial groups around the dice table, attentive in their collective solitude (Malaby, 2002, 2003). Was it Dhekaleptos’, or Manolis’ or the dice gamblers essential personhood that was at stake; that is, who they were in some permanent sense? Or were they in some way different persons as they differently reflected their circumstances – of winning, of losing, of solitary fishing until a self had changed? On one particular night, in the days leading up to New Year’s Eve, I walked into one of the smaller gambling coffeehouses that I frequented at about 9:15 pm. The owner was someone that I had come to know quite well by that point, and Panagiotis gave me a quick ‘good evening’ before turning back to his cards. This place was not far from one of the central squares of Chania, one notable for the stone busts of heroes of the Greek War of Independence, many of them extending to the waist, the better to show off the traditional knives and other weapons stuck in their belts (and reinforcing the domination of the public sphere by men in Greek life – more on this in the following text). Surrounded by hotels, the square hosted one of the largest taxi stands in the city, and this coffeehouse was mostly frequented by them in their off hours. Two small tables (for backgammon, or a conversation for two) were to the right, and to the left were two larger, circular card tables, their green baize noticeable from the street. Towards the back were the bar and restrooms (where on a different night Yiorgos had ventured ‘to burn hairs’). On this evening, the four players (Spiros, Nikos, Kostas and Panagiotis) were the only ones in the place, and they were playing pokher (five-card draw). I pulled a chair from the other card table and sat nearby as Panagiotis finished a hand and rose to make me a coffee. Spiros was gathering his winnings from the centre of the table, a pile of khartakia. These ‘chips’ were in fact playing cards, ones that had become too worn (and hence individually identifiable) for regular use. Panagiotis had taken them to a printshop, where they had trimmed off the narrow white borders. Thus, the cards were smaller and quite distinct from the regular cards to those playing, but of course from the road appeared simply as discarded cards in the centre of the table – one of many clever solutions by

161

162

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

gambling coffeehouse owners to keep the gambling itself invisible, even if the playing was not. As I took in more of the evening’s game (which I learned had started only about twenty minutes before), it became apparent that Spiros had been doing very well. He sat nearest to me (I was back a bit, but between him and Panagiotis, to his right) and played with a great deal of animation, displaying his cards with a flourish and talking frequently. Panagiotis, who was always a very quiet player, seemed to simply be ignoring him, as was Kostas, to his right. But Nikos seemed quite irritated by him. While Spiros acted as dealer, and the players traded in cards before the last round of betting, he flicked the cards for them face down, one by one, in front of each of them, with a quick snap of the wrist. As he was playing, he would from time to time, when he had a poor hand, spread his arms wide, a few cards in each hand held halfway towards the table, as if daring the other players to try to catch a glimpse of them. On one occasion, after winning a hand against Nikos, he brought both fists up, shoulder high, and pulled them sharply back, while grunting (‘Unh!’) – this, a commonly recognized reference to male domination (in this case, sodomization), led Nikos to give him furious look before turning to Kostas, urging him to start the next hand. Apart from Kostas, these were players that I had watched play before, if only a few times. Spiros, while not terribly congenial on those previous occasions, had not stood out in any particular way. Nikos was very much a regular, and he and Panagiotis had a trusting relationship; Nikos was even allowed to serve as banker when Panagiotis had other business to attend to. This evening, however, things were different, and the tension rose to a degree I had not seen before. As the evening went on, more customers arrived and the second table filled with players playing bilota (a trick-taking game similar to hearts). Each hour or so, the pokher game would pause and money would be settled up between the players, with Panagiotis usually taking a moment to glance through the front windows before they all produced their wads of drachma bills. Around 11 pm they were doing this for the second time, and Nikos was preparing to give a 5,000 drachma bill (about US$20 at the time) to Panagiotis (who, as owner, always acted as banker). Glancing to his right he saw Spiros, half-standing, watching Nikos closely and with his own 5,000 bill clutched in his hand, raised towards the

Selves in Play

hanging lamp over the table. Even though Nikos quickly glanced away as if ignoring it, all of us knew what Spiros planned, which was to slam his own bill on top of Nikos’ the moment he put it down, in a demonstration of masculine domination with clear sexual connotations (compare the discussion of plakoto in Malaby, 2009). Nikos looked at Panagiotis, possibly hoping for eye contact and the chance to hand the bill to him directly, but the owner was busy sorting khartakia into small, orderly stacks for the coming hands. Nikos finally laid down the bill close to the edge of the table on Panagiotis’ right, away from Spiros, but Spiros nonetheless reached over and slammed his own bill on top of Nikos’, grinding them both into the table with his thumb. As the playing continued into its third hour, several things happened. At one point, Nikos and Spiros were betting against each other, and, finally, Nikos called. Spiros was forced to show an unsuccessful near flush. It was four spades and a club, although he first showed only the four spades, keeping the fifth card behind in his other hand until Nikos reached over and uncovered it. In response, Nikos showed only two of his three jacks (having moved when the other table became occupied, I was now behind and able to see his hand). He took delight in ostensibly showing Spiros that he had won with such a weak hand, and took the opportunity to do the same gesture of sodomization at Spiros, squaring his shoulders and doing it with gusto. Spiros, upset, began to protest and insist on seeing Nikos’ hand, questioning whether the betting before had been conducted properly. But his protests went unheeded, with Panagiotis speaking around his dangling cigarette to say, ‘He showed his two jacks, doesn’t that win?’ But this one turn of events was not enough to overcome Spiros’ gains. He continued to win, leading Nikos, when he had an opportunity to cut the deck, to lean over and speak forcefully at it, saying, ‘Wake up, bastard!’ At the next break, as Spiros got up to head to the bathroom, Nikos began lamenting how much he had lost that evening. Spiros detoured to the small bar area and grabbed a small bucket of pocket change from the cashier desk and offered it to Nikos, who was incensed, refusing even to respond. While Spiros was in the bathroom, the table discussion turned to him and Nikos pulled no punches in his assessment of Spiros’ character. ‘Einai kakos poustis’ (‘He is a terrible faggot’), said Nikos, continuing the distinctly heteronormative frame that saturates male contest in Greece (see Herzfeld, 1988), but note the reference to the continuous, the essential

163

164

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

character of Spiros through time as ideologically represented. Spiros returned and play resumed. No further moments of drama erupted, and the players finished their last hour and filtered out. Panagiotis, when it was just he and I, shrugged his shoulders at the interchange between someone I gathered was a friend and Spiros. ‘Eh, every day it is different, the cards are different.’ Gambling is common and multiform in Greece, constituting a significant part of the daily life of most Greek men and women. In Chania in 1994–5, its various forms included state-sponsored gambling (such as lotteries, scratch ticket games and soccer pools), legal and illegal raffles by local organizations, illegal electronic games with cash payoffs, illegal local gambling (including card playing, dicing and backgammon) and local numbers games (which I most frequently saw offered for large, otherwise practically unsellable fish). Then a town of about 70,000 people, Chania lies on the north coast of Crete, and is a popular tourist destination with its well-preserved Venetian harbour and the looming, picturesque White Mountains to the south. But Chania is also a city of commerce, surrounded by broad and fertile plains well suited to citrus production, and terraced hillsides covered with olive trees. Many Chaniots account for the prevalence of gambling in Chania by allusion to the combination of tourist and agricultural industries, and most Chaniots I came to know had links to these multiple sources of income. In the run-up to New Year’s Eve, the most culturally significant day for gambling (everyone, including children, could be found within and beyond their homes playing tou khronou, for the new year), such personal practices of (re)fashioning became more frequent and intense. The illegal card playing largely gave way to the dice game of zaria (a local fifty/fifty game preferred over craps), and would erupt visibly onto the public scene, with existing, established coffeehouses for gambling setting up new arrangements for the much higher-stakes dice gambling, while at the same time entirely new but temporary establishments appeared, some offering games beyond cards and dice, such as roulette (perhaps with a dart thrown at a board instead of a – expensive, difficult to manage – wheel). A run of bad luck at poker can threaten not only a stable ‘definition of the situation’ (in Goffman’s phrase) within long-standing groups of players, but have consequences for each player’s ability to claim or reject their own past and reputation. In zaria, a fifty/fifty game eerily bereft of explicit sociality, players experience rapid wins and losses, sometimes extended into

Selves in Play

incredible streaks, and see the outcomes as suggesting, even constituting, an ongoing verdict on their viability as persons.1 In that work and those subsequent to it (at length in Gambling Life, 2003), I undertook to write about the intersections between various culturally situated understandings of indeterminacy (including luck in several senses, fate and other tropes) and the various domains of life through which Chaniots, and Greeks more generally, moved and lived: business, courtship, masculine friendship and politics. The aim was to use games as a lens through which to view the culturally shaped human encounter with the indeterminate, and thereby make more room within anthropology for the treatment of games as a cultural form in themselves, one that, like ritual or bureaucracy, entails its own commitments and contrivances, and becomes a forum for gambits and parlays of meaningful experience. On this view (Malaby, 2007), games are to be understood as unfolding processes that (again, like ritual and bureaucracy) exist in the doing, and therefore themselves are a site not for the reflection of social life, but for its constitution. This treatment of games sets aside the simplifying idea of the magic circle – which treats games as analytically apart from other domains of experience – allowing us instead to examine the cultural effort that succeeds (or fails) when social actors: set boundaries around games; mobilize claims about their pleasurability, their safety, or their lack of stakes (or the opposite of these); and use games and their outcomes to further institutional projects (see, for example, Schüll, 2014). In short, seeing games as processes that unfold in experience pushes us to ground our claims about them not in a Platonic ideal of games but in an Aristotelian concreteness of practice. Similarly, this approach guards against seeing games as simply reducible to their rule structure, or as purely representative; that is, as providing a narrative, or a representation of some other phenomena. In very much the same way that a score of Beethoven’s third symphony is not, itself, the symphony, games exist in

Cases examined in situ are based on ethnographic research in Chania, Crete, over a period of seven years between 1994 and 2002. The original research was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad, a Krupp Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship through the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, with a Faculty Travel Award from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee providing the opportunity for vital follow-up. Development of these ideas was made possible by a fellowship from the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2018-2019, and by its support of the Digital Cultures Collaboratory. 1

165

166

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

their playing, and thereby any instance of gameplay itself participates in the transformation or confirmation of the social order, and sometimes both. From that approach, it became possible to focus on the role games play in what Goffman called the ‘definition of the situation’, showing how moments of gambling themselves became constitutive of local realities, as instances of structuration: ‘It is in the context of an unpredictably unfolding present and an indeterminate future that players (dis)order the reality over the gaming table through their claims about how the emerging patterns of outcomes, and their position with regard to them, should be understood’ (Malaby, 1999: 149). I came to realize that the material, however, pointed to more than just how situations are defined; it also has something to say about how selves are made, and the question of what role games play in the making of selves drew my interest. I suggest here that the gambling in these existing and ‘pop-up’ casinos puts the players of games such as poker and zaria into explicit, practical dilemmas over their personhood; that is, whether their selves are to be understood as continuous with the past, present and future, on the one hand, or to be understood as discontinuous, as capable of radical breaks and transformations. My inspiration for this undertaking is a series of important pieces, within and beyond anthropology, that have raised questions about how culturally constructed selves should be best understood. In one way or another, writers such as Marcel Mauss (Mauss, 1990 [1925], see also Parry, 1986), Sally Falk Moore (1978), Michelle Rosaldo (1982), Michel DeCerteau (1984) and N. Katherine Hayles (1992) have raised questions about the cultural locatedness, and thus the analytical usefulness, of a self conceived in relation to claims of regulation and permanence (such as legal contracts, or any commitments that testify to a continued status over time). This continuous or contracting self seems be expressed with peculiar stridence in modernity, to the extent that the ideology of it has made claim to it as the only real, or actual, self. After all, the continuous self aligns with the strategic rationality of institutions, and has, some of these authors have suggested, tended to push aside or outand-out deny persons that are reflections of their circumstance, changeable and discontinuous. DeCerteau’s tactically clever everyman, moving within the interstices of regulated spaces and schemes, was a striking portrait of a self largely denied in modernity. For Hayles, the relationship between our patterned (continuous, I would suggest) selves and our present (discontinuous) selves is dramatically changed by the rise of digital

Selves in Play

networked technologies, which contribute to the modern emphasis on the patterned self (consider the rise of rhetoric of self as something ‘branded’). The contrast, put broadly, is between a consistent, contracting person that is essentially the same through time (and seized upon in a modern ideology as essential to the legal subject, for example), and a ‘discontinuous’ self, one marked less by consistent patterns through time and more by the ability to transform itself, and to do so via a radical break with the past.2 In 2013, Michael Lambek published ‘The Continuous and Discontinuous Person: Two Dimensions of Ethical Life’, where this contrast was given new vigour and pointedness, sharpening the focus on personhood and bringing it in relation to ethics. There he argued for recognition, on the one hand, that ideologies of continuous and discontinuous selves are present across human societies (though culturally elaborated in different ways and at times with strikingly different emphases), and, on the other, that the continuity and discontinuity of selfhood are also characteristic dimensions of human experience itself. That is, from Lambek’s point of view we can expect to find, in any society, both culturally shaped ideologies of continuous and discontinuous selves alongside practices of enacting continuity or discontinuity. Spirit possession in the ethnographic literature is a classic example, as he explores (as does P.C. Johnson, 2014). For purposes of illustration, we can consider for a moment how games themselves exhibit the tensions within and between these ideologies and experiences. As they continuously unfold sequences of indeterminate, yet interpretable, outcomes, games both provide for the possibility of linking meaningful outcomes over time as part of claims to continuity (‘lucky streaks,’ for example), as well as provide for outcomes that challenge expectations, that begin something new (such as when Oscar Robertson and Julius Erving took basketball ‘above the rim’) and thereby challenge any previous claims to permanence or eternal verities.3 More noticeably, the long-debated, thorny distinction between games and sports, while foundering on many lay preconceptions, appears from one angle to be sensible in terms of continuity versus discontinuity.

A full treatment of these connections lies beyond the scope of this chapter; these pointers are provided in the spirit of providing potential lateral connections. 3 Or, the opposite, as in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, where the continual landing of a flipped coin on heads frames the entire meditation on the limits of the title characters’ agency. 2

167

168

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Sports are marked by their institutionalization, by the linking together of particular, situated game instances to other instances and by the standardization of rules, settings and participants, the keeping of records and the organization of matches, seemingly every variety of Weberian rationalization brought to bear on leaving the particular behind in order to construct more eternal claims, in contrast to games, which in their iteration in unique events, slide towards the singular instance, grounded in the situated ‘doneness’ of practice. Returning to Lambek, his interest lies not only in tying together some of these threads of social thought, but also in bringing ethics into the conversation. While it might be tempting to imagine that ethics aligns with the extent of our continuousness as persons, he stresses that we should not see the contrast as between continuous (‘forensic’) selves that are ethically accountable and discontinuous (‘mimetic’) selves that are not. As he puts it (I quote at length to capture how he undertakes the weighty task of linking these constructs of personhood to ethics) (2015: 838–9): I suggest two universal and intrinsic dimensions of the person. On one side, the person is understood as a unique, continuous, and unitary actor and cumulative product of the acts in which she has engaged or been engaged and for which she is held and holds herself accountable. Following Locke, I call this the forensic person, alluding here to identity over time, carrying moral responsibility for past and future deeds in the way that the law ascribes continuity to individuals with respect to such matters as intentionality, commission, and punishment. On the other side, individuals draw from a set of named personnages or dramatis personae that they ‘become,’ ‘inhabit,’ ‘play,’ ‘personify,’ ‘imitate,’ or ‘impersonate’ alternately and discontinuously, or possibly successively or simultaneously, and for which different societies provide a variety of means and opportunities. These vehicles for subjection, but also action and reflection, appear to produce discontinuous, dispersed, dividual, divided, uncontained, or nonunitary persons, a dimension I call mimetic. .... I argue that they refer to modes or dimensions of action that are relevant for all persons, everywhere, hence emphatically not mutually exclusive. They can also each respond to aporias inherent in the other. . . . [B]oth dimensions are intrinsic to ethical life. .... I argue that ethics entails a judicious balance between forensically maintaining commitments in continuous practice and mimetically

Selves in Play

initiating, accepting, or submitting to new ones in discontinuous performances.

Lambek goes on to highlight the role of ritual in the process of the production of ethical selves in a way that resonates with the aforementioned claim about games as sites not simply for the reflection of social relations and meanings, but for their constitution. As he stresses, ‘Ritual . . . is not simply a secondary representation and possible mystification of underlying social relations or values . . . but is, as least in this respect, constitutive of them. As Andrew Walsh has put it, rituals do not only fulfill responsibility, they produce it. . . . From such a perspective, ethics is intrinsic to human social worlds’ (2015: 840–1). The argument – and it is one at the core of a large tradition of work in anthropology rooted in theories of performance and practice – compels us to recognize that ethics happen in social action, and often pointedly within the cultural forms (ritual, bureaucracy, game) that institutions deploy as part of the pursuit of their and their participants’ interests. For Lambek, the continuum from ritual performance to everyday practice is the scene for an interplay between performed moments of new commitments, new obligations and new selves (when past roles and expectations are set aside), while at the same time counterweighted by the accumulation of familiar anticipations, founded always in some sense of consistency with what has come before, realized in habits, trust and reliable expectations, and sensible in relationship to institutional roles. But in the contingent flow of experience, such continuity can be vexed: ‘If persons are subject to criteria established in performance, they must find ways to live with them in practice. This raises a number of challenges insofar as criteria do not fit changing circumstances, interests, or intentions, criteria are incommensurable with one another, commitments conflict or compete with one another, and the attempt to be consistent and complete presents significant difficulties’ (Lambek, 2013: 844). Going back to Arnold van Gennep, the context of ritual has long been established as key for transformations of status, and therefore the way in which ethics are implicated for the continuous and the discontinuous dimensions of our experience is quite clear. For Lambek, the spirit medium is instructive in how she portrays both aspects simultaneously (851): Although a host and her spirits exhibit discontinuous voices, any given host (spirit medium) is also constituted as a continuous person who must

169

170

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

return to herself after episodes of overt possession and who is accountable more broadly for how she addresses and articulates the presence of spirits in her life. An ethically competent spirit medium is someone who can perform appropriately as a given spirit but also someone who can exercise tacit judgment as to when to enter and leave trance, by which spirits to become actively possessed, and how to manage clients who come to her spirits for assistance.

Yet while rituals stand as a reliable cultural form for institutions, and therefore can readily be deployed by them for the regulation of social life, games are a cultural form that has historically stood in distinct tension with institutions. The Olympics are the classic demonstration case of the unruliness of games (with the Berlin 1936 games as the ultimate example), but we can also note with fascination Amy Chazkel’s account of an encounter between game and state in her 2011 book, Laws of Chance. In it, we learn of the Brazilian-born Englishman, João Batista Viana Drummond, who became a baron when Emperor Dom Pedro II gave him a title and the concession to the Rio de Janeiro zoo in the late 1800s. To popularize the zoo, he began a raffle in 1892 based upon guessing the identity of an animal behind a curtain. The animal game quickly escaped the zoo, however, going on to become a clandestine lottery, the jogo do bicho, a national phenomenon that continues, despite its illegality, to this day. Chazkel shows how the game, which became extremely popular and – as it combined with other, similar ‘numbers’ games under the same name – widely played, and ultimately came under the control of a criminal syndicate in the 1940s, has continually been at odds with the Brazilian state, which has made many attempts to eradicate it, nominally on the basis of concern over its contribution to the gathering together of ‘dangerous masses’. Chazkel argues, however, that the evidence suggests that the motive was more a manifestation of ‘the state bureaucracy’s perceived need to regulate behavior, which itself derived as much from a desire to increase tax revenues and to punish wayward police as from a preternatural fear of the popular classes and their folkways’ (2011: 25). More importantly for Chazkel, these efforts resulted in a co-production of civil and criminal life. As she writes, ‘Spilling outside the borders of the city zoo where it originated, the jogo do bicho would cross, strain, and reify the vague line between legal and illegal’ (2011: 27). At the core of her account is an argument about how Brazilian illegality and legality produced each other

Selves in Play

through and around the jogo do bicho. Her focus is not on the selves in play, but rather on the court cases that sprang up around the game over many decades, and in them we can still recognize the interplay of ideologies of continuity and discontinuity, of regulation and disorder, in a way consistent with Lambek’s remarks (2013: 851): ‘The courts serve to clarify and authorize forensic forms of personhood, yet even the law affords a statute of limitations for most crimes and a fixed term for most punishments. While the courts aim for conclusive judgments, the difference between first- and second-degree murder, for example, is often slippery.’ In any event, what Chazkel most powerfully demonstrates is the difficulty bureaucratic institutions have even in confronting and regulating games. About ritual, however, a few more careful words need to be said before proceeding to games and the account of Spiros and Nikos mentioned earlier. After all, not all rituals are rites of passage, and therefore ritual does not always traffic in the potentially dangerous shifting of role for someone or some people. Ritual can also seek to affirm existing status and legitimacy, and here the regulatory function of ritual comes even more strongly to the fore. From a point of view informed by Victor Turner (1975), Stanley Tambiah (1985) and Sally Falk Moore (1978), ritual is to be understood not simply as expressing a given social order or social structure, but as always enacted within a field of contest, where a particular picture of the social order is being pursued through ritual (and where failure is a possibility). Unlike bureaucracy, where the order imposed ultimately risks loss of meaning in the Weberian sense (the ‘iron cage’ of rationality), ritual is deployed within a field of meaning (Sahlins’ ‘cultural logic’; 1985), and therefore the interests of its sponsors are bound up in the constitution of the social order. For Lambek, it would seem that ritual comes to present an unfolding process where the discontinuous and continuous are brought together, but where ethical accountability and institutional interests ultimately hew towards the continuous. This component of his argument seems implicitly grounded on the nature of ritual itself and its relationship to sustained commitments and roles. As he puts it (852), ‘As we offer a greeting, make a promise, or conduct a ritual, we are acting mimetically, reiterating in our words and bodies a formula, script or scenario that has been uttered and enacted by other before us. But the practical provocations, entailments, and consequences of the performance are

171

172

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

forensic; each successive performative act binds us to the criteria it establishes.’ This account, in its focus on the cultural form of ritual, rightly concludes, then, with a focus on forensic consequences. What I want to suggest is that it could be productively amended and expanded by considering how performance in the context of a different cultural form, game, may present a different picture. Lévi-Strauss held both ritual and game up for inspection for a few fascinating, rich pages of The Savage Mind (1966: 29–33) and highlighted key differences. Rituals, he argued, conjoin (we might add, mindful of the afore­ mentioned, only to the extent that they are successful) – they are about belonging and the affirmation of the social order. Games, however, for Lévi-Strauss are distinctly differentiating – they establish a difference of performance. Although this is not always expressed in stark terms (winners and losers), nonetheless games, by having indeterminacy of outcome at their core, and by also always calling upon their participants to execute actions successfully or not (performative contingency), are a cultural form where, in contrast to ritual, the outcome (even the path to the outcome) is only legitimate to the extent that it is indeterminate. Hence (again) the unruliness of games for institutions; but for individuals, we may ask, what are the consequences for selfhood? If ritual ultimately situates its participants within ethical obligations that support continuous selves (while nonetheless accommodating and even relying on discontinuity – after all, it must be possible for status to change for a rite of passage to exist), what ethical consequences, if any, are generated by games? I will not claim to get to the bottom of this question in what space remains. But I do want also to comment that this volume, by focusing on play beyond the computer, directs us to consider what may be distinctive about games that are not digitally mediated. Among other things, this difference has enormous consequences for the status of institutions. To play a digitally mediated game is in all cases (usually directly, but always indirectly) to play a game bound up in institutional projects, and one suggestion of my work on Second Life (2009) is that digital technology makes new kinds of domestication of games by institutions possible. ‘Offline’ games, by contrast, while certainly still caught up in one degree or another by institutional interests, nonetheless seem to me marked by a relative deinstitutionalization, against which

Selves in Play

the exceptions (primarily professional sports and casino gambling in their non-digital and non-digitally networked dimensions) stand in stark contrast. It is therefore both as a result of the focus here on individual ethical experience and the relatively unruly contexts of many offline games that from this point I will set aside most of these larger questions of institutional context (although keeping one in play – Greek masculinity) and consider the unfolding of player experience as seen in the case described earlier. Remarkable throughout that evening of gambling, and others, were the potentially volatile shifts in outcomes, sometimes for long streaks, that occurred. And here we must pause and consider a strange fusion that can so often become a key point for the generation of meaning in games. Let us consider the performative contingency of Spiros (leaving aside, for simplicity, any lack of competence in the other players at the table). To consider his ability to execute well in his attempt to play the game according to his aims means also considering the dimension of social contingency (his ability to read others), as in the variants of poker both sources of contingency play a significant role. At the same time, however, as in virtually all games (even chess, in the initial choosing of a colour), there was also in play stochastic contingency, the contingency generated by a mechanism able to produce random distributions.4 The stochastic contingency of a well-shuffled deck is distinctly discontinuous, in Lambek’s terms. It owes nothing to what came before and defies, strictly in its distribution, patterns across instances. Spiros’ own performance, however, as that of other players’, has a more complicated relationship to continuity and discontinuity. Was his performance that evening better than ‘usual’? What is his usual level of performative competence? How predictive is that, even absent the complicating feature of the well-shuffled deck? At issue here, and again in strong contrast to the regulated actions of ritual, is the way in which the cultural form of game generated the possibility for discontinuities of both self and of the circumstance, and by doing so generated an aporia around

Or, at least apparently random – many digital games do not produce ‘true’ randomness; what is important is whether it is effectively random vis-à-vis the players’ point of view. See Malaby 2007 for a fuller discussion of these kinds of contingency and how they are arrayed variously across different games. 4

173

174

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

them about how to account for what occurred.5 Spiros performed his success and claimed it as his own (whether ‘skill’ or ‘luck’), creating a context where he could ground those claims in an at least momentary appeal to a conception of dominating manhood. And even on this score the story is not simple, because conceptions of masculinity in Greece at the time themselves lay in ambivalent relationship to the forensic self. As a distinguished professor of political science, Nikiforos Diamandouros remarked to me, upon hearing about my research interest, male power in Greece, particularly in the domestic sphere, was grounded in a discontinuous capriciousness of mood, leaving partners (almost always women) and children constantly wondering which person was going to walk through the door. For Spiros, this was an opportunity to attempt an association between his success at the table and his gendered power, all in ways that seemed to have consequences more tactical than strategic. After all, not one week later I sat in the same coffeehouse, in nearly the same place, and saw Spiros participating much as he had on other, less dramatic, occasions. By contrast, I should note, Panagiotis’ performance of unflappability aligned well with a different disposition that I outlined in Gambling Life and other earlier work and termed, ‘instrumental nonchalance.’ This approach requires a disciplined (not least because seemingly effortless) equanimity in the face of life’s exigencies, and presents its own performative challenges. Viewed alongside each other, we begin to see multiple gambits of masculinity available in Greek social life, each fraught and always in the process of becoming. The performance of gender identity is just one possible point of ‘elective affinity’ (per Weber) between the game context and other dimensions of social life. In play beyond the computer, we can notice the contingent mechanisms that are distinctively activated in games, in ways that invoke mimetic personhood perhaps to a slightly stronger degree than forensic selves, and with potential consequences for axes of difference in terms of gender but also many more. In contrast to digital games, where the implicit operation of pseudo-stochastic contingency makes it invisible to players

This is of course not to deny that ritual, too, can be subject to contingencies. The difference is that it attempts to minimize their threat to destabilizing its outcomes. In Austin’s terms, these threaten to make the ritual’s outcomes void or hollow (infelicitous). 5

Selves in Play

and instead (usually) couched inside of other representations (often aiming for ‘realism’), and where the institutional capture of player attention and information extends the reach of their ability to command attention beyond the dreams of Las Vegas’ first millionaires (Schüll, 2014), these comparatively more explicit, and less institutionalized game contexts demonstrate all the more clearly the moment-to-moment unfolding of experience and the dance of selfhood that takes place amidst the aleatory in the everyday.

References Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chazkel, A. 2011. Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life. Durham: Duke University Press. De Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Geertz, C. 1973. ‘Religion as a cultural system’. In Interpretation of Cultures, Ch. 4, 87–125.0. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity. Herzfeld, M. 1988. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Johnson, P. C. 2014. ‘Toward an Atlantic Genealogy of spirit possession’. In P. C. Johnson (ed.), The Work of ‘Possession’ in Afro-Atlantic Religions, 23–45. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lambek, M. 2013. ‘The continuous and discontinuous person: Two dimensions of ethical life’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 19: 837–58. Levi-Strauss, C. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Malaby, T. 1999. ‘Fateful misconceptions: Rethinking paradigms of chance among Gamblers in Crete’. Social Analysis, 43(1): 141–64. Malaby, T. 2002. ‘Odds and ends: Risk, mortality, and the politics of contingency’. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 26(3): 283–312. Malaby, T. 2003. Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press. Malaby, T. 2007. ‘Beyond play: A new approach to games’. Games & Culture, 2(2): 95–113.

175

176

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Malaby, T. 2009. Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mauss, M. 1990 [1925]. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls. London: Routledge. Moore, S. F. 1978. ‘Uncertainties in situations, indeterminacies in culture’. In Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach, 32–53. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Parry, J. 1986. ‘Gift, the Indian gift and the “Indian gift”’. Man, 21: 453–73. Rosaldo, M. 1982. ‘The things we do with words: Ilongot speech act theory in philosophy’. Language in Society, 11(2): 202–37. Sahlins, M. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schüll, N. D. 2014. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tambiah, S. J. 1985. Culture, Thought, and Social Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, V. 1975. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

10 Honourable risks and dishonourable certainties Naiveté and cynicism at play over the card table in Imperial Russia1 Ian Helfant

During the course of the nineteenth century, the Russian nobility experienced a substantial decline in its fortunes as the inherited wealth upon which it subsisted dwindled amidst the social, political and economic pressures of modernity. The emancipation of Russia’s serfs in 1861 accelerated this process dramatically, foreshadowing the gentry’s final dissolution in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. While many of the causes of this decline were beyond the nobility’s control, young Russian noblemen also lost vast fortunes at the card table over high-stakes games of chance, contributing to their own impoverishment. They often lost to each other but equally often to professional card sharps of humble origins

This chapter represents an abridged and updated version of Chapter 1 of my 2002 book The High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia. All translations are my own. 1

178

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

or declassé individuals of their own background. Prevailing mythologies that viewed gambling as a re-creation of battle and losses at cards as an opportunity to demonstrate one’s fortitude in dire circumstances played a significant role in this process. Real-life gambling encounters often pitted naive youths steeped in the mythologies of aristocratic honour codes against professional card sharps who paid their own debts of honour only when served with legal documents. Many Russians believed that the figure of the gambler spoke in a unique way about their society and characteristics as a people. Dostoevsky – never averse to national or ethnic stereotyping – wrote in both his letters and his fictional works of the Russian passion for risk-taking, which he contrasted to the dead conventionality of the French, English restraint and German miserliness. Other, more measured observers argued that gambling provided Russians with a means of expressing their frustration with a tzarist regime that stultified and repressed their best impulses. The memoirist I.I. Panaev, for example, believed that the liberal historian T.N. Granovsky’s ruinous addiction to cards epitomized the fate of a gifted and sensitive ‘man of the 1840s’ towards the end of Nicholas I’s stultifying regime (Panaev, 1928: 348–55). Some of Russia’s most prominent writers including Pushkin (1799– 1837), Tolstoy (1828–1910), and Dostoevsky (1821–81) gambled heavily, as did many of their lesser-known contemporaries. Tolstoy’s ancestral wealth shielded him from the results of unsuccessful card play, but Pushkin’s enormous losses at cards and Dostoevsky’s at roulette seriously compromised their financial well-being and served as one impetus for writing for profit. Russian writers were also quick to seize the possibilities that gambling provided for creating literary works. Russian literature ranging from fantastic to society tales, from narrative poems to didactic prose abounded with scenes of gambling. Sensitivity to the cultural codes involved in card play provides a key to reading both these literary works and also non-literary genres of the era including personal letters and published memoirs, whose authors utilized gambling as a means of signalling their social status and affiliations amidst Russia’s rapidly changing cultural landscape. While noble and gentry status were fluid throughout Europe, historians have argued that the Russian nobility occupied a particularly precarious position (Wirtschafter, 1997: 22–37). The elite aristocracy were subject to imperial disfavour and confiscation of their property, while the living

Honourable Risks and Dishonourable Certainties

standards of the lower segments of the gentry were often barely distinguishable from those of the peasantry. The nineteenth century saw an especially radical shift in the Russian gentry’s fortunes, as it did in those of landowning classes elsewhere in Europe. Tzar Alexander I’s 1861 decree liberating Russia’s serfs represented just one in a long series of events that contributed to the gentry’s decline. Moreover, prejudices against engaging in productive labour or entering the emerging professions lingered particularly long in Russia, which made it difficult for many gentlemen to repair their fortunes as their hereditary wealth dwindled. In this chapter, I will first lay out my approaches to analysing the rich cultural discourse of gambling in this era, then present some examples of memoiristic depictions of gambling. These portrayals will demonstrate that disdain for money, a conviction that one could prove one’s mettle at cards, and a belief in the sanctity of debts incurred while gambling were important components of a mythologized noble identity, which left those who subscribed to it vulnerable to manipulation by those who were more cynical. Regardless of one’s stance towards gambling’s mythical underpinnings, it served as a crucial means of characterization in both literary and non-literary genres. I will focus especially upon the first half of the nineteenth century, when these views of gambling were especially prominent. At the beginning of his memoirs, one of Russia’s first professional journalists – Nikolai Ivanovich Grech (1787–1867) – recounts the family histories of the actors who will figure in his life story. Among his dramatis personae, Grech includes Baron Friedrich Adolf Klodt von Jurensburg, born in 1730 in what is now Estonia. Grech devotes seven pages to describing this patriarch and his descendants, focusing upon the extravagant lifestyle of gambling, hunting and feasts through which the Baron squanders several inheritances and the dowries of two wealthy wives. Ensconced upon his Petersburg deathbed in 1806, the ruined Baron wishes to leave something, aside from debts, to his children – ‘but presently he comforted himself with the thought that he would bequeath to his children the fruits of his experience and wrote a thick book of notes entitled: Principles of Rural and Domestic Economy, for the Preservation and Augmentation of One’s Inheritance’ (Grech, 1990: 47). Grech’s inclusion of gambling as one of the salient vices of a prodigal aristocrat is an important component of this ironic portrayal. In early nineteenth-century Russia, the card game – poised at the nexus of chance,

179

180

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

wealth and social status – played a prominent role in memoiristic discourse. A person’s statements about card play represented a serious declaration of ideology. Grech could be confident that his readers would take note of the Baron’s predilection for cards and that his own ironic authorial stance would help to position him socially and ideologically. Looking back upon his own childhood, considerably less privileged than that of the Baron, Grech again touches upon gambling. Grech entered the Senate School of Cadets in 1801 at the age of fourteen. The school had been established four years earlier to train students for the law and civil service. Grech narrates in a maudlin key how he earned food and tea by translating assignments or looking up words for wealthier fellow students: A mug of tea and cheap bun were my reward for translating a page or looking up twenty words. I have this youthful appetite to thank for an important and useful lesson in life. My wealthy and idle comrades often enjoyed a go at cards – in secret from the school authorities, of course – and especially liked to play Bank. One of them had just won several rubles. This inspired me: my entire capital consisted of a copper half ruble, which I hoped would provide my breakfast buns for the next twenty-five days. The demon of gambling tempted me: I began to stake my half kopecks – in half an hour I was cleaned out and during the next twenty-five days had to settle for standard breakfast rations, which were woefully inadequate. This completely cured me of any passion for the game – whenever I see cards, even now, I feel something akin to the hunger of a fifteen-year-old boy. (Grech, 1990: 161)

Grech fixes his single encounter with the ‘demon of gambling’ as a pivotal moment in his moral development. He associates his card loss with resulting pangs of hunger, asserts a directly signifying relationship between the money at stake and the goods it can provide, and declares his reluctance to subject this relationship to the whims of chance. In the larger context of his memoirs, he affirms a work ethic suited to the emerging field of professional journalism, in which he was a leading figure, over the aristocratic reliance upon chance and inheritance evinced in his narrative history of the life of Baron von Jurensburg. Prince P.A. Viazemsky (1792–1878), an intimate friend of Pushkin who wrote as an aristocratic dilettante, describes a more significant card loss in an 1823 letter to A.I. Turgenev. Referring to the period after his father’s death in 1807, when he was in his mid-teens, Viazemsky writes: ‘During that time I had to get my blood boiling, no matter what the flame,

Honourable Risks and Dishonourable Certainties

and I boiled away about half a million at cards’ (Gillel’son, 1969: 8). Rather than offering rueful explanation for an event of nearly catastrophic proportions – one that together with later losses necessitated his entering into many years of government service that he loathed instead of living on his inheritance and pursuing, like many of his peers, only a token career – Viazemsky takes the opportunity of his loss to make a play on words. Gambling played a crucial role in both Grech’s and Viazemsky’s paths to maturity. Both men highlighted this role in constructing later autobiographical narratives – Grech in his published memoirs and Viazemsky in his personal correspondence. Grech uses the institution to mark his social, psychological and ideological separation from the aristocratic circles in which it thrived, while Viazemsky represents his youthful extravagance as an integral aspect of his aristocratic identity. Moreover, while Grech asserts that his loss of a copper half ruble squelched any desire to gamble for a lifetime, Viazemsky’s loss of half a million rubles apparently had a less sobering effect upon him. In March 1813, when he was twenty-one, Viazemsky received a letter from his brother-in-law, the renowned writer and imperial historian N.M. Karamzin, which indicates that he hadn’t forsaken the card table, despite his earlier losses. After commending Viazemsky’s decision to leave military service, Karamzin continued: Our friend – in utmost despair I implore you to remember your promise not to gamble. Someone wrote us that they tried to clean you out in Vologda and that they’re preparing the same for you in Yaroslavl. Don’t take offense – surely no one wishes you and the princess as much good as do we. If you don’t refrain from gambling, you’ll lose everything – and you’re a father now, after all. (Karamzin, 1897: 8–9)

What should we make of Viazemsky’s continued attraction to the card table? Did it represent an unfortunate and even pathological addiction or something fundamental to his sense of aristocratic identity, a quality shared by others among the Russian gentry of his and Pushkin’s day? Furthermore, if gambling did play a role in noble identity, what were the specific features of this role, and was it something particular to the upper aristocracy or to the gentry as a whole? Both gambling and duelling have been related to noble identity, but the relationship between gambling and nobility is more convoluted. The right to defend one’s honour in a duel was the self-conferred prerogative of a

181

182

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

privileged minority (Reyfman, 1999: 1–15). Conversely, noble status could virtually obligate a man to participate in a duel if sufficiently provoked. Neither of these conditions apply to gambling. In nineteenth-century Russia, as elsewhere, gambling occurred in diverse social milieus and among all classes. Moreover, membership in the gentry did not oblige one to gamble in the same way that it could require a man to accept a challenge or risk social ostracism. Although gambling abutted the semiotic sphere of duelling, it revolved around the exchange of money, which occupied a profoundly ambivalent position in gentry ideology. On the one hand, money was necessary to maintain a gentleman’s lifestyle; on the other, money was, according to both aristocratic mythologies and surprisingly persistent sensibilities, supposed to be beneath one’s notice. Demonstrating correct attitudes towards money – that most mundane yet highly charged and symbolic possession – represented one of the most problematic aspects of being a gentleman in Viazemsky’s day, or even Tolstoy’s, and could be a perennial source of anxiety. What then accounts for the strong association of gambling with aristocracy among both contemporaries and later historians? Modern risk theory represents one means of elucidating these issues. Modern analyses of risk-taking behaviour view it as lying on a continuum of causality that ranges from the individual, at one end, to the social context, at the other (Krimsky, 1992; Wildavsky and Dake, 1990). Two of the most developed paradigms, focused upon opposite ends of this continuum, are the ‘cognitive’ and the ‘contextualist’ (or ‘cultural’) approaches. Cognitive models of risk view individuals as rational actors who analyse risks in order to make decisions based upon ‘expected utility’. They extrapolate from the individual to larger groups and society and are typically used in the analysis of economic activities. Contextualist approaches analyse risk in the opposite direction, moving from social structure, institutional form or cultural milieu to the individual. Contextualist theories, strongly indebted to the anthropological studies of Mary Douglas, have been applied to analysing earlier cultural milieus and to a wide range of risk-taking activities. In contrast to cognitive approaches, contextualist theory argues that risk-taking and perception of risk derive from a person’s social and institutional affiliations: ‘Group and social context, not individual cognition, plays the primary role in the selection and response to risk.

Honourable Risks and Dishonourable Certainties

According to this view, the proper scale of analysis is sociological and not psychological’ (Douglas, and Wildavsky, 1982: 187). Cultural risk theorists argue that social relations, ideology and risk evaluation exist in mutually reinforcing symbiosis. As one proponent asserts: ‘Functional explanations of risk are not about “true” or “consistent” risk estimates; rather, they are about the coherence between risk selection and a way of life’ (Krimsky, 1992: 14). The contextualist viewpoint gains particular relevance as one moves away from the domain of commerce, in which cognitive theories of risk-taking based upon expected utility have their greatest value, and towards risk-taking in other domains, as well as into the analysis of such unorthodox economic activities as gambling. In addition to analysis through risk theory, gambling has been interpreted as part of a culture’s repertoire of ‘play’. Johan Huizinga, a founder of much modern scholarly discourse on games and play, argues that fundamental aspects of a culture and its subcultures reveal themselves in its games, which may either reinforce or contradict a culture’s predominant functional modes and ideologies (Huizinga, 1949). Roger Caillois, building upon Huizinga’s theories, categorizes games according to the principles of chance, skill, vertigo and mimicry and differentiates between societies on the basis of which types of games they prefer (Caillois, 1950). Modern bureaucratic societies, in Caillois’s view, balance between the principles of agon (skill) and alea (chance). Corresponding in part to merit and heredity, respectively, these represent the chief elements of the game of living in these societies. The story of these cultures over time, he argues, is one of agon’s ascendancy over alea as bureaucratic institutions, based in theory on advancement through merit, become increasingly powerful. Thomas Kavanagh summarizes some of the reasons that scholars have associated gambling with aristocracy in his Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance, which focuses upon gambling at court in Versailles during the ancien régime of Louis XIV (reigned 1643–1715). On one level, Kavanagh argues, both gambling and duelling represented compensatory activities meant to support a mythology of noble blood that prevailed after the traditional raison d’être of the nobility as a warrior class had lapsed. From this vantage point card play represented a struggle between individuals rather than ‘a confrontation between the player and the game as a structure of abstract mathematical explanations’ (Kavanagh, 1993: 64). The French aristocracy also indulged in high-stakes gambling in order to exhibit prodigality and disdain for money.

183

184

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Finally, since gambling debts had no legal status, aristocrats who chose to pay their ‘debts of honor’ were demonstrating allegiance to the codes of their own class over the legal codes imposed by the bureaucratic state (Kavanagh, 1993: 42–6). Kavanagh is describing, of course, a mythical viewpoint, and one based in Western European feudal traditions. One cannot simply transplant his assertions about the court aristocracy of the ancien régime to the Russian nobility’s perceptions of itself in the early nineteenth century. Many male members of the Russian gentry, for example, pursued active military careers: they experienced combat directly, rather than as an imagined historical past upon which to base mythical re-creations. Yet the parallel between battle and certain types of gambling, when treated in a synchronic rather than a diachronic sense, yields opportunities for myth-building as productive as those to which Kavanagh points. Rampant gambling in officer circles during military campaigns encouraged juxtaposition and comparison of the two spheres of behaviour. Moreover, civilians like Pushkin, who could not prove their valour alongside their contemporaries upon the battlefield, saw in gambling as well as in duelling a route to showing their courage and demonstrating their adherence to the honour codes that helped regulate gentry conduct. It’s crucial to differentiate between two different sorts of gambling that prevailed in early nineteenth-century Russia. Games of calculation, like whist (an early form of bridge), which were generally based on accumulating sequential cards of the same suit or cards of the same value across suits and were often played with partners, required a certain amount of skill and practice, which joined the element of chance in determining a game’s outcome. Games of chance, such as Bank or Faro, on the other hand, required no expertise. In the absence of cheating, the outcome depended entirely upon the luck of the draw. The only ostensible subtleties related to indicating such things as one’s desired sequence of bets, which could involve various ‘insider’ phrases or actions. Bending the corner of one’s card, for example, indicated a desire to stake previous winnings on it again. Games of calculation were played throughout gentry society, usually for small stakes. An ability to take competent part in the day’s leading games of calculation was one of the more or less necessary social graces of a member of the gentry – male or female. The reputation of being a pleasant gambler, or beau joueur, with its connotations of skill at the game,

Honourable Risks and Dishonourable Certainties

good breeding, and grace in paying one’s debts served as a valuable social qualification in both gentry and aristocratic circles. However, most gambling narratives of the age – both fictional and nonfictional – focused upon games of chance. The most popular game of chance during this era, Bank, was also known in closely related variants under the name of Faro, as it appears in Pushkin’s ‘The Queen of Spades’, and Shtoss, as it appears in Lermontov’s unfinished fragment of that name. In the most common form of this game, the player (or punter, in British usage) selected from his own deck a card, which he placed in front of him on the table. The banker, or a dealer whom he appointed, then dealt cards alternately to left and to right. If a card of equivalent rank (suit was irrelevant) fell to the dealer’s left, the player won; if to the right, the bank won. The player and banker faced different situations in that the player could select how much to bet and whether to continue betting while the banker had simply to match each bet up to the limit of his bank. Unless one of the participants cheated, player and banker had an equal chance of winning each hand, although the banker’s generally larger reserves tended to result in his prevailing over the long run. While more than one player could play simultaneously against the same bank (which could itself involve the pooled money of a group), other players tended to withdraw if one was betting heavily, leaving the stage to the protagonists and themselves joining the audience. Paradoxically, the mythology of gambling as battle, as martial arena for the display of character, exerted the strongest influence precisely in games of chance, which minimized the ability of an honest player to affect the outcome through skill, knowledge or fortitude. This reflected both the internal dynamics of these games and the social circumstances of play. Games of chance were played almost exclusively by men, especially those with a military background. They involved the highest stakes and the most momentous consequences. Yet the honest player could directly control only two things: the amounts and sequences of his bets (in other words, the level of risk) and his reactions to the turns of the game. The honest dealer could control only his own demeanour and was obligated to meet all bets, unless he closed down the bank. The very restrictiveness of these games in combination with their frequent ‘fatefulness’, to use the sociologist Erving Goffman’s apt term, invested each gesture and action of a participant with heightened significance.

185

186

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

In two essays on risk-taking, which he calls ‘action’, Goffman argues that certain qualities of character can emerge only during ‘fateful’ moments – moments that have the potential to impact an individual’s future in a dire way. For Goffman, this explains ‘action’s’ appeal: Plainly, it is during moments of action that the individual has the risk and opportunity of displaying to himself and sometimes to others his style of conduct when the chips are down. Character is gambled; a single good showing can be taken as representative, and a bad showing cannot be easily excused or reattempted. To display or express character, weak or strong, is to generate character. The self, in brief, can be voluntarily subjected to recreation. (Goffmann, 1967: 237)

‘Action’ often involves situations in which strengths of mind, body or character enable the individual actively to influence the outcome. Yet the essential element of fatefulness viewed as a backdrop for the display of character can also exist in situations that restrict the individual simply to awaiting the resolution with more or less equanimity. In both cases – and Goffman includes duelling and gambling among his examples – an individual has the opportunity to display such qualities as fortitude, nerve and self-possession. Moreover, Goffman notes that ‘composure in all its different dimensions has traditionally been associated with the aristocratic ethic’ (Goffmann, 1967: 227). The Russian semiotician Iu. M. Lotman echoes this aspect of Goffman’s treatment in his work on the significance of gambling in Pushkin’s day. Lotman emphasizes the similarities between gambling, duelling and warfare and emphasizes the opportunity for demonstrating character in each context: The role of chance underscored the significance in gambling, on the one hand, of the unpredictable, and on the other of self-possession, restraint, manliness, the ability to keep one’s head in difficult circumstances and to maintain one’s dignity in perilous situations – in other words, the same qualities that one had to display in battle and in dueling. All three spheres of behavior thus shared a common psychological subtext. (Lotman, 1994: 145)

Much of the fascination that gambling encounters held for Pushkin’s contemporaries arose precisely from gambling’s ambiguity as an activity that bordered the two more martial spheres of behaviour but also differed from them in crucial respects.

Honourable Risks and Dishonourable Certainties

The future cavalry general A.I. Arnol’di, in his recollections of the aristocratic author M.I. Lermontov’s time in the Grodno Hussar Regiment of the Life Guards, recounts an 1840 confrontation with Lermontov over the game of Bank that will clarify some of these theoretical points and demonstrate the mythology of gambling as battle in practice. Lermontov had been arrested and subsequently transferred from his own hussar regiment to Arnol’di’s after a duel with the French ambassador’s son. His status as an outsider plays a crucial role in this scene: One evening toward dinner time I dropped in on the Bezobrazov brothers and found there an officer of our regiment, unknown to me, who Vladimir Bezobrazov told me was named Mikhail Iur’evich Lermontov. Soon we sat down to our modest repast, and Lermontov, who was joking very playfully, made a pleasant impression on us. After dinner, as usual, people sat down to play Bank – but rather than the normal bank of fifty or one hundred rubles that one of us would ordinarily provide, Lermontov proposed setting up a bank of one thousand rubles and placed that amount on the table. I wasn’t playing and left to go somewhere. When I returned, I saw that both Bezobrazov brothers had lost heavily and were bitterly bemoaning their ill luck. I sat out a few rounds but suggested several winning cards to Vladimir Bezobrazov, who began to recover his losses after my entrance, until suddenly Lermontov suggested that I try my own luck. He made this suggestion, I thought, with such irony and annoyance that I immediately resolved to sacrifice some tens, or even hundreds, of rubles in order to satisfy my pride before this conceited stranger, this former Life Guard. On this occasion fate chose to come to my aid and I remember that with one king of diamonds, on which I unflinchingly staked a pile of half imperials, I enabled the Bezobrazov brothers to recoup their losses and myself won eight hundred rubles and change. It was the only time in my life that I came out ahead, although several times in my youth I played against thousand-ruble banks. (Gillel’son, 1964: 226)

This narrative represents the game as a personal confrontation between the protagonists in which heightened stakes and higher risk serve to test the other’s nerve and self-possession. At the outset, Lermontov escalates the level of risk – the real-life consequentiality of the game – by setting up an unusually large bank, implicitly challenging the players to place correspondingly large bets. One thousand rubles was a significant sum at this time; in 1831, for comparison, Pushkin paid 2,500 rubles a year in rent for his Petersburg apartment (Gessen, 1930: 20.) The Bezobrazov

187

188

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

brothers respond to Lermontov’s challenge, but in the resulting character contest they dishonour their regiment – not by losing, but by showing their discomfiture at this fact. This blow to regimental pride motivates Arnol’di to transgress against the etiquette governing games of chance, which dictated that spectators refrain from getting directly involved, and to suggest some cards to them. He wishes to defend the pride of his regiment against the mocking intruder, armed with his large bank and scornful demeanour. Lermontov, angered at this interference and at his reversal of fortune, challenges Arnol’di to enter the game himself. By showing his annoyance, Lermontov loses some of the primacy that he has gained. Arnol’di’s explanation of his decision to join the game is pivotal, with his resolve to ‘sacrifice’ tens or even hundreds of rubles in order to resurrect his regiment’s honour, inextricably bound with his own, before the intruder. In the mythological system of the game, monetary bets serve as a vehicle for the more significant stakes of honour. The higher one’s stakes, and the calmer one’s demeanour while winning or losing, the more honour one gains. This mythological code strips money of its real-life significance and assigns in its place a signifying role internal to the game. Yet a strange duality remains, for it is precisely the shadow of the stake’s real-life significance that lends the necessary gravity to the internal system of the game: only money’s importance in real life provides a sufficient degree of consequentiality to allow the participants to display their honourable qualities. Play money, signifier bereft of genuine alternative signification, would not provide the necessary level of risk (Goffmann, 1961: 69). Within this mythological system – as with the aristocratic honour code that regulated duelling – conduct, rather than outcome, is what counts. Arnol’di’s words imply that losing can actually signify more deeply than winning, as it provides more scope for showing equanimity in the face of dire circumstances. The individual’s problematic derives from the combination of a code of honour that focuses upon conduct and the assertion of noble identity, rather than outcome, and his own desire as an individual to win, rather than to lose; it reflects the contradiction between a mythological system and a real-world context in which the same signifying elements could have opposite and potentially dire consequences (Goffmann, 1967: 245). While Lermontov was able to risk the significant losses that such highstakes gambling involved, given an indulgent and wealthy grandmother and

Honourable Risks and Dishonourable Certainties

the fact that he reputedly favoured chess over cards (Gillel’son, 1969: 263), other less wealthy or restrained members of the gentry fared much worse. The damage that card losses were inflicting upon a substantial number of the Russian nobility during the latter part of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries led to a series of imperial edicts aimed at suppressing games of chance and preventing gamblers from incurring ruinous card debts. Catherine II (reigned 1762–96), Alexander I (reigned 1801–25) and Nicholas I (reigned 1825–55) all promulgated laws that reflected the chronic nature of the problem and their concern for the ruinous toll that card losses were exacting from the gentry (Karnovich, 1873). Considerable vacillation characterized Russian legislation directed against gambling, and the enforcement of these laws was even more arbitrary. Nevertheless, certain consistent themes emerged. The Russian legal code from the reign of Catherine onward forbade games of chance while permitting games of calculation, tended to divide those who participated in illegal gambling into victims and victimizers, and denied the legal status of gambling debts. As with duelling, punishment tended to assume administrative, rather than judicial, form. Three months after ascending the throne, on 11 July 1801, Alexander I issued an edict to the military governor of St Petersburg that deplored the extent of illegal gambling in the capital city. It called for the assiduous persecution of the ‘crowd of dishonorable predators who have cold-bloodedly planned the ruin of entire families; who wrest away with one blow from the hands of inexperienced youth or unthinking avarice the gains of their ancestors, acquired through centuries of service and labor; who, overturning all laws of honor and humanity, without pangs of conscience, and with shameless visage often swallow up innocent families to the last morsel’ (Ashukin, 1941: 228). An edict issued by Nicholas I on 12 March 1832 testified to the ongoing nature of the problem three decades later: ‘Regardless of our most august will and certain examples of just discipline that have befallen unmasked gamblers, we see with sorrow that in our empire, on the one hand, the fatal passion for forbidden gambling and, on the other, avarice for the acquisition of another’s property, satisfied by this shameful means, continues to provide both new victims and new violators of government decrees’ (Karnovich, 1873: 420). One of the government’s tactics in its attempts to prevent gamblers from incurring ruinous debts was to remove their access to a principal

189

190

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

financial instrument, the promissory note. According to the ‘Decree on Bankrupts’ of 19 December 1801, members of the gentry would no longer have the right to employ such notes (‘Ustav o bankrotakh’, 1820: 34.) The law was largely ineffective, however, as the gentry were able to circumvent it in various ways. For example, merchant intermediaries would sometimes sit in adjacent rooms armed with official paper, stamps and their right as guild members to contract such debts. Moreover, like other legislative measures, this decree had to contend with the status of gambling losses as debts of honour. Members of the gentry often attempted to ignore their debts to nonnobles. Belief in the sanctity of debts to other members of the nobility, however, played a key role in gentry ideology and was one of the means by which the gentry in Russia and elsewhere asserted its exclusive status. In practice, of course – particularly given the astounding amount of borrowing that characterized gentry life – loans often went unpaid for long periods or were never paid. Yet noble honour codes continued to stress the sanctity of the debt of honour and particularly of debts incurred at the card table well into the mid-nineteenth century. Cases of young men who lost too heavily at gambling and shot themselves when unable to pay their debts were not uncommon. In 1825, for example, V.I. Laval’, cornet of the Horse Guard and heir to the fortune and title of his father, Count I.S. Laval’, shot himself after a large card loss (Dubrovin, 1891: 384). As in duelling, where suicide could substitute for a duel in restoring a person’s honour if an actual duel could not be fought, suicide was viewed by some as a means of wiping away the stain of an unpaid debt of honour (Reyfman, 1999: 16–17). A description by I.V. Annenkov (1814–87) of gambling among the students at the Old School for Sub-Ensigns and Cadets of the Guard reveals its privileged role in the honour codes of the young noblemen there. Annenkov attended the school in 1831, as did Lermontov. In this passage, he describes the activities of the students after the doors to their sleeping quarters had been closed for the night: The cadets . . . would sit up for a long while at night, some drinking wine, others reading novels, but the majority at cards. This was the favorite pastime of the cadets and, sometimes, as you would lie down to sleep, you would hear for a long time from various quarters the exclamations: ‘staked again,’ ‘doubled’ ‘wait.’ . . . It has to be noted that these gambling gatherings in school had one extremely negative feature: games were conducted using

Honourable Risks and Dishonourable Certainties

promissory notes, rather than cash, and their payment was considered a debt of honor, so that many cadets paid dearly for their inexperience. It happened that accountings of card debts would drag out among the cadets even after their induction into the officer corps. As an example I’ll permit myself to mention that B. – that very same cadet who was well prepared in academic subjects at home and who didn’t study at all in school and graduated in first place – lost ten thousand rubles to one cadet: a significant sum for that time. It may seem strange, but fairness requires my remarking that despite such a prevalence of schoolboy spirit amongst the cadets, the sense of honor of officer circles was developed among them to a high degree. We differentiated pranks, horseplay, jokes from serious matters that touched upon honor, dignity, and rank or that inflicted personal insult. We understood all too well that one must not joke in these matters, and we didn’t joke in them. (Gillel’son, 1969: 120–4)

Annenkov ruefully portrays the schoolboys’ obedience to the debt of honour as preparation for the even more serious stakes that will accompany such adult behaviours as duelling later in life. He bemoans its negative consequences yet represents it as an integral component of the honour codes that prevailed in his milieu, to which he himself subscribed. While most of the examples I have provided so far focus upon noblemen who viewed gambling as an opportunity to display their adherence to aristocratic mores, some of the most interesting memoiristic (and literary) representations of gambling involve writers who distorted these behavioural codes for self-promotion or material gain. F.V. Bulgarin (1789–1859) exemplifies this. A literary professional who was ridiculed for his aristocratic pretensions, Bulgarin manipulates the gambling mythologies described earlier for his own ends. The motif of gambling recurs throughout the six volumes of his memoirs, published between 1846 and 1849, with varying significance and tonality. Bulgarin actively mythicizes his own conduct at the card table, claiming a privileged relationship with fortune. In one instance, Bulgarin admits to spending a long night as a civilian, after leaving his Uhlan regiment, playing Bank: After returning from the Prussian campaign to Petersburg, I once spent the whole night, until dawn, at the card table in the Cafe du Nord, to which I’ve already referred in part two of my Memoirs. I’ve already said that I don’t wish to appear better than I was and remain, and I confess that in my youth I often played Bank and was fairly lucky as well. After all, who didn’t play at that time? I always punted. I gambled with the greatest composure

191

192

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

and, when fortune didn’t favor me, I would sit the whole night, betting the usual amount on a single card in a hand. But when fortune turned her gaze upon me I’d sit upon a card, as the gamblers say, and I’d gain back my losses in a few stakes, often adding winnings to them. When lucky, I attacked by storm, into the breach! Acquaintances showed me all the bankers’ tricks used by false players, and it was almost impossible to deceive me, so that the bankers considered me a fearsome punter and would sometimes offer me a part in the bank so that I wouldn’t punt. On the night of which I am now speaking, fortune favored me. The bank opened at eleven o’clock in the evening and closed at nine in the morning: it was broken, and I received a tidy portion. (Bulgarin, 1849: 308–9)

With considerable audacity, Bulgarin attempts to dissociate himself from the negative connotations that gambling might involve for some of his mid-century readers while exploiting the possibilities for self-promotion that it might afford with others. His basic method in concurrently pursuing these contrary ends is to portray himself as both insider and outsider to the game and its codes. He ‘confesses’ to gambling, but only as a youth in an era when everyone gambled. He distances his use of gambling jargon with the phrase ‘as the gamblers say’. He also mythicizes his conduct at the table through the types of distortions described earlier, claiming that calm composure, martial daring and a vicarious insider’s knowledge of the tricks used by ‘false players’ allowed him consistently to make a profit at Bank. Military metaphors support this self-portrayal. In reality, while self-control and sophistication might indeed allow a gambler to recognize and elude the snares of card sharps, these qualities couldn’t help him to win. They could only enable him to place his bets and accept the results of play with apparent equanimity. The sole route for a player to win consistently against the generally greater reserves of the bank, or for a dealer to ensure his own success, was to defy chance and the honour codes of gambling by cheating. An 1826 autobiography (or more accurately, pseudo-autobiography) based its appeal precisely in its author’s open confession of his career as a card sharp. The first volume of Life of a Gambler Described by Himself, or Tricks of the Game Revealed appeared in 1826 and was greeted with such interest that its author published a second volume a year later (Zhizn’ igroka 1826-27). As the title implies, the work has a dual focus. On the one hand, it presents the evolution of its anonymous author from naive dupe

Honourable Risks and Dishonourable Certainties

into professional card sharp, along with his eventual repentance. On the other, it described in exhaustive detail, sometimes with accompanying diagrams, various card tricks employed in the ‘trade’. It purports to pursue a didactic purpose of educating the public against the wiles of professional gamblers. Yet the delight with which its narrator relates his stories, that of a connoisseur savouring past exploits, belies this explicit purpose, as does the author’s frank confession of his profit motive in writing the book. What results is a dual evaluative field in which each narrative statement lends itself to more than one interpretation. On the plane of conventional morality – exemplified by repeated passages in which the reformed narrator expresses regret for his former moral turpitude – his past life and actions seem reprehensible. However, in the world of the ‘scam’ (shtuka) that fuels each narrative, naiveté and honour are interrelated liabilities, laughable prejudices that lead directly to ruin. In one narrative after another, the protagonists – professional gamblers and cheats – emerge victorious over their naive and amateurish opponents. While many of the stories begin and end with the pious lament of the reformed author-narrator that he took part in such deeds, the enclosed narratives impose a language and interpretation of their own upon events. The simpletons who fall for the ruses of more sophisticated or less scrupulous gamblers seem exactly that: simpletons. The narrative vocabulary mirrors and reinforces this repeated plot sequence. Within the world of the ‘game’, players are divided into the ‘enlightened’ few and the ‘ignorant’ many. For those versed in the game, honesty, integrity and the like are simply ‘prejudices’ that ensure defeat. Yet they are also the necessary facade under which players must normally operate. The card sharps’ entire focus is to play on a ‘sure thing’ while seeming to respect the belief in luck that lures their victims to the game. The cynical author represents gentry honour codes as a constraining set of prejudices. The card sharp, eschewing a stable identity based upon fixed beliefs and representing an end in itself, maintains a flexible set of identities that will enable him to prevail against any antagonist in any sort of game. The narrator chooses the metaphor of the theatre, extremely prevalent as a means of interpreting social behaviour in this era, to convey this emphasis upon role-playing. At the other end of the spectrum from the author of Life of a Gambler (or even Bulgarin), gamblers like Viazemsky, Pushkin and Lermontov saw gambling as inextricably interwoven with the honour codes that underlay

193

194

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

their identities. For such men, gambling was comparable to duelling and was subject to the same codes. In this sense, the author-narrator’s dismissal in Life of a Gambler of ‘prejudices’ contrasts neatly with Pushkin’s 1836 comment in a letter to his acquaintance P. Ia. Chaadaev: ‘Comme homme à préjugés, je suis froissé’ ([‘As a man with prejudices – I’m insulted’] Pushkin, 1977–79: 10: 465). The same ‘prejudices’ underlay Pushkin’s refusal to share in the profits when he learned that his partner, N.N. Obolensky, had been cheating at Bank (Gillel’son, 1998: 2: 194–5). The most interesting applications of gentry honour codes to gambling during this era involve precisely moments like these in which one participant insists upon upholding the notions of honour that underlie his identity, while another concentrates on manipulating his opponent through codes that he often understands but does not respect. Such scenes were repeated countless times in tzarist Russia and had a significant impact upon the fortunes of the Russian gentry over the course of the nineteenth century.

References Ashukin, N. S. 1941. ‘Istoriko-bytovoi kommentarii к drame Lermontova Maskarad’. In P. I. Novitskii (ed.), Maskarad Lermontova, 211–48. Moscow and Leningrad: BTO. Bulgarin, F. 1849. Vospominaniia Faddeia Bulgarina. Otryvki iz vidennago, slyshannago i ispytannago v zhizni, 6 vols. St. Petersburg: Izd. M. D. Ol’khina. Caillois, R. 1950. Les Jeux et les hommes. Paris: Gallimard. Douglas, M. and Wildavsky, A. 1982. Risk and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dubrovin, N., ed. 1891. Sbornik imperialisticheskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, vol. 78. Saint Petersburg: Tip. I. N. Skorokhodova. Gessen, S. 1930. Knigoizdatel’ Aleksandr Pushkin. Leningrad: Academiia. Gillel’son, M. I. 1969. P. A. Viazemskii. Zhizn i tvorchestvo. Leningrad: Nauka. Gillel’son, M. I. 1998. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 3rd edn, 2 vols. Saint- Petersburg: Akademichskii proekt. Gillel’son, M. I. and Manuilov, V. A., eds. 1964. M. Iu. Lermontov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Goffman, E. 1961. ‘Fun in games’. In Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction, 17–81. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

Honourable Risks and Dishonourable Certainties

Goffman, E. 1967. ‘Where the action is’. In E. Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior, 149–270. New York: Pantheon. Grech, N. I. 1990. Zapiski о moei zhizni, ed. E. G. Kapustina. Moscow: Kniga. Helfant, I. 2002. The High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth -Century Russia. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Huizinga, J. 1949. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge. Karamzin, N. M. 1897. Pis’ma N. M. Karamzina к kn. P. A. Viazemskomu, ed. N. Barsukov. St. Petersburg: Tip. M. Stasiulevicha. Karnovich, E. P. 1873. ‘Presledovanie zapreshchennykh igr po nashim zakonam’. In Ocherki nashikh poriadkov administrativnykh, sudebnykh i obshchestvennykh, 405–29. St. Petersburg: Tip. Skariatina. Kavanagh, T. M. 1993. Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Krimsky, S. 1992. ‘The role of theory in risk studies’. In S. Krimsky and D. Golding (eds), Social Theories of Risk, 3–22. New York: Praeger. Lotman, I. M. 1994. ‘Kartochnaia igra’. In Besedy о russkoi kul’ ture. Byt i traditsii russkogo dvorianstva, 136–63. St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo. Panaev, I. I. 1928. Literaturnye vospominaniia, ed. I. Razumnik. Leningrad: Academia. Pushkin, A. S. 1977–79. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiatii tomakh, ed. V. V. Tomashevkii. Leningrad: Nauka. Reyfman, I. 1999. Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ‘Ustav о bankrotakh’ (chast’ II, otd. 1, punkt 1). 1820. Sobranie uzakonenii о vek-seliakh, zaemnykh pis’makh i prochikh dolgovykh aktakh. St. Petersburg: v Senatskoi Tip. Wildavsky, A. and Dake, K. 1990. ‘Theories of risk perception: Who fears what and why?’ Daedalus, 119: 41–60. Wirtschafter, E. K. 1997. Social Identity in Imperial Russia. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Zhizn igroka, opisannaia im samim, ili otkrytyia khitrosti kartochnoi igry. 1826–27. 2 vols. Moscow: Tip. Avgusta Semena.

195

196

Part IV Casino cities 11

Monte Carlo’s wheel of fortune: The social impact of risk, reward and roulette on visitors to Monaco’s legendary casino, 1863–1914 12 Gambling in the kitchen: Monte Carlo from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century 13 What statistics don’t say: Game innovation in Macau’s casinos since 2002 14 Playing with heritage: Gambling and Venice’s tradition

198

11 Monte Carlo’s wheel of fortune The social impact of risk, reward and roulette on visitors to Monaco’s legendary casino, 1863–1914 Robert W. Miller

In 1863, François Blanc, a wealthy and enterprising businessman who had successfully established a casino-gaming industry in Bad Homburg, purchased the casino concession in the remote and impoverished Principality of Monaco. The Grimaldi royal family had granted the gaming concession in 1854 in hopes of generating revenue, reducing an overbearing tax burden for the country’s citizens and maintaining social order (four-fifths of the principality had recently declared independence from the country). While Monaco’s casino industry languished under the poor guidance of early concessionaires, Blanc rapidly changed the minuscule country’s fortune. With his experience and immense capital, Blanc parlayed the struggling casino concession (which had hosted only two guests throughout much of a winter season) into a thriving,

200

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

multifaceted vacation-leisure industry (Fielding, 1977: 27–8). While former owners relied upon Monaco’s relative monopoly on public gaming in Europe, Blanc realized that he needed more ingredients than the country’s liberal gaming laws to turn Monaco into a fashionable leisure spot for Western elites. The Blanc family and the Société des Bains de Mer et du Cercle des Étrangers à Monaco (SBM) rapidly constructed a new, elegant city in the mid-1860s in which to house the casino: Monte Carlo. Promoters consistently strove to depict Monte Carlo’s casino resort as luxurious, elegant, sophisticated, exclusive and exciting; these qualities appealed to nineteenth-century European and American elites, the target audience of the casino resort’s early promotional efforts. In the 1860s and 1870s, no pastime more closely aligned with those traits than did the game of roulette. Therefore, SBM promotional efforts emphasized the exciting, but increasingly scarce, game, and Monte Carlo became inextricably linked to roulette in the minds of elite travellers, authors and moral detractors, alike. The relative rarity of roulette as a casino-gaming option in the midnineteenth century made Monaco’s permissive attitude towards it a windfall for the country’s nascent gambling-tourism industry. Roulette was hardly a new game; various early forms existed in Great Britain and France throughout the eighteenth century. Modern roulette debuted in revolutionary Paris, at the Palais Royale, around 1796. A combination of the hoca (a spinning wheel used in a French lotterytype game known as biribi) and an English wheel used in even and odd, ace of hearts and roly poly or ‘rowlet’, the wheel featured thirty-eight numbers (00 and 0–36) – reduced from the seventy-one numbers of biribi – and included a table for further betting options used in the modern game, such as odd or even, red or black and row betting (Schwartz, 2013: 19–20; Monod, 1902: 233). The expense of furnishing a properly calibrated roulette wheel and Europe’s restrictive gaming laws during the nineteenth century, however, combined to limit the game’s public diffusion. For Monte Carlo, this combination made roulette a veritable wheel of fortune. As state gambling restrictions widened in Europe by the middle of the nineteenth century, Monte Carlo became one of a handful of legal gambling establishments on the continent before becoming the only legal public gaming house to allow roulette by 1872; five years later, it would be the only public casino on the continent (Schwartz, 2013: 56, 63; Blancin, 1885: 138). For much of

Monte Carlo’s Wheel of Fortune

the mid- and late-nineteenth century, placing a bet at a roulette table was such a limited experience that the very act could serve as a distinctive, high-class social practice. Casino promoters reinforced this perception of refined exclusivity, and Monte Carlo became well established in the Western zeitgeist as the site of the seasonal rendezvous of ‘the elite from all nations, having refined artistic tastes’ (Casimir, 1903: 211).1 The limited scope of roulette play in Europe makes Monte Carlo an interesting case study in which to observe the intersectionality of casino gaming and elite social practice. This chapter espouses three principal arguments revolving around the roulette wheel and upper-class Western vacationers from roughly 1863 to 1914. First, it examines roulette’s role in the formation of Monte Carlo as the world’s premiere, upper-class vacation destination during the second half of the nineteenth century. While the game was not solely responsible for the city’s ascendancy as the world’s most fashionable and exclusive winter resort, the intimate link between Monte Carlo and roulette in popular culture, in casino promotions and in the minds of vacationers played a substantial role in the success of the city’s vacation-leisure industry. Second, this chapter demonstrates that gambling at Monte Carlo, and particularly placing bets on the roulette table, operated as a distinctive social function for Western elites. European and American hivernants (elite winter season vacationers) could signal their good taste and high social standing simply by playing roulette in Monte Carlo in the 1860s–80s. Finally, the chapter reveals that as the number of annual visitors to Monte Carlo grew to surpass one million by the turn of the century, elite vacationers could no longer signify their social standing simply by playing roulette; instead, they had to pursue different means by which they could distinguish themselves from the growing number of middle-class tourists at the casino resort. How vacationers played roulette, and how they responded to the dual excitement of risk and reward inherent in the game, became a distinctive function in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Roulette in Monte Carlo could provide more than a

For further descriptions of Monte Carlo’s reputation as an international rendezvous of the world’s elite, please see Casimir, 1903: 159, 186, 188, 215–16; Bessi, 1874: 8–10; Conty, 1897: 268, 279; d’Ange, 1884; Blancin, 1885: 139–40; Hanjoins, 1891: 3–4. 1

201

202

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

literal fortune of banknotes; for many elite vacationers, the allegorical wheel of fortune also helped to publicly distinguish their high social standing in an era in which title and wealth alone could no longer serve as a definition of eliteness. The nineteenth century heralded profound transformation and change in many respects; this is particularly true in regards to three aspects central to this study: European gaming laws, Monaco’s (and eventually Monte Carlo’s) reputation as a vacation destination and the leisure pursuits of Western elites. In fact, a mid-century observer would likely have noticed the continental trend of public gaming restrictions, but it is doubtful that many could have predicted that Monte Carlo would become the favoured vacation destination of aristocratic elites or that the old-guard aristocratic elite would lose ground to the nouveau riche and that Belle Époque leisure tastes would differ so dramatically from those of previous decades. Roulette, however, proved to be a common thread for each of these changes – particularly in Monte Carlo. Modern vacation leisure, dating back to the Grand Tour, had been the relatively exclusive realm of the aristocratic or Old Regime elite. It had also necessitated an edifying emphasis – early nineteenth-century public vacation travel rarely included considerations of pleasure. Historians have noted that European spas satisfied the cultural needs of both the aspirant middle-class and traditional elites. For the socially select, spas served as a seasonal retreat and a site of sociability with others of similar station; however, for the middle classes, spa-going allowed travellers to mimic elite vacation practices while satisfying a productive ethos with their leisure time. The emphasis on applied science, medicine and bodily regeneration – along with public displays of consumption – satisfied bourgeois tastes and served as a practice of class for these vacationers (Mackaman, 1998: 1–11, 67). As time progressed, more middle-class travellers visited spas and the spaces expanded their accommodations and grew into true resorts. Casinos proved alluring – and lucrative – attractions at these spas (Mackaman, 1998: 53). While the state had outlawed gambling in France throughout much of the nineteenth century, a notable loophole existed for villes d’eaux, or small therapeutic spa resorts. Enterprising entrepreneurs could apply to the Ministre de l’Intérieur for an exception as a health resort, thermal bath community, or seaside resort; over 400 sites obtained the designation (often under the flimsiest of pretexts),

Monte Carlo’s Wheel of Fortune

and by mid-century France was flush with casinos, despite officially prohibiting public games of chance (Eadington n.d.). At these spa casinos, middle-class and elite vacationers alike gained a taste for public gambling, and at a few of the larger Germanic casinos, patrons even played roulette. Seasonal travellers came to view visiting the casino not only as an acceptable leisure pastime, but also as an activity expected of those with good taste and high station. With the growth of spa towns as early sites of mass tourism, however, these retreats lost their appeal to many old-world elites. The trend of privileged classes seeking exclusive, new and exciting social practices – something unique to a cultural vanguard – is well established. When on holiday, upper-class Europeans sought virgin ground for leisure and participation in the perceived elite entertainment of the era (Rearick, 1985: 158–9). The distinctive function of cultural possessions and leisure practices correlates inversely with the number of people involved. The relative rarity of leisure practice is an essential part of what makes upper-class leisure pursuits elite. Vacation routines that held distinctive functions for social elites – such as spa-going early in the century and, eventually, playing roulette at Monte Carlo – differentiated high society from lower, aspirant classes. Once the middle classes engaged in these practices in great numbers, those distinctive leisure pursuits lost their social value (Bourdieu, 2002: 163, 176 and 230). By 1850, spa resorts across Europe were thriving; however, the clientele for these resorts had ceased to be the established, aristocratic order. These old-world, seasonal vacationers sought a new vacationing trend through which to distinguish their place in society (Large, 2015: 225). Since few roulette wheels were left spinning on the continent, playing the game emerged as a logical alternative to the overcrowded spas for the socially select. In France, public gaming had been mostly banned since the seventeenth century. A 1629 edict by Louis XIII had barred public games of chance, and a separate edict by Louis XVI in 1781 had strengthened the penalties for gambling. Public gaming received a brief reprieve during Napoleon’s reign; however, in 1836 France instituted a complete ban of gambling (La suppression de Jeux, 1881: 6). The ban went into effect on the last day of the year in 1837 – villes d’eaux continued to operate but were heavily regulated (Schwartz, 2013: 21). The days of public gaming grew numbered as Germany edged towards unification. In 1868, the Prussian legislature

203

204

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

resolved that all gambling would cease in four years and by 31 December 1872, the last casino in Germany shut its doors to the public. Unsurprisingly, the casino was Blanc’s – his competitors had abandoned their businesses months earlier (Schwartz, 2013: 55). From 1872 to 1877, the Swiss mountain resort at Saxon-les-Bains and Monte Carlo possessed the only two public casinos in Europe (Desroziers, 1874: 23). In 1877, the alpine casino closed its doors for the last time and left Monte Carlo as the only legally operating public gaming house in Europe. For investors in Monaco’s newly founded tourism industry, these developments surely seemed providential. Early concessionaires, however,  failed to capitalize on the advantageous situation. François Blanc was the first to put much thought towards creating a luxurious and all-encompassing resort for seasonal vacationers. Other owners viewed contractual obligations such as providing electric lighting or building gardens, hotels and restaurants as a façade meant to obfuscate the casino’s purpose. Blanc saw these obligations as necessary conditions towards creating an elite space of luxury and leisure in Monte Carlo that would attract an international corps of exclusive guests (Braude, 2016: 56–61). A veteran of the casino business and no stranger to the capriciousness of European gaming laws, he recognized Monte Carlo’s enviable situation as one of the few (and eventually the only) purveyors of roulette; however, he refused to rely solely on that boon. He provided incomparable accommodations for his patrons (at least, his veritable army of press agents would claim so); however, he was savvy enough to emphasize the relative rarity of roulette and suggest that playing the game was a true signifier of high social standing. Blanc also recognized that quality, not quantity, should predominate in Monte Carlo’s casino if the industry was to remain successful in the long term. There could be no (or as few as possible) gambling addicts, con men, rogues or beggars in the casino; it was to operate as a legitimate and exclusive establishment. Blanc did the unthinkable – he made each guest apply for an admission card and pay for entry to the casino; he hired men to patrol the casino floor in formal wear in order to escort unsavoury characters out of the principality. Bankrupt gamblers were quietly taken aside and given train fare and a small pittance in order to ship them out of the principality (Casse-cou, pseud., 1874: 4–5, 9). These exclusionary measures actually increased the casino’s patronage while allowing Blanc and the SBM to maintain social standards for their resort.

Monte Carlo’s Wheel of Fortune

With roulette, Monte Carlo’s tourism industry flourished, but, even in the tumultuous atmosphere of Europe’s gaming laws, roulette was particularly threatened with extirpation. The rapid regression of public casinos operating in Europe should not suggest that gambling ceased on the continent – far from it. Some villes d’eaux continued to operate in France, but the country strictly banned roulette. Public gaming also occurred with great regularity at social clubs where high society could mingle with those of a similar station. Gambling served as an ‘elaborate social ritual of aristocratic privilege’ during this era, and elites treasured the socializing aspects of gaming rooms (Braude, 2016: 19; Blancin, 1880: 18). Alongside elite gambling spaces, clandestine tripots, or underground gambling dens, proliferated. These shady spaces accommodated a more unsavoury clientele than did social clubs that allowed gambling. To be sure, hardened gamblers could win a great deal of money in these establishments – even more so than at a social club. Club members mostly gambled against one another and looked unfavourably at those who won an extraordinary amount from a compatriot. Betting against a bank, albeit a clandestine bank, removed any restraining effects that decorum or guilt may have weighed on a winning player (Maxim, 1904: 238–42). These illegal establishments carried a considerable risk, however, and being seen in such a haunt would not have elevated a player’s social standing (Blancin, 1880: 76–7). Without the constraints of legal operation, the tripot could halt play whenever it was convenient. Con men thrived there, and many of the games were rigged. Ultimately, even the costs of running the game contributed to Monte Carlo becoming the sole purveyor of roulette. To function properly, roulette wheels had to be finely crafted and carefully calibrated. At the time, they constituted the most expensive apparatus required for casino gaming. A single wheel cost several times a croupier’s annual salary to build (Braude, 2016: 21). Casino operators soon learned that the reliability of the wheels was paramount to their profits; not only did a properly calibrated roulette wheel signal the gaming house’s trustworthiness to its patrons, but it also prevented keen observers from noticing minute flaws in the wheel and capitalizing on their analyses. When an English engineer lightened the casino’s coffers by 80,000 pounds in just a few days in 1873, using a perfectly legal practice of observing the wheels for faults and then recording the frequency of winning numbers, the SBM decided it was

205

206

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

prudent to have the wheels tested, calibrated, repaired and replaced frequently (Schwartz, 2013: 76–7). Such precautions were costly. Even after purchasing the wheels, management sent the devices for testing to an engineer in Strasburg. Each calibration cost 1,000 francs, and around 320 francs were needed to re-carpet the game table; considering that by the 1900s Monte Carlo had about fifty roulette wheels either in play or in reserve, and that a functioning wheel needed to be able to spin freely for twelve minutes following a strong turn, ownership and upkeep of the game proved to be expensive (Monod, 1902: 233). Tripots, other clandestine establishments and social clubs could not afford to operate the game of roulette, leaving only legitimate casinos to offer the game. Throughout much of the late 1800s, that meant Monte Carlo alone. For these reasons, legitimate casino gaming such as that available at the Monte Carlo casino resort offered several advantages. First, Monte Carlo could offer the rarest game in Europe: roulette. Second, it satisfied the aristocratic social ritual of public gaming – in short, it provided a distinctive function for high-class guests. Finally, Monte Carlo afforded patrons peace of mind that games of chance were operated and run fairly. Even fierce critics of the industry acknowledged that, if nothing else, Monte Carlo ensured that the roulette tables were administered honestly. A disgruntled former croupier cynically compared playing roulette to the gradual deterioration and ruin brought on by syphilis or gangrene – but acquiesced that ‘[y]es, the gambling is honest in Monte Carlo, because, in that honesty, this game is worth twenty or twenty-five million by a share’ (Henriett, 1895: 13). By the 1870s, the SBM had recognized roulette’s appeal to hivernants and increased efforts to make an associational connection between Monte Carlo and the game. Their efforts included commissioning paintings of the Goddess Fortuna with her wheel, disseminating the connection through the country’s tightly controlled press, hiring authors to write hagiographic reports about Blanc and the country’s unique game, and trumpeting the gambling exploits of big winners. These were effective, but the public’s representations of this connection may have been even more valuable. Authors, artists and even visitors – quite unconnected to the SBM – published works that drew connections between Monte Carlo and the spinning wheel of chance. When Sarah Bernhardt inaugurated the Charles Garnier Theatre at Monte Carlo, François Blanc suggested that her performance might be of better use to the SBM if she had portrayed

Monte Carlo’s Wheel of Fortune

the Goddess Fortuna. After Blanc’s death, the company made good on his suggestion, commissioning Alphonse Mucha to paint Bernhardt as the goddess floating above recognizable features of Monaco’s landscape. Three floral circles encased the actress, drawing an unmistakable connection to the roulette wheel: the wheel of fortune. The SBM used the painting as an advertising bill for many years, and it became a popular postcard (Alphonse Mucha, 1897). Alongside these official promotional efforts, unassociated authors began to refer to Monaco as ‘the Country of Roulette’, to Monte Carlo as the ‘Queen of Roulette’ and to Blanc as ‘The King of Roulette’ (Villy, 1927; Desroziers, 1874: 19, 22). Another claimed that ‘in Monte Carlo today is the unique temple of Fortune, a beautiful temple, I assure you’ (Blancin, 1880: 17). While such flowering praise of the casino suggests these writers were salaried sycophants, that seems unlikely. These authors alluded to the Monte Carlo gaming rooms as the temple to chance or Fortune; however, they also soberly reminded players of the improbability of success at roulette and unabashedly claimed that the house would always win. Blanc and the SBM, it seems, had succeeded in making Monte Carlo synonymous with the exciting game of roulette in the public’s mind. The early decades of Monte Carlo’s existence, coincidentally the time when the city held a monopoly on roulette, provided elite vacationers with a truly distinctive practice of class. The very act of publicly gambling in Monte Carlo and placing wagers at the roulette table provided winter vacationers with a relatively rare and exclusive social practice, a leisure activity that they could parlay into social capital. In the words of Paul Blancin, ‘[t]he passion of the game is always one of the great sources of the social machine’ (Blancin, 1880: 18). Blancin and others argued that an exclusive crowd routinely visited Monte Carlo’s roulette tables not only to place stakes, but also to fulfil the social obligations of their class. This proved especially true from the 1860s throughout the 1880s. In addition to the relative rarity of the game, a taste for moderate risk and reward within the realms of social propriety made roulette an alluring holiday pastime for Western elites during the second half of the nineteenth century. As long as hivernants maintained their decorum while gambling, the excitement generated from the spinning wheel proved a welcome diversion. Europeans of the era gravitated towards entertainments dashed with an element of playful danger or risk. These were activities that provided an

207

208

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Figure 11.1 Alphonse Mucha, Monaco Monte Carlo, 1897. (The author has several copies of this image from various sources, but Wikicommons actually provides the clearest and most vivid of the selection; this version has therefore been selected for inclusion here).

escape from the banality of work life or passé amusements (Rearick, 1985: 207). Blanc and the SBM also laboured to ensure that a socially select group of players dominated the crowds in the gaming salon, particularly after the suppression of gambling in the rest of Europe. Management feared that gambling addicts, sharpers and con men would descend upon the principality, ‘like a living leprosy [and] push away the high society, the players of good company, the hig-liffe [sic], the aristocracy of birth and of business’ (Desroziers, 1874: 26). The company raised roulette’s minimum, rigorously enforced entry card requirements, and instituted a season-long

Monte Carlo’s Wheel of Fortune

pass that further differentiated hivernants from middle-class gamblers. Camille Blanc assumed the casino concession following his father’s death and the death of Marie Blanc. He surpassed his father in terms of separating classes of clients by building for elite visitors private gaming rooms and even a separate gambling facility in 1898 (Fielding, 1977: 98–102). In short, the casino-resort management worked stringently to ensure that socially select vacationers could gamble among their peers while enchanted by the measured surrender to chance offered by roulette. The presence of old-world elites around the roulette table (and importantly, the public belief that such a crowd frequented Monte Carlo’s gaming halls) was essential to the SBM’s marketing strategy and the casino resort’s success. Monte Carlo developed an international reputation as the home to the capricious, but exhilarating, wheel of fortune and as the preferred pleasure paradise of the Western world’s elevated society. Roulette at Monte Carlo represented a ‘chimera and an apotheosis’, because, on the one hand, it offered an ‘escape from the banal rut of existence . . . the tantalizing tremor of chance, luck . . . with the flourishing of luxury and happiness’, but it also brought about a ‘constant fright and sordid anxieties’ (Monod, 1902: 209). The moderated risk offered by roulette provided a pleasurable release from control for upper-class vacationers, but the city’s reputation made seasonal gambling almost a necessity for these travellers. This reputation increased the value of the social capital earned by visiting Monte Carlo. Elites simply expected one another to gamble as a social practice. Hiram Maxim reminded his readers that ‘ladies of the highest society, when at Monte Carlo, regard participation in the game as an allowable form of recreation, the wives and daughters of English peers, and ladies belonging to the highest continental aristocracy being constantly seen at the roulette table’ (Maxim, 1904: 216). Weekly social revues published the names of aristocratic guests and notable persons, as well as the names of the hotels where they stayed. Similarly, guidebooks, travelogues and personal correspondence could turn into a veritable ‘who’s who’ of Riviera royalty (Casimir, 1903: 215–16). The purpose for such lists were twofold: first and very practically, they provided vacationers with information about social contacts at the resort; but they also served a very visible and socially distinctive function by announcing that guests of high standing and good taste were indeed crowding around Monte Carlo’s roulette tables. The social pressure to play roulette proved so great that elites who hated

209

210

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

gambling or morally opposed the practice nonetheless found themselves placing bets by the spinning wheel (Desroziers, 1874: 18–19). La Comtesse d’Ange, a member of the Spanish nobility who had married a French aristocrat, spent several (very profitable) days at the casino playing roulette. Nominally, nothing seems outrageous about her visit, but it was surprising considering that she vehemently despised gambling and was one of Monte Carlo’s fiercest and most prolific critics – having published several memoirs and books lambasting the institution (d’Ange, 1884). Clearly, the social implications for roulette playing had a strong draw for many elite vacationers. By the turn of the century, playing roulette ceased to, in and of itself, signify elite social class. Once mass tourism practices began at the casino during the late nineteenth century and waves of middle-class tourists descended upon the minuscule principality, simply gambling in the impressive salons of the casino could no longer establish one’s position as that of high society. Annual visitor numbers doubled from 500,000 in 1889 to 1 million in 1902 and increased to 1.5 million by 1909, and with this change the relative rarity of roulette playing had been extinguished. Meanwhile, Monte Carlo’s seasonal society of hivernants was waning – the temporal dimensions of vacationing had changed, and a greater number of visitors were gambling in the casino, but for shorter periods. The middle-class invasion forced remaining Western hivernants to find new ways of signifying their status. Elite casino-goers began to distinguish themselves from the perceived hoi polloi by how they played roulette. A wilful surrender to the capriciousness of chance and fortune was seen as acceptable, exciting and modern. However, acquiring a fever for the game, displaying exceptional emotionality or winning or losing too much came to be viewed as base and improper. In these ways, how one gambled at Monte Carlo’s roulette tables developed an important socially distinctive function in an era of great change for the city’s casino-resort industry, and for European and American vacation-leisure practices more broadly. The period from the 1880s until the start of the First World War marked a tremendous period of transformation for European vacation-leisure practices in general. Monte Carlo noticeably felt these changes as well. Both visitors and the casino-resort management wrote of the shift that had significantly altered the city’s tourist demographics. Near the beginning of this transitional period, Louis Boisset humourously described

Monte Carlo’s Wheel of Fortune

the gaming rooms as a ‘madhouse’ and commented that Monte Carlo now had twelve classes of players (Boisset, 1884: 42–3, 46). Reflecting on the Belle Époque, a long-serving former croupier of the casino described the motley crowd that came to inhabit the gaming rooms. He recalled: The foreigners who flock to Monte Carlo in the winter season are hundreds of thousands. All countries, all races, all conditions are widely and honorably represented. Authentic princes and the posh and very rich and a nobility of contraband are sewn together, alongside them are a junk aristocracy who pulls the devil by the tail; naïve men mix with confidence men, and aficionados of every coat and every kind and especially the pleasure-sekers [sic], the seekers of easy pleasures who are always wading in dirty things. (Villy, 1927: 89)

As one would expect, the SBM monitored these changes with heightened concern. By 1912, the director of games at the casino, Emmanuel Maubert, complained of the shifting demographics: The worst aspect of the situation is that to-day quantity rather than quality predominates. This has given cause for much reflection, no small alarm and anxiety and a great deal of useless regret. After all, the development of economic forces is like the tide of the sea, it takes but little account of would-be Canutes, even if they are casino directors. It is the old battle between the first and the third class, between the saloon and the steerage, between the orchestra stalls and the pit or the gallery. Though the situation is very different, the result will be the same. The mass will win; indeed, it has won already. . . . There had been no falling off in the number of the high-class frequenters of the casino. They came now as in the bright days of yore, when . . . their presence was much more obvious. . . . They are there now, only they are lost in the crowd; they are not less numerous, but they are crowded in the mass of pleasure excursionists, of Cook’s tourists, of travellers booked through by innumerable agencies and syndicates. . . . Thus it is that the casino crowd has quite a different aspect. (Smith, 1912: 374–5)

Alongside the changes brought about by this vastly different type of vacationer, Monte Carlo’s relative monopoly on roulette and gambling had ceased. In 1907, France lifted its long-standing ban on public gambling, and more than 100 new casinos arose as competitors to Monte Carlo before the outbreak of war. Although roulette was still prohibited in the country, the French public clamoured for its legalization. It remained illegal for decades, but Monaco was forced to take action to ensure its

211

212

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

competitive advantage. The SBM thus entered into an informal agreement with the casinos along the French Riviera, some of which were quite large and legitimate competitors: Monaco would not offer the newly invented and popular game of baccarat in their casinos as long as French casinos promised not to agitate to lift the ban on roulette (Schwartz, 2013: 80–3). Belgian casinos now offered roulette and tourism promoters at German resort towns such as Baden-Baden appealed (initially unsuccessfully) for gaming concessions and a chance to install their own wheels of fortune (Large, 2015: 326). Deprived of offering the popular game of baccarat, its monopoly on roulette fading, and with a new demographic of patrons, Monte Carlo’s casino struggled to maintain its reputation as the resort of the privileged classes and to compete on an even footing with a whole slew of new casinos. This also presented elite visitors with the challenge of distinguishing themselves among their social peers while in the company of thousands of aspirant tourists, many of whom were now well acquainted with casino gambling as a leisure practice. Among the nouveau riche and the middle class (groups emulating elite leisure practices and hoping to gain social capital), the corps of Western high society developed several tactics to differentiate themselves. Roulette grew in popularity during these decades, as elites continued to play the game and as aspirant classes gravitated towards the vacation activities favoured by the privileged. Theatre-going, novelty entertainments and exhibitions, international sporting tournaments and other activities became new ground for elites to explore. The casino resort focused increasingly on segregating select patrons from the rest of the masses of tourists, and private gaming rooms opened up outside the main casino. Nonetheless, playing roulette a certain way remained a distinctive activity for Monte Carlo’s elite classes. Risk itself proved to be an attractive force of roulette for all class segments, but excessive surrender to risk horrified moral reformers and casino promoters alike. Any indication that the player was too emotionally invested or losing self-control could be socially damaging (Bourdieu, 2002: 211–19). Observers described casino patrons with too great a taste for risk as feverish, virulent or bestial (Monod, 1902: 217). The addictive quality of excessive risk similarly went against the social decorum of elite-class segments. By playing roulette with a reserved indifference to the game’s outcome and by playing with calm, reserve and moderation, socially select patrons could distinguish themselves from vacationers who exhibited greater emotionality over the game’s thrilling excitement of risk and reward.

Monte Carlo’s Wheel of Fortune

Elites’ approach to casino gaming, particularly to playing roulette, proved to be a solid signifier of status at a time when various class segments were congregated at Monte Carlo. Roulette offered the chance of accumulating a great fortune – this rewarding aspect of the game obviously contributed to its allure. Middle-class vacationers and professional gamblers flocked to the casino in hopes of striking it rich, equipped with an inexhaustible amount of systems, martingales and guidebooks. Elites quickly distanced themselves from such practices and sought moderation even in their reward. Winning an immodest sum, or even seeking to, proved indecorous for high-class gamblers. They were expected to play well, but not to seek extraordinary monetary gain from their achievements. Big winners among Monte Carlo’s hivernants habitually diffused their gains among their peers (Limouzin and Paris, 1876: 113). A British visitor to the casino and author of several books about gambling at Monte Carlo, Victor Bethell, wrote of the elites’ indifferent approach towards playing roulette. He remarked: As long as the world exists gambling is sure to continue. Of late years it seems to have increased its hold upon the members of the Upper Classes. Fortunately most of them take to it more as a pastime than a vice. They gamble to amuse themselves, and few of them lose more than they can afford. Some take it up in the same way that many others take to cycling, playing golf, and Bridge i.e. more or less because they are driven to it. They visit Monte Carlo and Ostend because all their friends go there, and having arrived, they find that they are ‘out of it’ unless they join in the universal pastime of Roulette. (Bethel, 1910: preface)

According to Bethell, the social obligation of playing roulette attracted the upper classes more than the prospect of accumulating a giant fortune at the table. The aforementioned Comtesse d’Ange, the fierce critic of gambling at the casino who nonetheless played roulette to satisfy social expectations, wrote of her dismay at her extraordinary luck in the gaming rooms. She had intended to visit Monte Carlo simply to mingle with other hivernants, and in doing so had won a great deal of money at roulette and tapis vert. She feared that other elites would think her immoderate or seized with the spirit of gambling because of her exceptional chance. Her fears quickly turned to mortification when, once she had won 40,000 francs from the casino, the management asked her to leave and revoked her entrance card (d’Ange, 1884). Reward was an attractive aspect of

213

214

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

roulette for social elites, but not the monetary kind. Playing the game well and the act of winning provided entertainment and pleasure, but too great a taste for remuneration from the roulette wheel could be a damning fauxpas for high-class gamblers. Intense superstition at the roulette table or the use of good-luck charms worked even more to distinguish middle-class guests and tourists from the aloof indifference of the elites. Visitors commonly used lucky coins, talismans and religious icons (Schwartz, 2013: 69). The pursuit of good luck could also often take a macabre turn. Rubbing the hump of a hunchback (several made a lucrative living near the casino terrace) or taking a lock of hair or souvenir from a suicide victim was considered an infallible repellent of bad luck. Rumours abounded that the bodies of suicide victims were surreptitiously looted before they were removed (Praed, 1884: 148). Croupiers rejected these supernatural explanations for the whims of the roulette wheel and looked upon the superstitious precautions taken by gamblers with bemusement and disdain. One recounted that ‘the spirit of superstition leads the players . . . to every imaginable eccentricity . . . many of the regulars of Roulette attribute their losses to a malefic chance, whereas they are solely due to the combination of cogs and maneuvers against which nothing can be done’ (Villy, 1927: 86). Certainly, the extremes to which Monte Carlo’s ordinary visitors went in hopes of winning big at the roulette table helped set elite gambling practices apart. The socially select had good cause to play reservedly and to exercise restraint while visiting Monte Carlo’s gaming salons. Wanton abandonment to fate or chance could be interpreted not only as corrupt or low-class, but also as non-Western. Russian nobility, Russian dowagers and, later, the scores of White Russian émigrés who flocked to the Riviera frequently featured as caricatures of heedlessness and boorishness in countless novels. Myth and reality intertwined to form this national reputation, but it was an image that was well known in Monte Carlo. One historian acknowledged, ‘Russians became famous for their flair and recklessness they brought to the table – the roulette table in particular. “Show a Russian a roulette wheel,” it was said, “and he will spin it”’ (Large, 2015: 137). The ‘Orient’ fascinated the upper segments of Western society during the Belle Époque; however, the concept was more of an idealized elsewhere than a specific geographic location. Broad regions often served as the background for the concept. During the early nineteenth century, for example, Palestine and the Maghreb

Monte Carlo’s Wheel of Fortune

likely served as the general locus for the Orient. After the turn of the century in the West, and certainly in France and Monaco, the Orient often, somewhat nebulously, meant Russia. This is unquestionably true after Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe took up seasonal residence in Monte Carlo in 1911 (Detaille and Mulys, 1954: 11–17). In this context, Western elites possessed yet another reason to gamble measuredly – recklessness and a taste for risk also drew associations to Russia. To distinguish oneself as elite, and as a Western elite, a patron of Monte Carlo’s casino could feel the excitement of the risk of placing a bet at the roulette table, but could never fully surrender control to chance. In order for roulette to retain its differential quality for elites from the latter decades of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of war, highclass gamblers negotiated a tenuous balance between betting too conservatively and gambling too recklessly. Such a visitor could not ‘punt’ at the roulette table (a practice common among many neophyte gamblers with a low bankroll, where they bet the bare minimum, inevitably losing but prolonging their play) because this gave off the appearance that the high-class gambler could not afford a small loss or did not adequately understand the nuances of the game. Moreover, the privileged classes could not gamble recklessly for fear that the stigma of risk-seeking tourists would be attached to them. They encouraged one another to gamble with a sense of disinterestedness to winning or losing, with an aloofness that left them poised, in control and dignified; they warned one another of the disastrous social impact of abandoning this practice (Andreis, 1874: 3). A British author observed that ‘[t]he smart woman from Paris, Vienna, or Rome never loses her head. She gambles always discreetly’ (Le Queux, 1921: 11). Baron A. de Vombey provided perhaps the clearest guidance for proper play for elites. He instructed, ‘[t]hose intending to visit Monte-Carlo and the Casino. Let: Calmness – Self-control – Perseverance be your motto; let the three magic words be deeply impressed on your mind’ (Vombey, 1913: 24; emphasis original). The first two precepts were especially important to Vombey. He continued: unless the player be in a condition of calmness and self-control, he is quickly misled. . . . The eagerness to gain and the fear to lose begin to unfold themselves from their latent state, and the result is that these two

215

216

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

rival passions: the feeling of gaining and the feeling of losing come to conflict with each other, and cause him to lose his calmness, self-control and perseverance. (Vombey, 1913: 25)

Vombey recognized the dual excitement of risk and reward inherent in roulette, but advised against surrendering wholly to these passions. For this author, success, in terms of both winning at roulette and the social capital of playing the game in the first place, rested on limiting the draw of risk and reward and in remaining calm and in control of one’s actions. This veritable guidebook for social decorum while playing roulette demonstrates the important distinctive function the game could have for the socially select, even once the leisure activity became available to masses of aspirant-class tourists. From 1863 to 1914, roulette served as the means by which both the Monte Carlo casino resort and its visitors distinguished themselves as elite. Certainly, other factors contributed to these reputations, but roulette played a crucial role. For Monte Carlo, the relative rarity of roulette in continental Europe during the nineteenth century made the city’s periodic monopoly of the game literally exclusive. Coupled with the SBM’s concerted efforts to construct a public reputation of Monte Carlo as a winter station for an elite, refined and cosmopolitan crowd, the scarce commodity of gambling at the table game reinforced the city’s exclusive image. Monaco’s monopoly on roulette also led to a permanent associative attachment between Monte Carlo and roulette. Promoters of Monte Carlo more than achieved their goal of turning the city’s name into a byword of luxury, exclusivity and cosmopolitanism; they, and perhaps more so, casino visitors, succeeded in drawing an indelible link between Monte Carlo and roulette in the public imagination. Playing roulette in and of itself served as a distinctive leisure activity for Western elites, at least initially. In an era when travel and vacation-leisure practices became available to a growing number of the aspirant classes, the more privileged largely abandoned spa-going and instead gravitated towards placing a bet before Monte Carlo’s spinning wheels. In the 1860s and 1870s, especially, gambling at the roulette table represented rareenough cultural terrain to qualify as distinctively exclusive. Simply playing roulette at Monte Carlo and socializing with other upper-class Europeans and Americans could help signal one’s standing as a Western elite. From the 1880s through the pre-war years, the minuscule principality

Monte Carlo’s Wheel of Fortune

experienced an influx of mass tourism that negated any possible distinctive function simply playing roulette could have had for casino patrons. With more than 1.5 million visitors annually, Monaco and Monte Carlo’s casino were no longer exclusive. In the face of this challenge, which casino management regarded as the ‘very serious problem’ of being ‘too successful’, the select social classes of vacationers were forced to differentiate themselves from middle-class tourists in new ways (Smith, 1912: 373). These attempts were often innate and subconscious, but nonetheless important functions of class. Vacationers from high society gambled at roulette in a very specific manner – reservedly, indifferently, calmly and with great self-control; they allowed themselves to be enchanted and amused by the whims of chance, but neither fully surrendered control to fortune nor exhibited excessive emotionality. The dual excitement of risk and reward inherent in Monte Carlo’s wheel of fortune had been part of what made it an attractive alternative to spas and villes d’eaux for European elites in the mid-century; however, too much focus on accumulating money at the roulette wheel and too great a taste for risk contrasted with upper-class social expectations. Elites distinguished themselves with their aloof demeanour and reserved play, while lesser gambling tourists rigorously played systems, rubbed goodluck charms, and turned to macabre extremes in hopes of striking it rich at roulette. In short, how one played roulette mattered a great deal in terms of a distinctive leisure practice. This phenomenon that unfolded in Monte Carlo sheds light on social differentiation patterns of the era. Even when a cultural activity had ceased to be purely exclusive in nature, adaptations to that leisure practice (the site of the practice, the practitioners’ approach to the activity, the demeanour exhibited by the practitioners, etc.) allowed it to retain its important distinctive function. Following the First World War, Monte Carlo and the SBM struggled to adapt to changing leisure tastes and rising competition. The number of competitor casinos increased, and, by the 1930s, France legalized roulette throughout the country; even Adolf Hitler resurrected gambling in some of Germany’s traditional spa-resorts, like Baden-Baden and Bad-Homburg (Large, 2015: 326–8). The SBM increasingly segregated the elite and the masses of vacationers during this period and turned to many novelties, sporting exhibitions and auto-racing as featured activities for guests. Roulette did not disappear at the casino, far from it, but the unique fascination with the game that earlier guests felt had waned – there were

217

218

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

other things to do. On a broader scale, roulette wheels proliferated across Europe and the United States during the 1920s and the 1930s, but soon lost their glittering appeal. By the late 1940s, roulette had fallen out of vogue in both Europe and America. A strong post-war American influence led to the ascendant popularity of games such as craps, blackjack and even mechanical slot machines, while European games like baccarat surpassed roulette as the preferred game of choice (Schwartz, 2013: 88–9). Monte Carlo, however, weathered the tough times brought on by changing leisure tastes and increased competition. By the late 1930s, it had recovered from its post-war slump and continued to innovate in another wave during the 1950s. While the SBM extended its interests far beyond the casino, the venerable ‘temple of chance’ exists as a key facet of the SBM’s marketing strategy to this day. Monte Carlo persists as a vacation destination for the world’s elite and as a symbol of luxury and sophistication due to its casino’s fabled reputation. Roulette aided substantially in the construction of the city’s public image and remains, today, the featured game at the principality. Leaving a lasting social impact on its players, Monte Carlo’s wheel of fortune continues to spin.

References Andreis, Louis de to Alexandre. 1874. Bibliothèque nationale de France François-Mitterrand rez-de-jardin, Paris (BNF). K-15225. Bessi, J. 1874. Monaco et Monte-Carlo. Nice: BNF. K-15188. Bethell, V. As V.B. [pseud.]. 1910. Monte Carlo Anecdotes and systems of play. London: William Heinemann. The University of Nevada Las Vegas Special Collections and The Center for Gaming Research, Las Vegas (UNLV). Blancin, P. 1880. La roulette et le trente-et-quarante, guide théorique et pratique à l’usage des visiteurs de Monte-Carlo. BNF. 8-V-3336. Blancin, P. 1885. Les joueurs et les cercles, avec des notices sur Monte-Carlo, Aix-les-Bains. Chalon-sur-Saône, FR. BNF. 8-V-20761. Boisset, L. 1884. Monaco – Monte-Carlo: Grandeur et décadence d’une maison de jeu. Nice: V.-Eug. Gauthier. La Médiathèque de Monaco Fonds Patrimonial et Regional, Monaco (MM). M690. Bourdieu, P. 2002. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Les Editions de Minuit, trans. R. Nice. London: Routledge.

Monte Carlo’s Wheel of Fortune

Braude, M. 2016. Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle. New York: Simon & Schuster. Casimir, P. 1903. Guides des pays d’azur. Monaco, Monte-Carlo et les environs. Nice: Éditions de la Ste de Publicité des Pays D’azur. BNF. 8-K-3694. Casse-cou [pseud.]. 1874. À la colonie étrangere. Casse-cou. Considérations sur les cartes d’entrée de la maison Blanc et compagnie. Nice: Caisson et Mignon. BNF. K-14530. Conty, H. A. de. 1897. Guides pratiques Conti [sic]: Paris à Nice MonacoMenton. Paris: BNF. 16-L27-245. D’Ange, C. 1884. La Comtesse d’Ange et Monte-Carlo. Nice: V. E. Gauthier. BNF. 8–V PIECE-5242. Desroziers, E. 1874. De Lyon à Monaco: Voyage agréable accompli sans accident et non sans plaisirs, raconté sans prétention. BNF. K-15128. Detaille, G. and Mulys, G. 1954. Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo 1911–1944. Paris: Éditions Arc-en-Ciel. Eadington, W. R. n.d. Personal notes. The William Thompson Collection 87–063. Box 3. UNLV. Fielding, X. 1977. The Money Spinner: Monte Carlo Casino. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hanjoins, A. 1891. Monte-Carlo et ses détracteurs. Nice: Malvano-Mignon. MM. M760. Henriett, H. – Ancien Croupier. 1895. Les coulisses de Monte-Carlo. Paris: Étienne Ghilini. MM. Mm1456. La suppression des jeux de Monte-Carlo-Monaco. Mémoire a l’appui de la pétition présentée aux Chambres françaises. 1881. Nice: Malvano-Mignon. BNF. 8–V PIECE 3355. Large, D. C. 2015. The Grand Spas of Central Europe: A History of Intrigue, Politics, and Healing. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Le Queux, W. 1921. Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo. New York: Macauley. Limouzin, C. and Paris, G. 1876. L’Hiver 1876 à Nice et à Monaco, Cannes et Menton. Nice: Imprimerie Nice. Mackaman, D. P. 1998. Leisure Settings: Bourgeois Culture, Medicine, and the Spa in Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Maxim, Sir H. 1904. Monte Carlo Facts and Fallacies. London: Grant Richards. UNLV, Special Collections. Monod, J. 1902. Aux pays d’azur: Nice, Monaco et Menton. Nice: L. Gross. BNF. 8-LK7-33362. Praed, C. 1884. Zéro: A story of Monte Carlo. London: Chapman and Hall. Rearick, C. 1985. Pleasures of the Belle Époque: Entertainment & Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France. New Haven: Yale University Press.

219

220

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Schwartz, D. G. 2013. Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling. Casino ed. Las Vegas: Winchester. Smith, A. 1912. Monaco and Monte Carlo. London: Grant Richards. Villy, A. 1927. Au pays de la roulette: impressions d’un croupier de MonteCarlo. Paris: Radot. BNF. 8-K-6685. Vombey, Baron A. de. 1913. Monte Carlo: Luck and Its Laws. Empoli: Lambruschini Brothers. MM. M1113.

12 Gambling in the kitchen Monte Carlo from the nineteenth to the midtwentieth century Paul Franke

Chapter Outline ‘The old town dozes and Monte Carlo gambles’: Building a casino town 223 Monte Carlo casino: The atrium and the ‘kitchen’ 231 Conclusion236

In 1913, American traveller and writer Theodore Dreiser arrived at the world’s most famous gambling resort: the Monte Carlo casino. Dreiser visited the small Mediterranean principality during his round trip through Europe and spent some time at the Côte D’Azur, exploring Southern France, Italy and Monaco. When he stepped into the salle de jeux, the gambling room, he was almost immediately overcome by the decors and the gambling tables.

222

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

I shall never forget my first sight of the famous gaming tables. Aside from the glamour of the crowd – which was as impressive as that of an opera first night or grand reception – and the decorative quality of the room, which was unduly rich and brilliant, I was taken with the sight of the quantities of real money scattered so freely over the tables, small piles of gold louis, stacks of eight, ten, fifteen and even twenty- five francs, layers of pale, crisp bank notes whose value was anywhere from one hundred to one thousand francs. (Dreiser and Schmidt, 2005: 386)

Dreiser’s relationship to gambling and Monte Carlo remained ambiguous. He was fascinated by Monte Carlo’s visual appeal, the impression it seemed to make on everyone, who stepped into the casino district and the gambling house that stood at its centre (Dreiser and Schmidt, 2005: 384). The feelings it evoked, however, worried him. When in the space, he felt urges and had thoughts that surprised him. ‘Great God!’ I thought. ‘Supposing I were to win a thousand pounds with my fifteen! I should stay in Europe an entire year.’ Visions of easy wealth dawned before my eyes, and I yearned to be able to instinctively pick the lucky numbers which brought such delicious piles of gold to so many.’ (Dreiser and Schmidt, 2005: 386)

The ‘traveler at forty’, as Dreiser calls himself in his book, was not alone with his fascination. Monte Carlo is more than mere location for gambling, it has become synonymous with a particular experience of gaming. Even non-gamblers know of Monte Carlo, and might even try their luck at the ‘green cloth’, just because here it feels unique and special. European gambling, so it seems, has reached its pinnacle here (Jackson, 1975: 72–3; Schwartz, 2003: 119–22). The question remains, why Monte Carlo has become so intertwined with a particular gambling experience. At least part of the answer can be found in the quotes of Dreiser. In 1913, he recognized the connection between gambling crowds, games and the space that hosted both. It all seemed to form a unity. Gambling and gamblers dominated the rooms, but Dreiser’s impressions of them were shaped by the surrounding decors and architecture. Gambling spaces have changed in recent decades. The casino is still one of the primary places in which people play games of chance, yet more and more gamblers now gamble in virtual spaces. In 2016, James Stock & Co estimated that in 2020, online gambling’s market size will reach $59 billion,

Gambling in the Kitchen

while in 2009 it accounted for ‘merely’ $20.51 billion (Statista, 2018). In their 2015 paper, June Cotte and Kathryn A. Latour already addressed the growing number of online gamblers and connected the different consumption habits with spatial differences. People played games of chance from home in private and therefore gambled in a very different way from people in a casino. Nowadays people play blackjack in the kitchen, or from the couch; the online casino is an interface, a virtual space on their laptops, computers and cell phones (Cotte and LaTour, 2009: 742–4). The growing debates concerning micro-transactions and the so-called ‘loot boxes’ in video games has lead politicians and state authorities in China, South Korea, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Australia to ask whether living rooms are now virtually connected to de facto online casinos (Yi-Pole, 2018). Gambling may be an age-old activity, yet its form and meaning largely depends on the spaces it is practised in. By analysing the spatial set-up of games of chance, we can thus develop a deeper understanding of gambling. In that regard Monte Carlo is especially interesting. It both was a town built around gambling and featured Europe’s most famous casino. This chapter will first investigate the city space and how the executives of the casino and the political authorities worked together to build a gambling town. Secondly, the chapter will investigate how Monte Carlo’s gambling experience was created within the casino, focusing on architecture and gambling’s spatial components. The town of Monte Carlo was planned as a company town, designed to guide people to the casino and to get people into a gambling mood. Inside the casino, rich décors, subtle means of control and an emotional atmosphere of hedonism shaped gambling behaviours and experiences. Casino architects and city planners intertwined urban and casino space, thereby providing an overarching framework for all gambling activities within the small Mediterranean principality.

‘The old town dozes and Monte Carlo gambles’: Building a casino town The principality of Monaco has been governed by the Grimaldi dynasty since the middle ages. In the nineteenth century however, the micro state

223

224

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

entered a period of economic decline and political turmoil following the French Revolution and the Restauration period after 1815. Although major European powers acknowledged Monegasque independence, the lack of notable resources and industries, alongside growing unrest among the populace to put up with feudal rule of the Grimaldi, threatened its integrity. In 1848, the year in which many European countries went through large-scale uprisings and revolutions, two cities that had made up a significant portion of Monaco’s territory rebelled against the reigning prince Florestan. They declared themselves ‘Free Cities’ (Decaux, 1996: 103–5), with the prospect of being incorporated into the neighbouring Italian Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont (Robert, 1997: 58–60). After many attempts to increase tax revenues and establish a noteworthy domestic industry, Florestan’s son and later ruling prince Charles III and his mother Princess Caroline, with the help of their Parisian advocate and adviser Adolphe Eynaud, proposed the establishment of a casino and bathing facility in 1856 (Boyer and Agulhon, 2009: 301–2; Barnhart, 1983: 172–4). The idea to transform Monaco into a spa town had been around for years at that point. Many other micro-states with similar problems as Monaco had turned to the casino industry with much success in revitalizing their economies. Especially smaller German principalities, such as Baden-Baden, or Bad Homburg, which lacked economic power and resources, depended on the so-called Kurhäuser and spas to bring in taxes. In the mid-nineteenth century, health spas had already transformed into institutions of leisure, mostly built upon gambling, rather than medical treatments. Indeed, many old health spas unable or unwilling to favour the casino over the traditional water cures had suffered heavy losses in prestige and visitor numbers (Steinhauser, 1974: 99–100; Fuhs, 1992: 153–6). Monaco’s ruling family thus wanted to emulate spas centred around the casino business. They sent their trusted adviser Eynaud to Baden, a successful casino spa run by gambling entrepreneur Jaques Benazet (Kavanagh, 2005: 132–3; Beaumerth, 1990: 162; 164–7; Boyer and Agulhon, 2009: 300–1). Despite the thorough preparations, Monaco’s gambling venture was off to a rocky start. The first casino located in the Villa Bellevue in Monaco failed to attract gamblers and meet the expectations of the Grimaldi family. In 1863, however, investors in the Monegasque gambling venture, Eynaud and the Grimaldis, would

Gambling in the Kitchen

eventually succeed in putting the principality on the map and building Monte Carlo, after they turn to François Blanc, a French gambling entrepreneur and the casino operator of the German spa Bad Homburg (Fielding, 1977: 30–5). In 1863, he and Charles III agreed on the terms for the concessionaire contract, and the Société des Bains de Mer (SBM) was founded. Blanc turned his attention immediately to the two most pressing concerns: the casino and the city space. In the early 1860s, the small state of Monaco consisted of three basic areas. The old town of Monaco with the palace and living quarters of most inhabitants on the so-called Rocher (the Rock), the harbour district Condamine beneath the old town and an agricultural area on a hill to the east, called Spélugues. It was on this hill that Blanc and the princely government decided to build a new urban area around the just recently completed casino (Fielding, 1977: 52–3; Jackson, 1975: 35). The Grimaldis wanted to separate the local life and the casino from the very beginning. Especially Princess Caroline was adamant that the casino had to be located outside of the old town (Miller, 2016: 55–9). There were many reasons for this decision. The subjects of the prince were not allowed to gamble and thus had little to do in the casino. Furthermore, the separation of tourists and locals remained a common feature in most spas and casinos in the nineteenth century. The Kurbezirk, the German casino district, represented a space with its own laws, social codes, culture and even population. Locals were excluded, marginalized or made invisible by urban design and policies (Fuhs, 1992: 137; 219–25). As the Grimaldis modelled their own casino district after the German archetype and François Blanc had previously run a Kurbezirk in Homburg, it is no surprise that Monte Carlo was planned from the beginning as a space for tourists and gamblers, rather than locals. When Blanc and his company started the process of building a city around the already-existing casino, the Spélugues consisted of barren hills and a couple of lemon trees. With his expertise, vast resources and political support of the Grimaldis, François Blanc changed that. His investments bore testimony to the transformation of the Spélugues into the town, that was called Monte Carlo after 1866 (Boyer and Agulhon, 2009: 296). Between Blanc’s arrival in 1863 and the official founding date of the town of Monte Carlo in 1866, the SBM invested 750,000 francs in 1865 alone, almost the entire revenue of that year, to build the new city (Braude, 2015: 61). Blanc’s casino company had close to 1,000 construction

225

226

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

workers on its payroll (Miller, 2016: 98–101). During his fourteen years in Monaco (1863–77), the Frenchman spent over two million francs to build streets and housing and to provide utilities, such as gas and water, to the casino town (Braude, 2015: 61). These policies continued even after his death. In 1878, the SBM paid more than 8,000 francs to cover sewage operating costs, over 47,000 francs for gas supply and over 80,000 francs for public transport. In 1879, in addition to operating the town and paying for the maintenance of its infrastructure, the casino company remodelled Monte Carlo’s main boulevard for over 60,000 francs.1 Because the princely government and the SBM envisioned Monte Carlo as a city for the casino and its gamblers, the urbanization process of the area differed significantly from the other areas of the micro-state. A casino company determined urban policies, ran the town’s infrastructure and shaped its architecture and design (Braude, 2015: 40–2). This had consequences for almost all aspects of urban life, from housing to security, from its economy to transportation. The housing sector, for example was dominated by Grand Hotels and mansions, as well as boarding houses, meant to host tourists and gamblers. Monte Carlo was a whole town that lacked a full-time local populace. François Blanc actively supported this. If the buyer wanted to build a mansion, Blanc sold Monte Carlo’s land cheap. In 1870, 19 hotels (the largest being the SBM’s own Hôtel de Paris, which featured 3,000 rooms) and over 116 mansions, as well as 80 luxury apartments had been constructed in Monte Carlo (Boyer and Agulhon, 2009: 311–15; Révoil, 2010: 236–9; Callais, 2014: 3; Mari, 1991: 6–7; Jackson, 1975: 45). People basically had to work with the SBM if they wanted to build something in the casino town. The rapid construction activity and the resorts’ increasing popularity raised land prices. In 1874, 1 square metre near the casino cost 150 francs. Even the harbour district Condamine saw prices increase drastically as Monte Carlo grew (Fielding, 1977: 73–5). In 1863, the Spéluges was the closest thing Monaco had to a hinterland. At the turn of the century, the SBM had transformed it into a town based on gambling, tourism and luxury consumption. Grand hotels like the

Archives du Palais Princier, Assemblée Génerale annuelle des actionnaires de la Société annonymes des bains de mer et du cercle etranger de Monaco, 29, Avril 1878; Archives du Palais Princier, Assemblée Génerale annuelle des actionnaires de la Société annonymes des bains de mer et du cercle etranger de Monaco, 25 Avril 1879. 1

Gambling in the Kitchen

Hôtel de Paris, the Hermitage and the Métropole were grouped around the Monte Carlo casino. Additionally the casino was surrounded by carefully maintained gardens and shops. The SBM did not want to distract form the casino, or the gambling inside it. Rather, all economic activities within the district had to work in support of the gambling house. Every district of the principality became connected to a specific economic activity. As a British journal noted in 1877: ‘Condamine, which seems to do all the business while the old town dozes and Monte Carlo gambles’ (The Graphic, 1877). The focus remained on retail shopping and luxury goods. The SBM enjoyed the monopoly not only over gambling in Monaco, but also over tobacco sales, and operated most of the big hotels. The casino town, which until the 1920s was mostly populated by tourists and thus deserted in the summer when the traditional vacation season at the Riviera ended, featured over fifteen jewellers, eighty-five wineries and more than a dozen flower shops, boutiques, cafés and fine dining opportunities (Jackson, 1975: 78–9). French authorities of the 1930s described the city as built around consumption rather than production, and without any industry not connected to the service sector. They seemed to admire a town that seemingly had no problematic working class, or the negative fallout associated with heavy industries.2 That included unpleasant smells, sights or social problems which might have compromised the cities’ atmosphere (Miller, 2016: 98). In reality, however, the SBM had just used its influence to push Monte Carlo’s non-consumption-related industries and infrastructures to the fringes or outside of the casino town. This included the SBM’s own pottery factory and a waste incineration plant. Those were located in Condamine, at the edges of the principality, or in Monte Carlo supérieur, today’s Beausoleil (Giordano and Gamper, 2013; Gastaut:1-2). In this French community, the casino company also settled its largely Italian workforce after 1904, which kept them out of sight of visitors and thus banished images of industrialization and the working class from Monte Carlo. The mayor of this casino settlement was Camille Blanc, Francois Blanc’s son

ADAM, Commissariat Spéciale, Rapport 1825, 21 September 1934, A/S de la situation politique et économique à Monaco; ADAM, Commissariat Spéciale, Rapport 1295, 21 September 1934 A/S de la situation politique et économique à Monaco; ADAM, Commissariat Spéciale, Rapport 1045, 01 July 1934 A/S de la crise politique et économique à Monaco. 2

227

228

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

and heir, the SBM president after 1893 (Callais, 2014: 3–4; Gastaut:1-2;8; Pickard, 1937: 160–2). The lack of industries and the abundance of retail shopping and luxury consumption, supported the SBM policy of transforming gambling into a legitimate leisure activity. It was meant to enhance, not to replace it. As an Austrian author noted in 1908: Those who arrive at Monte Carlo will gamble. You can’t get cards, it is impossible to play chess, because not a single Café, or restaurant provides the boards or necessary pieces. One cannot find Billard either. That means: either you will be bored or you will gamble. Nobody came to Monte Carlo to be bored. (Chodounsky, 1908: 17)

If people eventually decided to gamble, they did so in a very secure environment. Safety remained a major issue for the SBM. Casino gambling’s association with criminals, violence and suicide, a trope that was very influential on Monte Carlo’s public perception, required the company town to be well policed. In this, the casino succeeded. In 1924, a visitor remarked: People who know nothing of Monte Carlo often vaguely imagine it a disorderly place. There could be no greater mistake. The overcrowded Principality is perhaps the most orderly place in Europe. You have the privilege of being wicked only if you keep your wickedness bottled up and behave quietly and with perfect discretion. You may not so much as make a noise in the streets of Monte Carlo at night. Why, even a quarrelsome cat or dog is suppressed, so why not a human being! (Williamson, 1924: 110–11)

The casino company exercised a lot of power over the local law enforcement – after all they funded it. The huge success of the casino made it possible for Prince Charles III to abolish all direct taxes in 1870, as he considered taxes a destabilizing factor for his regime, leaving the SBM to cover most of the expenses of the state. That included the police (Lewiston Daily Sun, 1913: 2). In 1879, the casino company paid over 57,000 francs to finance law enforcement.3 This also meant that officers were willing to meet the expectations of the casino

Archives du Palais princier, Assemblée Génerale annuelle des actionnaires de la Société annonymes des bains de mer et du cercle etranger de Monaco, 25 Avril 1879. 3

Gambling in the Kitchen

executives. While criminal elements were surveilled in great details, working-class people and the poor were also removed from the casino town of Monte Carlo. Between 1866 and 1900, local police removed Italian workers who had to live on benches or under the olive trees of the town. Homeless people or workers had now to live in either Beausoleil or the unsanitary worker settlements in Monaco-Ville (Gastaut:3-4). Another element of the casino’s urbanization programme was emulated from mid-nineteenth-century Paris: ‘Urban furnishing’, meaning the arrangement of street lights, gardens and park benches. City planners knew about the effects these objects had on the character of cities and used them to boost consumption. The SBM invested a lot of resources on the question of how to arrange gas lamps, flowers and plants in its new casino city (Hahn, 2010: 149–50; 162; Hetherington, 2008: 25–9; 91; 107). Street lightning is one good example of how this worked. The SBM used installed gas lighting to illuminate the long boulevards leading to the casino and to present the gambling house in spectacular fashion. The gas lighting (electric after 1890) illuminated the frescoes and facade of the casino, yet also kept the darkness of the night from compromising the consumption-friendly atmosphere with feelings of insecurity or danger. Many contemporary writers and travellers address the lighting of Monte Carlo by night as a reoccurring theme throughout the period between 1866 and 1940 (Braude, 2015: 65; Miller, 2016: 83–5). Alongside the lightning, the gardens of Monte Carlo fascinated visitors and writers alike. In their descriptions of Monte Carlo’s atmosphere, many of them wrote especially about the huge green space next to the place du casino, the heart of Monte Carlo. Previous concessionaires of the 1850s regarded gardens as a waste of resources. Blanc and his associates, however, knew better. They realized the effect the gardens could have on people, how they put visitors into a gambling mood. Continental spas, where casino gambling had been commodified in the first half of the nineteenth century, featured gardens as part of the leisure (Scmitt, 1982: 133–42; Steward, 2012: 182–3).4 The SBM imported plants from all over the world, in order to create an almost overwhelming landscape of sight and smell. The casino gardens

A good example of these planning procedures is in Giordano and Gamper (2013: 285), where casino, hotel, garden and place du casino are all united in one architectural plan, showing how they were conceptualized as a unit. 4

229

230

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

used a combination of bright plants with strong fragrances, things that triggered real bodily responses, while visitors saw the nearby casino standing tall above them (Braude, 2015: 63–5). Thus, garden and casino formed a larger unit (Miller, 2016: 83–5; The Graphic, 1886: 157–60; Révoil, 2010: 229–32; 199–205).5 Dreiser, a keen observer, described how the gardens of Monte Carlo were not calm or serene, like in other Mediterranean town; rather, they seemed to put people in a state of excitement and frenzy (Dreiser and Schmidt, 2005: 404–5). The casino spent 66,285 francs maintaining the gardens in 1878. The following year, costs of extending the casino terrace and the gardens amounted to another 65,541.6 A journalist described the effects of the gardens and the town as whole on people in 1873: If the visitor leaves Nice in the afternoon, he arrives at Monte Carlo at a time when the casino, the public establishments, the hotels, and the fairy terrace which surrounds them are lighted up by a thousand globes of fire, and he feels that he has left ordinary life and the countries of reality to enter into that brilliant region where all passions combine to obliterate the mind and obscure reason. . . . The magnificent palm trees which stand out in the evening light produce the most unexpected effects upon imagination. . . . The roads which lead to this principally of passion, the gardens which surround it, the edifices which embrellah it, the soldiers who guard it, and the air which perfumes it, have all been paid for by M.  Blanc. . . . Those who pour molton wax into their ears are tempted through their vision, and those who are purposely blind are overcome by the delicious odours which pervade the place. (Freeman’s, 1873)

In general, people tended to stay in Monte Carlo, once they arrived. Even after other casinos opened at the Riviera, French authorities remarked in 1930s, people just wanted to gamble in Monte Carlo and barely frequented other casinos.7 Within Monaco, Monte Carlo had become a city with a single purpose. Monte Carlo had become the gambling town.

Archives du Palais princier, D20/6 Rapport du Commissaire du Gouvernement, 19. March 1864, Nr. 174. 6 Archives du Palais princier, Assemblée Génerale annuelle des actionnaires de la Société annonymes des bains de mer et du cercle etranger de Monaco, 29, Avril 1878; Archives du Palais princier Assemblée Génerale annuelle des actionnaires de la Société annonymes des bains de mer et du cercle etranger de Monaco, 25 Avril 1879. 7 ADAM, Comissariat Special de Beausoleil, Rapport 1766, 9 October 1933 A/S de la roulette et du 30x40; ADAM, Comissariat Spécial de Beausoleil, Rapport 1346, 17 July 1933 I. des casinos 5

Gambling in the Kitchen

Monte Carlo casino: The atrium and the ‘kitchen’ The construction work on the Spélugue (after 1866 Monte Carlo) transformed the former agricultural area into a sprawling urban pleasure district. This entailed changes to the casino building as well. When François Blanc arrived in Monaco in spring of 1863, he saw the gambling house for the first time with his own eyes. According to various accounts he was extremely unhappy. At this point, Monaco’s casino had changed location several times already. The first concessionaires had used deserted mansions, or buildings in the old town, much to the dismay of the Grimaldi family. The last concessionaire before Blanc, named Léfèvebrve, had started to build a casino on the Spélugue, amidst the lemon trees and feeding goats in 1858. It took his architect Goudineau de la Bretonnerie until 1863 to finish it, only months before Blanc took over the whole operation. It featured gambling rooms, a reading room, a small café and a restaurant (Pinchon, 1991: 78). Blanc worried not about the lackluster croupiers (dealers) or the equipment Léfèvebrve had used. Both could be replaced easily. His issues lay with the building and space itself. Blanc found the rooms to be too dark, too barren, too small and poorly ventilated. He went as far as comparing the atmosphere within the casino to that of a graveyard. However, there was no time to rebuild the casino from scratch, so he entrusted the German architect from Homburg Louis Jacobi with redecorating the already-existing space. Jacobi ordered the gambling rooms repainted and supped up the rooms with elegant sofas (Andrea and Merello, 2013: 568). It was a first step, but Jacobi freely admitted that much more work had to be done in order to make the casino into a suitable gambling space. To this end, Blanc turned to Jules-Laurante Dutrou in 1865, The architect Dutrou had worked on the Hôtel de Paris, Blanc’s pet project among Monte Carlo’s future luxury hotels. Now, he was charged

monégasques 2. du Crédit Foncier de Monaco; ADAM, Comissaire Spécial, Rapport 1171, 27 July 1934, A/S de la société des Bains de Mer de Monaco et du casino de la Méditerranée à Nice; ADAM, Commissariat Spécial Rapport 19, 2 January 1934, a:s des casinos de Beausoleil et de Monte-Carlo.

231

232

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

with designing a gambling room, a theatre and parts of the façade (Boyer and Agulhon, 2009: 311–15). Dutrou conceptualized the new casino as intertwined with the emerging casino town around it. Hotels, cafés, gardens boulevards and the interior of the casino had to form a coherent unit (Giordano and Gamper, 2013: 271; 285).8 In January 1865, he started with the gambling rooms’ expansion. His plans eliminated the sharp corners and favoured rectangular features instead. He used a new colour scheme on the inside: white and gold, arabesque patterns and various paintings with gambling motifs. The bright colours lightened the gloomy atmosphere of the rooms, a problem Blanc had identified early on. Dutrou also used mirrors to make the space look larger. The reflection created the illusion of additional space, thus helping to avoid a feeling of overcrowdedness. The gambling motifs reminded guests subtly of the underlying purpose of the room and triggered fantasies of huge wins and riches (Fielding, 1977: 55; Pinchon, 1991: 78; Miller, 2016: 113–21; Braude, 2015: 101–4; Andrea and Merello, 2004: 118–26). The atrium connected the theatre in the south and the gambling rooms in the east. It was a transitional space, between the outside world and the dreamworld of the casino. If visitors turned to the left after entering it, they could immediately see and hear the gambling rooms, without setting a foot in them. The atrium featured twenty-eight black marble columns, a gallery on the upper floor and chandeliers made out of bronze. It was richly decorated with massive mirrors and gold. In the original casino, a reading room, a smoking room and the original concert hall had occupied this space. Garnier decided to replace them with this hall, which allowed people to get a first taste of what it meant to gamble in the Monte Carlo casino (Andrea and Merello, 2004: 113–21). Here, tourists would see small groups of people chatting and smoking, discussing betting systems or spectacular games. Others would (re)enter the gambling rooms after taking a break in the gardens, or having briefly visited the nearby theatre. Most people here would have been small-sum bourgeois gamblers, as well as courtesans, called the demimondes half-world, a group also associated

Centre d’archives d’architecture du XXe siècle de la Cité de l’architecture, Fonds Niermans, Edouard- Jean (1859-1928). 043 Ifa, Dépendances du Casino, quartier de Monte-Carlo, Monaco (Principauté de Monaco). 1913-1914. 8

Gambling in the Kitchen

with the Monte Carlo casino (Miller, 2016: 138–4; Pickering, 1882: 71–4). Although the atrium had no games within it, gambling was ever-present. It was a place to entice people, get them excited for the gambling rooms. Here they witnessed other guests talking about gambling with positive emotions and could themselves engage in discussions of games. Socializing was not encouraged in the gambling rooms themselves, leaving the gamblers only the atrium to show their excitement and share it with others (Andrea and Merello, 2013: 116–19). Contemporaries could feel how the atrium seemed to guide them to the gambling tables almost automatically. One of them remembered: The light blazes from the chandeliers on the decorated walls and marble floor of the Atrium; the atmosphere thickens, becomes less fragrant, less sparkling, grows heavy and overpowering like a drug. Room after room opens before you, filled with a strong throng that flows in and out and moves in eddying orbits round the tables. There is something in the atmosphere that is strange and compelling; . . . a system of tides and currents and influences that has drawn men and women from North and South and East and West.9

Others were more critical. Arnold Blankenfeld wrote in 1913: And how harmless lies the atrium before the gambling rooms, so that it is sometimes called Europe’s anti-chambre! Its location at this point, just as its characteristics, that we encounter here are almost diabolically smart thought out. It brings the audience discreetly in touch with the gambling rooms. Everyone has to step into the Atrium, to see a play or listen to a classical concert, attend a festive occasion, see the newest fashion of the ladies. . . . The Atrium creates also the natural excuse to be at the ominous gate to the gambling rooms for the ‘secret’ Lovers of a little game. . . . With a soft touch it guides the clueless ones in the holy temple, with selective Courtoise, it straightens the road for open and secrete players. (Blankenfeld, 1913: 102–3)

After walking through the atrium, one set foot in the main gambling rooms of Monte Carlo. Today, a visitor might be surprised by its most dominate feature: silence and murmuring. In the twenty-first century, gambling appears loud and bright. Casinos in Las Vegas, for instance, seem

Quoted in Smith (1912: 376).

9

233

234

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

to carefully create an overwhelming soundscape to entice customers. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Monte Carlo, however, gambling was done quietly. Upon entering the main gambling room, nicknamed ‘the kitchen’ (Miller, 2016: 113–21; Fielding, 1977: 113–15; Jackson, 1975: 251–3), visitors primarily heard the so-called ‘casino murmur’ (Pickard, 1937: 169–70). A constant muttering and whispering of players. Only the croupiers interrupted this soundscape: ‘Messieurs, faitez vos jeux’ and ‘rien ne va plus’ (Williamson, 1924: 114–19). The etiquette of the casino, both formal and informal, expected gamblers to show a high degree of self-control. It forced players to keep their countenance in the face of huge losses at the tables (Devereux, 1884: 418). Showing anger or desperation was extremely frowned upon by other players and policed by the SBM security. This kind of behaviour had to be learned, and many visitors thus paid close attention to fellow players in order to familiarize themselves with the correct behaviours (Ketchiva, 1928: 50–61; 66; Malborn, 1997: 271–3; Dreiser and Schmidt, 2005: 386–8). The SBM encouraged emotional control, as it minimized the presence of negative feelings that would hinder continuous gambling consumption. It was, however, also firmly based in a Victorian and European emotional culture, which is why many American visitors to Monte Carlo were confused about European gamblers’ behaviours. Many were disappointed, as they had imagined excitement and fun in the casino. Unaware or unable to understand the differences in emotional behaviour and gambling practices, they experienced the Monte Carlo casino as cold, serious and even boring or frightening (Levenstein, 1998: 174–5). The spatial set-up of the games was also quite different for these American visitors. Monte Carlo did not yet employ slot machines, so table games were the only ones available. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Monte Carlo featured around seventeen roulette and six trente-et-quarante tables (Fielding, 1977: 103–6; Smith, 1912: 357). These tables occupied the centre of the room, making them the focal point of the space. Players were sitting around the tables, or standing in rows, if they could not get a chair. The tables were very large, so whole crowds gathered around them. In Monte Carlo, gamblers played the games almost collectively as a result. Opposed to the games designed to be played by individuals like blackjack that would later become popular in the United States, roulette in Monte Carlo was an almost-centralized

Gambling in the Kitchen

experience. People bet individually, yet the pace of the game was set by the croupiers. Gamblers shared the space with dozens of people, rather than sitting at smaller tables, making individual decisions and forging personal relationships with other players or even the dealers. The silence, the sheer number of people, made roulette in Monet Carlo into a game, which addressed the individual player only as part of a crowd. The spatial set-up supported this additionally. Only a few, massive tables were available, and they stood at the centre of the room, making it hard to approach them without becoming part of the masses that had gathered there (Braude, 2015: 101–4; Reith, 2002: 80–1; Zollinger, 1990: 257–60). Not everyone joined in immediately. Along the walls of the main gambling room were chairs where people could sit to just watch the games (Braude, 2015: 101– 4). The spectators, called ‘flutters’, were a common sight during the high season (Pickard, 1937: 178–81). The casino did not remove them immediately; indeed, the spectacle of gambling and the rich décors of the gambling room, with its gold, made the SBM confident that no one could resist the games for long. In 1912, writer Adolphe Smith observed: ‘some will frequent the rooms because of their beauty, not intending to play. If they do, it happens more often than not that they end by yielding to the temptation, and risk at least a small stake.’ (Smith, 1912: 323) In 1934, French observers noted that although the 10 and 20 francs minimum tables were still popular, most people played at the 5 francs minimum tables. This means people played at the tables with the lowest stakes. It indicates the bourgeois character of the ‘kitchen’, but also that gamblers were not necessarily big risk-takers. They gambled because in Monte Carlo it felt special.10 The space, the games it featured and the way they were played thus formed a unit. Nothing makes this more obvious then the efforts by the SBM to incorporate craps in the mid-twentieth century. In 1949, the casino company sent two of their employees to America in order to study games, equipment and play styles. Especially craps was interesting to the Monet Carlo casino. The rules of the dice game posed no problem; the way of actually ‘shooting’ craps, however, challenged the Monte Carlo casino.

ADAM, Comissaire spécial à Préfet, Rapport 1546 07.11.1934 A/S de la situation économique dans la Principauté de Monaco. 10

235

236

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Calls like ‘It’s a big dick!’, or ‘Eight the hard way!’, seemed, figurative and literally, out of place in the Belle Époque gambling palace. The company tried to translate the phrases into French, but to no avail. They still seemed not to fit in (LIFE, 1949: 51–2). Gambling is shaped by the spaces it is done in. Monte Carlo and craps did not match well, because the atmosphere and set-up of the casino could not support the way, the game was supposed to be played. An American journalist described his craps experience in Monte Carlo in 1956 vividly: ‘When this correspondent joined the halfdozen persons at the dice layout, the traditional cry of ‘baby needs a new pair of shoes’ stuck in my throat. I slunk over to the roulette wheel and lost my money in aristocratic silence.’ (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 1956). Playing craps in Monte Carlo, even if one was familiar with the rules, seemed wrong and quite literally out of place.

Conclusion The meaning of gambling, its shape and form, how it is practised and experienced, depends on the spaces it is done in. Gamblers’ behaviours, what games they enjoy and how they engage with them is determined by more than the games rules, or the odds. As a consumption activity, it can only be properly understood if we take into account in what spatial set-up it is offered and practised in. The meaning of Monte Carlo largely derives because it was a whole town, planned and built from scratch to present gambling as part of almost natural activity within a hedonistic, leisure framework. The city transformed tourists into consumers and eventually gamblers, as its architecture and fabric had the casino at their centre. The Monte Carlo casino itself facilitated movement towards the gambling tables and presented an emotionally controlled, richly decorated and spectacular space for games like roulette. The ‘kitchen’, as the main gambling room was called, structured players’ activity who in many cases surrendered to the underlying spatial script and became part of the gambling crowd. Space gives gambling meaning for consumers, and thus is not only important for games ‘beyond the computer’. Blackjack, played in the domestic kitchen and on a phone, might just be as influenced by the real and virtual space, as roulette was in the ‘kitchen’ of Monte Carlo.

Gambling in the Kitchen

References Andrea, F. and Merello, G. 2004. ‘Les Fastes des Salles garnier au Casino de Monte-Carlo’. In J.-L. Bonillo et al. (eds), Les Riviera de Charles Garnier et Gustave Eiffel: Le rêve de la raison, 112–37. Marseille: Éd. Imbernon. Andrea, F. and Merello, G. 2013. ‘Monte Carlo Casino: Architectural evolution and projects (1856–1914)’. In N. Rosticher (ed.), Monacopolis: architecture, urbanisme et urbanization à Monaco, réalisations et projets, 1858–2012, 566–74. Monaco: Nouveau musée national de Monaco. Baeumerth, A. 1990. Königsschloss contra Festtempel: Zur Architektur der Kursaalgebäude von Bad Homburg vor der Höhe. Marburg: Jonas Verlag. Barnhart, R. T. 1983. Gambling of yesteryear. Las Vegas: GBC Press. Blankenfeld. 1913. Monte Carlo : Land u. Leute, Spiel u. Spieler. Berlin : Pormetter. Boye, M. and Agulhon, M. 2009. L’hiver dans le Midi: XVIIe-XXIe siècles. Paris: l’Harmattan. Braude, M. 2015. ‘Spinning wheels: Cosmopolitanism, mobility, and media in Monaco, 1855–1956’. Dissertation, University of Southern California. Callais, A. 2014. ‘Quelques Pages Sur L’histoire Des Grands Hôtels De La Principaute’. Un tramway nommé Riviera Palace, in: Monaco Hebdo, 19 septembre 2014. Chodounsky, S. 1908. Was ein Detektiv über Monte-Carlo erzählt. Berlin: Richard Ecksteib. Cotte, J. and LaTour, K. A. 2009. ‘Blackjack in the Kitchen: Understanding online versus casino gambling’. Journal of Consumer Research, 35(5): 742–58. Decaux, A. 1996. Monaco et ses princes: Sept siècles d’histoire. Paris: Perrin. Devereux, W. C. 1884. Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo. Dreisder, T. and Schmidt, K. H. 2005. A Traveler at Forty. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fielding, X. 1977. The Money Spinner: Monte Carlo and Its Fabled Casino. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Freeman’s. 1873. ‘A visit to Monte Carlo’. Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser. Dublin, Ireland, 12 April 1873. Fuhs, Burkhard 1992. Mondäne Orte einer vornehmen Gesellschaft: Kultur und Geschichte der Kurstädte 1700-1900 Bd. 13. Hildesheim and New York: Olms. Giordano, N. and Gamper, M. 2013. ‘Monte Carlo’. In N. Giordano (ed.), Monacopolis: architecture, urbanisme et urbanisation à Monaco, réalisations et projets, 1858–2012, 235–438. Monaco: Nouveau musée national de Monaco.

237

238

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Hahn, H. H. 2010. Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hetherington, K. 2008. Capitalism’s eve: Cultural Spaces of the Commodity. New York: Routledge. Jackson, S. 1975. Inside Monte Carlo. London: W. H. Allen. Kavanagh, T. M. 2005. Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture, Critical authors and issues. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ketchiva, P. de. 1928. Confessions of a Croupier: The inside story of the gambling game from the authoritative angle of the “bank” revealed for the first time. London: Hurst & Blackett. Levenstein, H. A. 1998. Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewiston Daily Sun. 1913. ‘King of gamblers – Francois Blanc, the exconvict, who bought Monaco’. The Lewiston Daily Sun, 8 February 1913. LIFE. 1949. ‘Monte Carlo takes up “Les Craps” – Casino men in U.S. jumble the jargon, finally learn the hard way’. LIFE, 28 March 1949. Malbon, B. 1997. ‘The club’. In T. Skelton and G. Valentine (eds), Cool Places: Geographies of Young Cultures, 266–89, London: Routledge. Mari, M. 1991. L’Opéra de Monte-Carlo: 1879–1990. Paris, Genève (Suisse): Champion; Slatkine. Miller, R. W. 2016. ‘Constructing a spatial imaginary: The formation and representation of Monte Carlo as a vacation-leisure Paradise, 1854–1950’. Dissertation, University of Kansas. Pickard, F. 1937. Monaco and the French Riviera. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Pickering, T. H. 1882. Monaco: The Beauty Spot of the Riviera. London: The Fleet Printing Works. Pinchon, J.-F. 1991. ‘Monte-Carlo: le triomphe de l’éclectisme’. Monuments historiques, 175. Reith, G. 2002. The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture, Routledge studies in social and political thought 22. London and New York: Routledge. Révoil, B. H. 2010. Monaco et Montre-Carlo. Nabu public domain reprints, s.l.: Nabu Press. Robert, J.-B. 1997. Historie de Monaco, 2e éd. mise à jour 1497. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Sarasota Herald-Tribune. 1956. ‘Monte Carlo Casino in need of Crapshooters’. Sarasota Herald-Tribute, 11 April 1956.

Gambling in the Kitchen

Schmitt, M. 1982. Palast-Hotels: Architektur und Anspruch eines Bautyps 1870-1920. Berlin: Mann. Schwartz, D. G. 2003. Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and Beyond. New York and London: Routledge. Smith, A. 1912. Monaco and Montre Carlo. Philadelphia: J. B. Lipponcott. Statista. 2018. ‘Size of the online gambling market from 2009 to 2020 (in billion US dollars)’. Statista. https​:/​/ww​​w​.sta​​tista​​.com/​​stati​​stics​​/2707​​28​ /ma​​rket-​​volum​​e​-of-​​​onlin​​e​-gam​​ing- worldwide/ (accessed 7 September 2018). Steinhauser, M. 1974. ‘Das europäische Modebad des 19. Jahrhunderts Bade-Baden: eine Residenz des Glücks’. In L.Grote (ed.), Die deutsche Stadt im 19. Jahrhundert: Stadtplanung und Baugestaltung im industriellen Zeitalter, 95–128. Studien zur Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts Band 24 München: Prestel-Verlag. Steward, J. R. 2012. ‘Moral economies and commercial imperatives: Food, diets and spas in central Europe: 1800–1914’. Journal of Tourism History, 4(2): 181–203. The Graphic. 1877. ‘Letters from Monte Carlo’. The Graphic. The Graphic. 1886. ‘A visitor to Monte Carlo’. The Graphic, 6 February 1886. Williamson, C. N. 1924. The Lure of Monte Carlo. Garden City: Doubleday. Yi-Pole, W. 2018. ‘Now Belgium declares loot boxes gambling and therefore illegal’. Eurogamer. https​:/​/ww​​w​.eur​​ogame​​r​.net​​/arti​​cles/​​2018-​​04​-25​​ -now-​​belgi​​um​-d​e​​clare​​s​-loo​​t- boxes-gambling-and-therefore-illegal, 7 September 2018. Zollinger, M. 1990. ‘Banquiers und Pointeurs: Geschichte des Glücksspiels zwischen Integration und Ausgrenzung vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert’. Dissertation, Universität Wien.

239

13 What statistics don’t say Game innovation in Macau’s casinos since 20021 Xavier Paulès

Chapter Outline Macau, new Las Vegas? 242 The failure of slot machines 246 Baccarat and its three sequences 250 First solution: No commission baccarat, the silent revolution251 Second solution: Baccarat gambling machine 253 Third solution: Live baccarat 254 Conclusion255

Les grandes personnes aiment les chiffres (‘Grown-ups like numbers’). – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

This chapter originated from a 2016 article: Paulès, X. 2016. Ce que les statistiques ne disent pas : la réinvention de l’offre des jeux de casino à Macao depuis 2002. Sciences du jeu, 5. 1

What Statistics Don’t Say

Gambling studies has examined a major shift which took place with the arrival of the integrated resorts model in Las Vegas in the 1990s (Courtwright, 2014).2 Gigantic and often theme-oriented super casinos are systematically linked to luxury hotel resorts. Gambling is fully integrated as one of many other entertainments like water games, light games, live shows, cinemas, gastronomic restaurants, cafés and jacuzzi. They also contain vast shopping malls which host various luxury brands shops (Gravari-Barbas, 2001: 159–65). This model provides two main advantages. The multiplication of available entertainments encourages visitors to stay longer, while the mixing of gambling with a wider range of entertainments frees it from its nefarious reputation and therefore broadens the client base. Many studies have demonstrated that with the arrival of integrated resorts the range of games offered in Las Vegas went through a major turn. Until the 1970s, casinos were mainly offering table games such as blackjack, craps or roulette and only some slot machines at the margin which were predominantly targeting a female clientele. From the 1980s and 1990s, the attraction for slots machines increased massively, in particularly thanks to their network system, an innovative mechanism which allows the jackpot to go up to ridiculously high levels (Lee, 2012: 6–7). Over time, slots machines have become more and more sophisticated, making the player believe that they can actually make choices which influence the results of a draw. Similarly, sophisticated algorithms encourage now the player to play for longer. Machines tend to mislead the player and make them believe that they have just missed a big jackpot, which only encourages them to play again immediately (Turner et Horbay, 2004; Turdean, 2012; Schüll, 2012). From the casino point of view, slot machines have many attractive advantages. First of all, they don’t require the use of a dealer. The absence of human intervention allows for the game to be much quicker: the sequencing of betting, dealing and the distribution of earnings, which can be counted in minutes on traditional table games, only takes up a few seconds with slot machines. The house edge, which is the percentage of bets statistically not redistributed to players, is also different. It is much more important for

David Courtwright’s article provides an excellent literature review on the recent development which took place in Las Vegas and of which we only give a brief introduction. 2

241

242

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

slots machines (from 5 per cent to 10 per cent) than for table games like blackjack or baccarat (around 1%) (Hannum, 2013). At last, slot machines are a way for casinos to access freely and immediately a multitude of data: what is the profit for each slot machine, which days or which moments of the day each slot machine or each type of slot machine is most played, and so on. The use of this information allows the casino to constantly adapt what they offer in order to increase their profit (Lee, 2012: 9–11). Today, slot machines are central to casinos in North America, Europe, as well as in Australia. They produce, for example, about 65 per cent of profit in casinos in Nevada or Atlantic City (Schwartz, 2018a, 2018b). More recently, gambling studies which used to be mainly concerned by the United States or the Western World has just started to look at the situation in Asia and most particularly in Macau, where the casino industry has experienced a massive expansion since 2002. Most of the research has mainly been concerned with the arrival of Wynn resorts and Galaxy casinos in Macau in 2002 and whether these two major actors of the gambling industry in Las Vegas has led to the ‘import’ of the Las Vegas model (Gu, 2004). It is to Macau and its importation – or not – of this model we now turn.

Macau, new Las Vegas? The legality of gambling in Macau is a legacy from the Portuguese period. Since 1962, Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau (STDM) has had the monopoly over the gambling industry. The return to Chinese sovereignty in 1999 means that the territory has become a special administrative region. Specific legislation has made it possible for gambling to remain legal (Godinho, 2016: 315–18). However, as early as 2001, the new authorities decided to end STDM’s monopoly and launched an international bid for three licences. This call for bids demonstrated that the new authorities had a clear political agenda, but most of all that the central government in Beijing, which is above them, wanted to source the knowledge of foreign multinationals to start an all-round development policy of the gambling sector. Establishing in Macau was such an attractive prospect that no less than twenty-one international casino operators responded to the bidding

What Statistics Don’t Say

process. Macau in itself does not seem so appealing. It is a tiny territory with a very small (by local standards) population of about 650,000 inhabitants. The main asset of Macau is its situation. It is located at the heart of Guangdong province (more than 100 million inhabitants), one of the richest regions of China where, as anywhere else in the country, casinos are not allowed. Hong Kong, the other special administrative region, far more affluent and populated (7.5 million) than Macau does not allow casino gambling either. And the former British colony is only 60 kilometres away: one hour by boat (hydrofoils) is sufficient to come over, time which has been further reduced with the inauguration of a bridge in October 2018. Last but not least, the potential clientele of East and South East Asia (region in which the competition for casinos is weak) who are only a few hours away by flight via the airports of Hong Kong and Macau counts more than two billion people. In February 2002, the results of the bidding process were publicly released: the Sociedade de Jogos de Macau (SJM; new name of the former STDM) would share the monopoly with Wynn resorts and Galaxy casinos (Wan and Pinheiro, 2011: 24–6; Godinho, 2014: 4–5). Four years later, three other operators, each associated with one of the three bid concessionaires from 2002 made their entry: MGM Grand Paradise, Melco-PBL (currently called Melco Resorts) and Venetian Macau (Zheng and Wan, 2014: 63–4). The years that followed upheld these promises: from 2003, there is an incredible and almost uninterrupted growth in the number of visitors from mainland China (Godinho, 2014: 7–8).3 Whereas in the last decades of the twentieth century, visitors/players mainly came from Hong Kong, ‘mainlanders’ represent nowadays the widest majority.4 This vast clientele has been flocking to the super casinos opened by the new operators and based on the model of the integrated resorts since the mid-2000s. Most of them are based in Cotai,5 an area of reclaimed land between the islands of Taipa and Coloane, which hosts, in particular, the Venetian which was open

This inflow was facilitated by the lifting of most of the movement restrictions from China to Macau in July 2003, as well as by the improvement of transport connections via road, rail, sea and air. 4 In 2016, these ‘mainlanders’ made up 66,1 per cent of the total 30.9 million of visitors to Macau (and Hong Kong only 20,7 per cent): Anuário Estatístico 2016, available on the site of Direcção dos Serviços de Estatística e Censos: www​.dsec​.gov​.mo. In 2002, the numbers for each group were 36.8 per cent and 44.2 per cent, respectively (same source). 5 For more details on the geography of casinos: see Zandonai (2015: 19–23). 3

243

244

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Figure 13.1  The Galaxy Macau.

in 2007 (a bigger replica of the one in Las Vegas), the City of Dreams in 2009, the Galaxy in 2011 and, most recently, the Parisian (See Figure 13.1). SJM has joined the race for gigantism: the unique figure of its Grand Lisboa, open in 2007, now dominates the peninsula of Macau. By the same token, themed casinos are now operated under SJM’s licence, like Fisherman’s Wharf (opened in 2006) and Oceanus (2009).6 When looking at the type of games offered, the situation in Macau at the beginning of the millennium was quite unique since it was a table game of European origin, baccarat (which was introduced in the 1960s), which dominated almost entirely in all the casinos (Table 1.3.1). The few hundreds slot machines only occupied an extremely marginal place. According to the same strategy which aims to import the Las Vegas model, the new operators offered a massive number of slot machines in their new casinos: between 2002 and 2018, the number of slot machines in Macau has been multiplied by twenty (see Figure 13.2). Despite all of this,

For a permanently updated map of casino locations: see http:​/​/www​​.dicj​​.gov.​​mo​/we​​b​/en/​​infor​​ matio​​n​/map​​-​04​/m​​ap​.ht​​ml 6

What Statistics Don’t Say

Table 13.1  Percentage of Casino Profits from the Four Main Types of Games in 2005 and 2018 2005 (%)

2018 (%)

Baccarat

85.9

88.6

Cussec

3.3

2.7

Blackjack

3.1

0.9

Slot machines

2.7

5

Source: Direcção de Inspecção e Coordenação de Jogos : www​.dicj​.gov​.mo Cussec is a game in which gamblers bet on the result of the throw of three dices. It has other appellations, notably daxiao 大小, tai sai 大細, sic bo / sek-poh 色寶, klu-klu, et gluglu.

Figure 13.2 Slot machines in Macau. From Direcção de Inspecção e Coordenação de Jogos : www​.dicj​.gov​.mo

as many studies have already noted, slot machines have not been as successful as it was expected. However, current studies on the question which are using official statistics are only concluding for a non-convergence towards the Las Vegas model. In summary, inside the premises of ultramodern casinos nothing seemed to have changed: players are apparently totally faithful to their playing habits (and therefore to baccarat) while showing little interest for slot machines. This chapter aims to review this diagnostic. It is essentially based on field observations in Macau over a period of ten years from 2007 to 2017. All casinos were visited. However, for organizational reasons, most of the

245

246

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

observations were concentrated in five of them: the Sands, Ponte 16 Casino, the Grand Lisboa, the Galaxy and the Venetian. With annual visits, it was possible to observe the development of the situation. Observation in situ was completed with interviews with the managers of some casinos. First, I will show that the failure of promoting slot machines can be explained by the fact that the characteristics of the local demand was not taken into account. Second, the pure statistical approach of researchers which was predominant until now completely ignored the actual transformations which have affected game availability over these last years. Most notably, changes in the game of baccarat can be noted, such as the No commission and the live multi game. Issues of transformation in the supply of games should not be limited to a question of rejecting or accepting slot machines, but should also take into account the full process of transformation that the game of baccarat by itself has undergone.

The failure of slot machines As already pointed out, casinos in general tend to promote slot machines. But this is probably even more so in Macau than anywhere else. For several reasons, not requiring the use of croupiers provides extra benefits in the Macau context. In January 2013, the government limited the annual growth of the overall number of table games which operate with a croupier to 3 per cent. Casinos, therefore, have to share a limited contingent of table games, a situation which leads them to develop alternative solutions where croupiers are not required. What is more, unlike most gambling places in the world, croupiers in Macau are relatively well paid. Recruited among the local population (and not in mainland China as it is the case for the most unpleasant and lowest paid jobs of the casinos), croupiers are a strong social group which is well organized to defend its interests (Choi and Hung, 2011). They demonstrated in the last few years their ability to mobilize themselves against the incessant lobbying by the casinos for the authorities to open croupier recruitment to the workforce of mainland China. Concerned by their working conditions, croupiers succeeded in also pressurizing the authorities to ban smoking in gambling spaces. This measure, despite a strong opposition by casinos, came into force on 1 January 2013.

What Statistics Don’t Say

As such, it is certain that casinos have worked hard to promote the thousands of slot machines offered to players since the opening of the new casinos (Figure 13.2). Strong advertisement campaigns supported their introduction. They were located in strategic spaces to ensure that players will be forced to pass by them when they enter a casino. At last, evident efforts were made to ensure that they were adapted to a Chinese clientele. Many slot machines model refers to the well-known first emperor, omnipresent in the collective memory of the Chinese population. The Journey of the Monkey King (猴王游戏) model speaks of a hero of one of the most well-known stories of classic Chinese literature, the Journey to the West (西遊記), which has been part of the popular culture for centuries. It is the same cultural sources that the machines White Snake (白蛇) and Golden Dragon (黃龍) are built upon. Many other examples could be provided but the field observer got the impression that these slot machines are not successful, or, at least, that these machines do not seem to be more successful than the ones with a ‘foreign’ design. This is perhaps not surprising: who would hope to encourage French people to play slot machines by designing them with Eiffel Towers? How successful are the overall efforts of the operators in encouraging players to engage more with slot machines? It is true that the profits from slot machines have strongly increased in absolute value (Figure 13.3). But a more relevant indicator of their success is actually the percentage of casino profit that they generate. After a high of 5.4 per cent in 2009, it has been stagnating around 5 per cent of the overall income these last four years. It confirms the general impression given by field observations (which in turn is confirmed by interviews with casino managers7): slot machines are not popular. There is not a massive conversion of customers. Moreover, the number of machines, after a strong increase which reached a maximum of 16,000 in 2012, has been stagnating since (and this despite the continuated increase in the number of casinos). A clear indication that the casinos’ dream of a massive conversion of customers to slot machines have vanished away.

Interview with Walter Power, ex-senior vice president of operations for Sands, 17 December 2010; interview with Dennis Andreaci, senior vice president gaming Operations for Galaxy Macau, 17 December 2010. 7

247

248

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Figure 13.3  Changes in slot machine revenue and slot machine revenue percentages. From Direcção de Inspecção e Coordenação de Jogos: www​.dicj​.gov​.mo. One pataca = about 8.5 Euros.

How to explain this failure? We have just described the ironic attempts to adapt slot machines to Chinese gamblers, attempts which have mainly consisted in drawing historical figures, dragons and phoenixes on the machines themselves. They are doomed to failure because, purely of cosmetic order, they don’t change anything to the root of the problem, that is to say, the nature of the relationship that the player has with the game they play. In a previous article, I demonstrated how much the habitus of players from Macau was shaped by the game of fantan, which to some rare exceptions was the only casino game available in South China from the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1960s (Paulès, 2014). The rules of fantan are very simple. From a pile of tokens, the dealer takes a large portion that he hides immediately under a small cover. Players place stakes on a number between one and four. Once all stakes have been made, the dealer takes off the cover and draws the tokens four by four. The earnings and losses of players are calculated according to the number of tokens that are left at the end of the counting: one, two, three or four. Certain characteristics of the game ensure that the casino cannot manipulate the draw for its benefit. For example, the counting four by four is delivered with a long stick because a direct manipulation

What Statistics Don’t Say

with the hands will increase suspicions that the dealer can retract tokens during the operation (Paulès, 2010). What is more, the house edge is weak and players can easily work it out: players who guess the right number get three times the amount of their bet minus a small percentage which is the house edge. At last, fantan creates an intense social atmosphere among players who are with each other. There is no competition between the players, on the contrary, an atmosphere of solidarity dominates: because most often players decide to bet on the same number, they share the same hope of winning for the next draw. In the beginning of the 1960s, the STDM felt the need to invigorate casino gambling in Macau and notably did so by introducing games of European origin. Players were quickly attracted by one of them: baccarat, a preference which has remained unchanged since. This phenomenon, which can be surprising at first can be explained by the fact that despite being a new game, baccarat was responding in a satisfying manner to players’ habits and expectations towards casino games, as they have been shaped by the practice of fantan over more than a century (Paulès, 2014). As will demonstrate the upcoming description of baccarat, it is like fantan a non-competitive game of pure chance, which offers a limited number of options for betting and a small house edge which is easy to figure out for the player. It is also a game where any manipulation of the draw by the casino is very difficult. If the history of the adoption of baccarat in the beginning of the 1960s was not repeated with slot machines after 2002, it is for a specific reason: unfortunately for casino operators, slot machines do not match at all the playing habits of gamblers in Macau. They are three main points. Firstly, unlike baccarat, slot machines seem to allow the casino to manipulate the results of the draw at will.8 Secondly, the house edge does not respond at all to the players’ expectations as it is not obviously enunciated (as in baccarat and fantan) and is far too high. Thirdly, the solitary face to face with the slot machine goes against the social and collective dimension of the game which is so important for players. As such, the failure of slot machines demonstrates in the end that the unique behaviours of gamblers from South China are a fundamental factor to take into account for

This is confirmed by interviews with casino managers: interview with Walter Power, 17 December 2010; interview with Dennis Andreaci, 17 December 2010. 8

249

250

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

casinos. Aware of the faithful preference that gamblers have for baccarat, casinos have started to change the game to improve its profitability.9

Baccarat and its three sequences Rules of baccarat in Macau The game of baccarat originated in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century (Lhôte 1994: 395–6). The variant of the game which is played in Macau today is Punto-banco, an alternative version which originated in Argentina and Cuba in the 1950s before it was adopted by Las Vegas (Whiting, 2010: 4–5). The casino banks the game; the gambler only has to figure out from two virtual players, Banker (punto) or Player (banco), who will obtain the closest number to nine. Gamblers can place their bets on the Banker’s hand, the Player’s hand or on a tie. It is worth mentioning that the ‘Player’ has no particular association with the gambler, nor ‘Banker’ with the house. To start with, Banker and Player get two cards each. The value of their hand is obtained by adding up the value of the two cards taking into account that face cards (king, queen and jack) count for 0 and that if the total is more than 10, only the units count. For example, queen and 5 makes 5; 6 and 8 makes 4 (and not 14); 9 and 8 makes 7 (and not 17). Depending on the two cards already drawn, preestablished rules determine whether a third card should be drawn for Banker and Player. These rules ensure that Banker wins slightly more often than Player. Winnings are calculated in the following manner: The gambler who bets on Player wins the value of his bet The gambler who bets on Banker wins the value of his bet minus 5 per cent The gambler who bets on a tie wins eight times his bet

It is not possible in this chapter to consider all of the new variations of the game of baccarat which have been launched. In addition to the versions I will talk about in the rest of the chapter, which I chose for being the most relevant ones, there are many others, such as Three Cards Baccarat (三公百家樂). It is important to highlight how much casinos are in a permanent phase of innovation and never stop to experiment with new games and new variations of existing games. 9

What Statistics Don’t Say

A game of baccarat, whose rules are reminded in the aforementioned text, takes place in three successive sequences. The first one is when gamblers make their bets. The second one is when the cards are drawn and requires further attention: as an article by Desmond Lam describes really well (Lam, 2007), it is important to note that the dealer draws the cards from a dealing shoe and place them face against the table but he only returns the cards which are meant for Banker. The gambler with the highest bet on Player has the privilege of returning the cards for Player. For him, there is no point in returning the cards quickly. For making sure to prolong the suspense for himself and other players, he ‘peels’ the cards. With one hand, he presses the card, and with the other he very slowly returns the corners of the card, making sure to bring his face as close as possible in order to be the only one who can see the card. The same action takes place again for the second card. Then, after various facial expressions, he stands abruptly and throws theatrically the cards on the table. Common to all baccarat tables in Macau, this small scene of dramaturgy can seem to the outsider to be a trivial detail of the game. But for the casinos, the consequence is by no way trivial as it prolongs considerably the length of this sequence when the cards are drawn. The third sequence is when lost bets are gathered by the dealer and when winnings are distributed to the winners. By itself, it is a relatively long operation. But when Banker wins, the situation is worst: the distribution of winning to players is made longer because the figures are not round (the gambler receives 95 per cent of his bet, which means, for example, that someone who bets HK$300 on Banker will receive a winning of HK$285). As I will demonstrate in the following text, the casinos successfully introduced three types of solutions as a way to overcome these constraints and, in doing so, speed up the game.

First solution: No commission baccarat, the silent revolution With the overall aim to speed up the pace of the game, casinos first made slight changes to the rules of the game. The idea was to shorten the third sequence by suppressing the inherent complication which comes with the

251

252

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

calculation of winnings for Banker since the player is paid 95 per cent of his bet. Consequently, the No commission baccarat (免佣百家樂)10 was launched in 2005. In this alternative version, the winnings of those who bet on Banker are equal to their bets unless the game is won by a six: in this case, the player only wins 50 per cent of his bet. No commission baccarat has grown significantly to the point that it is now seriously competing with traditional baccarat. So why has this ‘silent revolution’ of the game of baccarat remained unnoticed by researchers? The most plausible explanation has to do with the fact that official statistics from Direcção de Inspecção e Coordenação de Jogos do not make a distinction between these two versions of the game. This means that this sort of play has been largely overlooked. Although due to this absence it is not possible to quantify rigorously the percentage of No commission baccarat which is played, our (subjective) impression is that today between one-third or even one-half of baccarat tables in Macau are made up of No commission baccarat. Three different types of practices can be noted. There are casinos which are exclusively offering this alternative version of the game. This is the case for the Venetian, the Galaxy, the Pharaon and the Fortuna. In opposition to this, certain casinos such as the Jimei or the Grand Emperor remain entirely faithful to traditional baccarat. But in most other cases (e.g. Ponte 16 Casino, Sands, Starworld, Kam Pek and President), casinos offer both No commission baccarat and traditional baccarat. In the last few years, the tendency has been more and more to keep traditional baccarat only for high limit tables or VIP rooms (it is the case for the Galaxy, the Parisian, the Sands, the Wynn and Wynn Palace, for example). In this way, traditional baccarat is becoming a privileged practice. Another noticeable change is how the chosen type of baccarat is determined by its location: casinos located nearby the landing wharf of the ferry coming from Hong Kong (Jai Alai, Oceanus, Golden Dragon, Casa Real) do not offer so much No commission baccarat, probably because of the preferences of the players coming from the former British colony. Nevertheless, as a whole, it is obvious that the introduction of No commission baccarat has been a remarkable success. It can be explained by the fact that this alternative

A legislation passed on 23 November 2005 gives a definition of No commission baccarat and authorizes it: Despacho do Secretário para a Economia e Finanças n 73/2005. 10

What Statistics Don’t Say

version of the game does not challenge the basic principles of the game and its sequencing.

Second solution: Baccarat gambling machine No commission bacarrat resulted only from a minor change in the rules of the game. We are now entering the field of what can be called ‘mechanisation’: the process by which the relationship between the game and the player is drastically transformed by the mediation of electronic devices which are free of human intervention and which therefore do not require the use of dealers. Some casinos launched about fifteen years ago a purely electronic baccarat with a large screen displaying a virtual dealer drawing the cards. Facing the screen, the gamblers sit in the front of individual terminals on which they can place bets. No staff is required. Let us consider again the three successive sequences of the game of baccarat we have described. The shortening of time during the first one (betting) has hardly made any difference. By contrast, considerable gain in time took place for the second and third sequences. The distribution of winnings to the players is now immediate. But most of all, this type of game has for main advantage to get rid of the considerable delays which were taking place during the drawing of cards (the second sequence). However, the baccarat gambling machine is only experiencing a limited success. An obstacle resides probably in the players’ suspicion that the casino will manipulate the draw to its advantage, the same reason which explains their lack of interest for slot machines. The reluctance of players can also be explained by the fact that they are playing individually in the front of terminals and that therefore the game is losing one of its most attractive traits: its social and collective dimension. This might explain why the casinos have recently decreased the number of terminals which are facing the screens of baccarat gambling machines (there are now between ten and fifteen terminals, whereas there were several dozen only a few years ago). By this way, it can be expected to recreate some forms of sociability: as a matter of fact, it would be a mistake to oppose too boldly traditional betting and machine play: playing the machines could remain a social form of gambling as well (Cassidy, 2012).

253

254

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Third solution: Live baccarat Kam Pek casino (from SJM) was, it seems, the first one at the beginning of the years 201011 to propose an innovation which seemed better adapted to the specific characteristics of the local demand. The aim is to combine the advantages of electronic devices which save time, space and staff and at the same time diffuse the resistance of players towards them. The solution was smart, and consists of filming the draw of cards which is operated by a real croupier and broadcasting it live to dozens of electronic terminals located in the same room and in rooms nearby on which gamblers can make bets. At any moment, any player can walk a few steps and check for himself that the game is taking place ‘for real’. Three games are taking place simultaneously: roulette, Cussec and, of course, baccarat. On their terminals, each player can play any of these games, which is why the official appellation for this dispositive in the official statistics of Direcção de Inspecção e Coordenação de Jogos is ‘live multi game’ (直播混合遊戲).12 But in fact, it can be noticed that among the three games proposed, gamblers have a strong preference for baccarat. The appellation of ‘live multi game’ is somehow misleading: it is essentially a game of live baccarat. It must be noted that such ‘live broadcast’ is not a new practice in Macau since it already took place in certain casinos during the 1950s: the gamblers could bet from a dancing hall on games that were taking place in other rooms. There was no question of using electronic terminals at that time: bets were made on counterfoil books. But, already at the time, gamblers could watch in real time the results of the game as they were displayed on wide lighted panels (Kessel, 2011; De Sá, 1989). It is also worthy to observe that a great deal of online gambling is done nowadays using the ‘live broadcast’ way. The Philippines, in particular, has begun to distribute licences for offshore gaming centres where you find rooms full

It is in 2010 that this version of the game was recorded for the first time in the statistics of Direcção de Inspecção e Coordenação de Jogos: www​.dicj​.gov​.mo, which suggests that it was most certainly introduced that same year. It is also in December 2010 that I observed for the first time the presence of this version of the game in Kam Pek. 12 However, in the field, the name changes with the casino: ‘Fast action baccarat’ in the Venetian, ‘Golden touch baccarat’ in the Galaxy, ‘Live table game (直播遊戲機)’ in Kam Pek, ‘live game device (直播戲機)’ in the Grand Emperor in December 2014. 11

What Statistics Don’t Say

Table 13.2  Percentage of Casino Gross Revenue from Live Multi Game (2010–18) 2010 (%) 0.08

2011 (%) 0.12

2012 (%) 0.29

2013 (%) 0.41

2014 (%) 0.64

2015 (%) 0.92

2016 (%) 1.05

2017 (%) 0.91

2018 (%) 0.90

Source: Direcção de Inspecção e Coordenação de Jogos : www​.dicj​.gov​.mo

of croupiers, gaming tables and cameras, but no players. They are beamed to players all over the world who connect and play live via the internet.13 In Macau, the place taken by live multi game has increased significantly in a few years. It is now present on two of the three floors of the Kam Pek, and it has spread to other casinos: it is also practised by the Grand Emperor, the Venetian, the Galaxy and the Sands. For the field observer, the game seems to be fairly successful with players. The only statistical data available is the development of this version of the game in casino profits (See Table 13.2): The overwhelming domination of traditional baccarat has, for sure, not yet been properly challenged. Live multi game was not insignificant in 2018, eight years after its introduction, and it is now the fourth revenue generator for casinos, behind baccarat (88.6 per cent), slot machines (4.9 per cent) and Cussec (2.7 per cent). Live multi game brings back a sufficient level of safeguards during the draw of cards for the player; this explains why it has been better accepted than fully electronic alternatives. Nevertheless, after a very promising start from 2010 to 2016, the stagnation of live multi game during the very last years points at another aspect: the absence of the social aspect that is present around a table of fantan and then baccarat. Live multi game is not a Macau gambling panacea, and it is very likely that traditional baccarat still has fine days ahead.

Conclusion When arriving in Macau, it is hard not to notice the presence of super casinos, replicas of the Las Vegas model, and how this is one of the

I thank Prof Lee Kah-wee for his very precious insight on this section.

13

255

256

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

consequences brought about by the opening of the sector to new operators at the beginning of the millennium. Yet behind this apparent alignment to the Las Vegas model, it is obvious that some profound differences still remain. In Las Vegas, slot machines occupy a central role, to the point that they have entirely marginalized table games. In Macau, important efforts have been made to promote slot machines over the last fifteen years. However, these efforts have not produced significant results, and the overwhelming domination of baccarat has not been challenged. Baccarat matches perfectly the playing habits of gamblers from South China which are characterized by an exacerbated suspicion that the casino might manipulate results, a desire for an obviously clear and low house edge, and a strong need for a collective and non-competitive game which encourages players to socially interact. Unable to challenge the marked preference for baccarat by the players, casinos have reshaped the game with the double aim to speed it up and to get rid of dealers. No commission baccarat, an innovation which originated in 2005 and which has spread out since, streamlines the distribution of winnings. Attempts to make the game of baccarat entirely electronic and to eliminate any human intervention were not successful because players are resistant to any lack of transparency when it comes to drawing. It is important for players that the draw takes place in full sight of everyone and that it is executed by a real dealer. Taking into account these constraints, casinos do not aim to eliminate the role of croupiers anymore, but they aim instead to marginalize it. This is why live baccarat, which is available since 2010 and for which a real dealer is filmed drawing cards and lived broadcast to dozens of terminals where gamblers can make their bets on, is relatively successful. An additional conclusion can be made from this study: the reevaluation of the role of SJM. The dominant academic discourse tends to portray SJM as backward and playing only a passive role in the modernizing process of the casino industry led by foreign operators in the last fifteen years (Simpson, 2018). In this scholarship, implicit is the assumption that the norm of modern casino gambling should be Las Vegas. Yet, it is presumptuous to think that the recent transformation is simply forced on SJM. This chapter has demonstrated that on the very contrary SJM has played a central role in the renewal of game supply in Macau by leading the way to an original path towards the rise of baccarat machine gambling within the premises of the Kam Pek casino. It is also not trivial that the first manufacturer for live multi game machines, LT Game, is located in

What Statistics Don’t Say

Hong Kong (communication by email with LT Game in December 2015). Based on the long-standing experience they have of the playing habits of gamblers in Macau, these local actors have been able to provide an original and pertinent direction to the latest innovations in casino gambling supply.

References Cassidy, R. 2012. ‘Horse versus machine: Battles in the betting shop’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18: 266–84. Choi, A. and Hung, E. 2011. ‘Labour regulation in the Liberalised Casino Economy: The case of the Croupiers’. In L. Newman and S. Ian (eds), Gaming, Governance and Public Policy in Macau, 145–61. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Courtwright, D. 2014. ‘Learning from Las Vegas: Gambling, technology, capitalism, and addiction’. Las Vegas Center for Gaming Research, occasional papers series 26. http:​/​/gam​​ing​.u​​nlv​.e​​du​/pa​​pers/​​cgr​_o​​p26​_c​​ou​ rtw​​right​​.pdf De Sa, L. 1989. A História na bagagem. Crónicas dos Velhos Hotéis de Macau, Macau SAR, China: Instituto cultural de Macau. Direcção de Inspecção e Coordenação de Jogos: www​.dicj​.gov​.mo Direcção dos Serviços de Estatística e Censos: www​.dsec​.gov​.mo Godinho, J. 2014. ‘Casino gaming in Macau: Evolution, regulation and challenges’. UNLV Gaming Law Journal, 5(1). http:​/​/sch​​olars​​.law.​​unlv.​​edu​ /g​​lj​/vo​​​l5​/is​​s1/7 Godinho, J. 2016. Direito do jogo, vol. 1. Macau: Fundação Rui Cunha. Gravara-Barbas, M. 2001. ‘La leçon de Las Vegas: le tourisme dans la ville festive’. Géocarrefour, 76(2): 159–65. Gu, Z. 2004. ‘Macau gaming: Copying the Las Vegas style or creating a Macau model?’ Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 8(1): 89–96. Hannum, R. 2013. A Primer on the Mathematics of Gambling, Oxford handbooks on line. Kessel, J. 2011. Hong-Kong et Macao. Paris: Gallimard [first edition 1957]. Lam, D. 2007. ‘An observation study of Chinese Baccarat players’. UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal, 11(2). Lee, K-w. 2012. ‘Containment and virtualization, slot technology and the remaking of the Casino industry’. Las Vegas Center for Gaming Research, occasional papers series 14. http:​/​/gam​​ing​.u​​nlv​.e​​du​/pa​​pers/​​cgr​_o​​p​14​_l​​ee​.pd​f

257

258

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Lhote, J.-M. 1994. Histoire des jeux de société. Paris: Flammarion. Paulès, X. 2010. ‘Gambling in China reconsidered: Fantan in South China during the early twentieth century’. International Journal of Asian Studies, 7(2): 179–200. Paulès, X. 2014. ‘Les limites de l’influence du modèle de Las Vegas dans l’offre de jeux de hasard à Macao: apports d’une mise en perspective historique’. Etudes chinoises, 33(2): 129–52. Schüll, N. D. 2012. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schwartz, D. 2018a. Nevada Gaming Revenues 1984–2017: Calendar Year Results for Selected Reporting Areas. Las Vegas: Center for Gaming Research, University Libraries, University of Nevada Las Vegas. http:​/​/ gam​​ing​.u​​nlv​.e​​du​/re​​ports​​/NV​_1​​984​_​p​​resen​​t​.pdf​ Schwartz, D. 2018b. Atlantic City Gaming Revenue: Annual Statistics for Total, Slot, Table & Internet Win, 1978– 2017. Las Vegas: Center for Gaming Research, University Libraries, University of Nevada Las Vegas. http:​/​/gam​​ing​.u​​nlv​.e​​du​/re​​ports​​/ac​_h​​​ist​.p​​df. Simpsons, T. 2018. ‘Neoliberal exception? The liberalization of Macau’s casino gaming monopoly and the genealogy of the post-socialist Chinese subject’. Planning Theory, 18(1): 75–95. Turdean, C. 2012. ‘Computerizing chance: The digitization of the slot machine (1960–1985)’. Las Vegas Center for Gaming Research, occasional papers series 15. http:​/​/gam​​ing​.u​​nlv​.e​​du​/pa​​pers/​​cgr​_o​​p15​_​t​​urdea​​n​.pdf​ Turner, N. and Horbay, R. 2004. ‘How do slot machines and other electronic gambling machines actually work?’ Journal of Gambling Issues, 11. http:​/​/ jgi​​.camh​​.net/​​doi​/f​​ull​/1​​0​.430​​9​/jgi​​​.2004​​.11​.2​1 Wan, P. and Pinheiro, F. 2011. ‘The development of the gaming industry and its impact on land use’. In L. Newman and S. Ian (eds), Gaming, Governance and Public Policy in Macao, 19–35. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Whiting, T. 2010. ‘The history of Baccarat’. Las Vegas Center for Gaming research, occasional papers series 3. http:​/​/gam​​ing​.u​​nlv​.e​​du​/pa​​pers/​​cgr​_o​​ p03​_​w​​hitin​​g​.pdf​ Zandonai, S. 2015. ‘The “Gambling city,” geometries and geographies of Urban instability in Macau’. Lo Squaderno, 38: 19–23. http:​/​/www​​.losq​​ uader​​no​.pr​​ofess​​ional​​dream​​ers​.n​​​et/​?p​​=1648​ Zheng, V. and Wan, P-s. 2014. Gambling Dynamism: The Macao Miracle. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer.

14 Playing with heritage Gambling and Venice’s tradition Marta Soligo

Chapter Outline Introduction259 Venice’s tradition of gambling and Ca’ Vendramin Calergi 260 Heritage and collective memory 263 Methods265 Findings267 Discussion273 Limitations and Future Research 275

Introduction Venice’s long history in traditional gaming is one of the aspects that attract tourists to the Italian city, it being the location where the first casinos in Europe were born. The sixteenth century’s ridotti – this is what Venetians used to call casinos – were more than just places to gamble. Ridotti were important meeting points for everyone, from nobles to criminals. It is interesting how casinos and their games shaped the city’s lifestyle and

260

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

how several scholars see traditional games as part of Venice’s heritage. The value of this heritage is still appreciated today, and is used to attract not only gamblers, but also cultural tourists, who visit the Renaissancestyle building of the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi casino, fascinated by its architectural and historical features. Analysing the existing scholarship in both the heritage and gambling fields, I noticed a gap in terms of casinos as cultural tourism attractions. Through content analysis of websites of different nature (tourist information, gambling and guide books), this investigation aims to answer two research questions: ‘How do tourism-related and gambling-related websites define Ca’ Vendramin Calergi?’ and ‘Is it possible to define Ca’ Vendramin Calergi and its games as cultural tourist attractions?’ I will try to give an answer using heritage studies and cultural studies concepts, such as the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) notions of tangible and intangible heritage and the topic of collective memory. Finally, this study focuses on tourism and how the Venetian tradition of gaming works as a motivation to attract cultural tourists to the Italian city. In the fields of gambling and tourism, studies on motivations are becoming increasingly important. This is particularly interesting today, since tourism motivations are blending, as case studies all around the world show. If we think of Las Vegas and Macau’s themed casinos, we understand that tourists visit these attractions not only for gambling motivations, but also for activities such as dining, shopping and live entertainment. In the past years, several studies showed that the numbers of non-gaming revenue in Las Vegas resorts are impressively growing (Gu, 2004; Loi and Kim, 2010). Similarly, to the question ‘What is the tourist motivation that brings tourists to Ca’ Vendramin Calergi?’, we cannot answer that it is just gambling. As I will describe in the next pages, Ca’ Vendramin Calergi has become also a cultural attraction, which is a vital element in this context. Cultural tourism plays a fundamental role in Venice’s economy, and attractions such as Ca’ Vendramin Calergi are fundamental in promoting the city’s tourism.

Venice’s tradition of gambling and Ca’ Vendramin Calergi Some scholars argue that Venice is the city where legal gambling was born, with the establishment of the first casinos during the seventeenth

Playing with Heritage

century (Raento and Flusty, 2006; Kingma, 2010). In that period, Venice’s government showed concerns about the increase of gambling-related illegal activities, deciding to allow some noble families to use their palaces as gambling spaces, called ridotti. The noble family Dandolo di San Moisè opened the first ridotto in 1638, becoming the earliest public and legal casino in Europe. There were different kinds of ridotti at that time, from elegant noble palaces to less welcoming venues, often hideaways of criminals and vagabonds. Ridotti were also the places where the famous Venice Carnival was celebrated, given the fact that gamblers could protect their privacy through the use of masks. Today, Venice has two casinos, Ca’ Vendramin Calergi and Ca’ Noghera. This research will focus on the first, since it is the one that is more related to the collective memory and heritage of the city. Ca’ Vendramin Calergi opened as a gambling venue in 1959, becoming the only municipality-run casino in Italy. Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, however, has a longer history, and it is considered one of the most important examples of Venetian-style Reinassance architecture. The Venetian architect Mario Codussi started the construction of the building in 1481, which was completed in 1509 by the Bottega dei Lombardo. During the next centuries, the building became the home of several important personalities, such as noble families and the composer Richard Wagner, who died in the building in 1883. Today, a section of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi hosts the Wagner Museum, a permanent exhibition dedicated to the composer. In 1999, a second municipality-run casino, Ca’ Noghera, opened in Venice. Ca’ Noghera is defined as Venice’s summer casino, since it is open only during the summer. Described as ‘Italy’s first American-style casino’ (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.), this venue ‘offers over 5,000 square meters of entertainment, including a new poker room for Texas Hold’em Poker tournaments . . . an Entertainments Arena, staging concerts, theatrical productions and fashion parades’ (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.). Differently from Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, which is located in Venice’s historic Laguna, Ca’ Noghera is situated on the mainland, close to the airport. It is interesting to look at Ca’ Vendramin Calergi also in terms of other Italian casinos. At the moment, Italy only hosts two other casinos: the Casinò Municipale di Sanremo, on the Italian Riviera, and the Casino de la Vallée – Saint-Vincent, in the Aosta Valley. Opened in 1905 and 1947, these venues, if compared to Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, represent a more modern concept of casinos. Although considered

261

262

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

important attractions and part of the local culture, those casinos have a more recent history, and less material can be found in terms of their connection to the historical and cultural fabric of the area where they are located. Studies on casinos rarely focus on the cultural role of these venues for the city where they are located. If we look at the history of casinos, however, we notice that often they are important cultural landmarks for the community that hosts them. The official website of the casinos of Montecarlo, France, for example, states: ‘Casinos have been shaping Monaco and making it legendary since 1863’ (Monte-Carlo Société des Bains de Mer, n.d.). Similarly, the hotel and casino El Cortez in Las Vegas is part of the United States National Register of Historic Places, for its association ‘with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of [American] history’ (National Park Service, 2012). Examples like these help us look at casinos from a different perspective, relating these venues to concepts such as cultural heritage and collective memory. When we talk about the collective memory in Venice, moreover, we understand the important social role not only of casinos, but also of traditional games. Several works have been written highlighting the importance of gambling in shaping Venice’s society. Starting from the sixteenth century, games became fundamental elements for Venice’s urban life, also influencing aspects of what today is defined as cultural heritage, from literature to art, from traditions to celebrations. For example, this happened in the case of the Carnival of Venice, which is the city’s most famous celebration and which is still held every year between February and March. During the Carnival celebrations, everyone could play in complete anonymity, hiding their faces behind the traditional masks. Today, the Carnival is still considered one of the beating hearts of Venice’s arts and crafts practice. Additionally, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the ridotti and the gambling-related activities people undertook in them were fundamental in terms of creating relationships among different social classes. Several artistic and literary works throughout history narrated the strong link between gambling, society and culture in Venice. To celebrate the historic role of gambling in Venice, in 1989 Ca’ Vendramin Calergi hosted the exhibition Sei Secoli d’Azzardo nella Serenissima (Six Centuries of Gambling in the Serenissima), centred on the historic relationship

Playing with Heritage

between gambling, art and literature in Venice. As the catalogue of the exhibition states: In the past, gambling was a matter of ‘culture:’ popular culture and social culture. Gambling was seen as a part of everyday leisure; gambling took place in taverns and in palaces; gambling was perceived and lived not that much as an occult bad habit, but as a form of communication; to the point that the Serenissima Republic formally strict and repressive, showed itself to be very tolerant and forward-looking in matters of gambling. (Le Tarot, n.d., translated)

For the 1989 exhibition, Ca’ Vendramin Calergi collected 170 items, such as cards, dice, paintings and ancient books. Among the most famous artworks, the exhibition hosted the 1755 painting Il Ridotto (The Foyer) by Francesco Guardi, which depicts an everyday life scene in a casino, complete with table games and masked visitors. Among the artists who tried to depict Venice’s social life through the lens of gambling, we also find the famous playwright Carlo Goldoni, who in 1750 published the comedy La Bottega del Caffè (The Coffee House), centred on the protagonist’s passion for gambling: When La bottega del caffe was first seen in Venice in 1750, it was new and daring. Goldoni transcended the stock characters and situations of commedia dell’arte to show a world on stage that was closer to the streets. Indeed, the play’s setting is a street, where the coffee house of the title nestles between a barber’s and Pandolfo’s gambling house. (Tushingham, 2003)

As we read from the aforementioned quote, Goldoni decided to bring his audience closer to the real Venice’s everyday life, and, in doing so, he chose to set a casino among the main locations of his comedy, which is still considered one of his most famous works.

Heritage and collective memory Together with the historic features of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, we understand the fundamental role of gambling in terms of Venice’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage. According to UNESCO, ‘Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artefacts and intangible attributes of a

263

264

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

group or society that are inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations’ (UNESCO Culture, n.d.). The International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) describes heritage as ‘the entire corpus of material signs – either artistic or symbolic-handed on by the past to each culture and, therefore, to the whole of humankind’ (2005: 4). Moreover, ICCROM describes that ‘as a constituent part of the affirmation and enrichment of cultural identities, as a legacy belonging to all humankind, the cultural heritage gives each particular place its recognisable features and is the storehouse of human experience’ (p. 5). In an article for the Getty Conservation Institute, the heritage expert JeanLouis Luxen (n.d.) declares that ‘today there is widespread agreement on the definition of heritage as a social ensemble of many different complex and interdependent manifestations, reflecting the culture of a human community.’ In order to answer the two research questions, this chapter takes as a starting point the concepts of tangible and intangible heritage proposed by UNESCO. This classification helps to understand if and how Ca’ Vendramin Calergi falls under the definitions of tangible and intangible heritage. According to UNESCO, tangible cultural heritage includes ‘buildings and historic places, monuments, artifacts, etc., which are considered worthy of preservation for the future. These include objects significant to the archaeology, architecture, science or technology of a specific culture’ (UNESCO Culture, n.d.). In a similar fashion, UNESCO declares that the concept of cultural heritage goes beyond monuments and collections of objects, recalling the notion of intangible heritage. This term ‘includes traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts’ (UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, n.d.). Together with the notion of cultural heritage, this chapter aims to understand how gambling and casinos are part of Venice’s collective memory by taking a sociological approach. The sociologists Gary Alan Fine and Aaron Beim define collective memory as a ‘living concept, linked to the behaviors and responses of social actors who

Playing with Heritage

generate meanings’ (Fine and Beim, 2007: 1). The two sociologists argue that it ‘incorporates collective objects and the collective conscience, and how these two phenomena present and influence cultural values’ (Fine and Beim, 2007: 1). Moreover, the sociologist Jeffrey Olick explains that with the term ‘collective memory’ scholars often ‘refer to aggregated individual recollections, to official commemorations, to collective representations, and to disembodied constitutive features of shared identities’ (Olick, 1999: 336). Under­ standing the concept of collective memory helps to comprehend the cultural importance of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, being a tool that witnesses an important part of Venice’s history. This research aims at understanding the role of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi as a witness of the past, considering it as part of the landscape where it is rooted rather than as an isolated entity. In 2014, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) published the Siena Charter, a document focused on the concept of cultural landscapes (ICOM, 2014). With the Siena Charter, ICOM tried to raise awareness on the fact that heritage venues—museums in particular—are not spaceships floating alone in the space, but they are rooted in a specific context. Writing about this idea, the sociologist Melinda Milligan uses the terms ‘historic fabric’ and ‘historic tissue’ (Milligan, 2007: 112). The analysis of the fabric around the casino helped me understand the role this institution plays for the community that surrounds it.

Methods In order to conduct this research, I analysed four kinds of websites. The first website I investigated was the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi official webpage, focusing mainly on the descriptions of the venue and the games it hosts. Secondly, I centred my attention on the so-called Destination Marketing/ Management Organization (DMO), which United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) defines as ‘the leading organizational entity which may encompass the various authorities, stakeholders and professionals and facilitates tourism sector partnerships towards a collective destination vision’.(UNWTO, 2019: 12). In the case of Venice,

265

266

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

the DMO is the website Veneziaunica​.i​t. Thirdly, my analysis focused on guidebooks’ websites and other tourist information webpages, which allowed me to learn more about the casino history and its cultural role(s). Finally, I focused on gaming and gambling websites and their descriptions of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi. I decided to focus on the online environment since an increasing number of studies show that the internet is becoming fundamental for tourists during the planning stage. As Lončarić, Bašan and Marković (2013) explain while analysing DMOs: DMOs create a destination image and affect the destination market positioning. In the time of computerization, the emergence of the internet has significantly changed the process of communication, and so it becomes the main communication channel through which DMOs inform tourists and partners. (373)

Before deciding where to go and what to visit, tourists consult websites of different nature, such as DMOs, tour operators and virtual guidebooks. Investigating the message these websites aim at transmitting becomes fundamental for the researcher who tries to comprehend how the destination or attraction wants to promote itself. This kind of analysis helps answering questions, such as the following: Who is the ideal target for the destination/attraction? How does the destination/attraction position itself on the market? What are the tourism motivations connected to the destination/attraction? In terms of data analysis, I used content analysis, with the aim to attain a condensed and broad description of the phenomenon I was analysing, which led to concepts and categories describing the phenomenon (Elo and Kingäs, 2008). I started with an open coding process, condensing and organizing my data into categories that made sense in terms of my ‘relevant interests, commitments, literatures, and/or perspectives’ (Lofland, 2006: 201). I analysed which key concepts this process brought to the surface, and I assigned different labels to each one of them. Consequently, I conducted focused coding, reviewing my codes and evaluating which ones occurred the most, using them ‘as the starting point for more focused and analytic questions’ (Lofland, 2006: 201). Further analysis resulted in the determination of three categories: Ca’ Vendramin Calergi as a witness of Venice’s history, classic games as tradition and Ca’ Vendramin Calergi and the comparison with Ca’ Noghera.

Playing with Heritage

Findings Ca’ Vendramin Calergi as witness of Venice’s history A thorough analysis of different websites shows that Ca’ Vendramin Calergi plays a fundamental role in terms of tangible and intangible heritage and history. The homepage of the casino’s official website reads: ‘Inaugurated in 1638, Casinò di Venezia is the world’s oldest casino’ (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.). Although this is a short sentence, it is interesting from different perspectives. If we think that this is the first caption people read when they open Ca’ Vendramin Calergi’s website, it is easy to understand the importance of history for the casino’s communication strategy. The website explains that the venue is not only more than 380 years old, but also it highlights the uniqueness of this casino. Moreover, the decision to keep the name in Italian, Casinò di Venezia, shows the intention to focus on the geographical and cultural roots of the place. Similarly, the DMO website Venezia Unica reads: Ca’ Vendramin Calergi is one of the most important and luxurious Renaissance stately homes overlooking the Grand Canal. . . . Built between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, this charming building is enhanced by a beautiful Italian garden, one of the few with a view and direct access to the main waterway of the city. Work of the brilliant architect Mario Codussi, the building was once the residence of the most influential aristocratic families of the Serenissima and still today, in addition to housing Venice Casino, it is a representative office for the city of Venice. (Venezia Unica, n.d.)

The website of the guide Lonely Planet describes: Founded in 1638, the world’s oldest casino only moved into its current palatial home in the 1950s. The building certainly wasn’t lucky for composer Richard Wagner, who died here in 1883; the Museo Wagner now occupies his suite. (Lonely Planet, n.d.)

Examples like these show that there are two main elements that are used to attract visitors. Firstly, these websites highlight the tangible aspect of the casino, promoting the architectural beauty of the building and how it is an

267

268

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

example of Venetian-Reinassance period. Secondly, it is interesting how descriptions of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi centre on Venice’s intangible heritage and cultural landscape. During the Renaissance, influenced by Classical Greek and Roman architecture, architects who worked in Venice decided to use elements such as ‘grooved columns, Corinthian columns and semi-circular arches’ (Venice The Future, n.d.). A principal feature of this kind of architecture is the use of marble, and, as Howard, Quill and Moretti (2002) explain, ‘the façade of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi . . . incorporates porphyry, serpentine and veined oriental marble’ (60). The beauty of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, moreover, can be found also in its interior spaces, with Baroque ceilings, French doors, and grandiose sculptures and paintings. Concerning intangible cultural heritage, we find one main aspect. The casino is depicted in terms of its geographic location, especially highlighting its closeness to the Grand Canal, which has a historic importance for Venice, being its major water-traffic corridor. Consequently, Ca’ Vendramin Calergi is depicted as an integral part of Venice’s cultural landscape, with the descriptions highlighting aspects such as tradition, history and culture. An interesting example in this sense is the fact that Ca’ Vendramin Calergi’s official website includes in the description of the casino second floor the ‘damask walls, precious paintings and Murano chandeliers’ (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.). Also in this case, mentioning Venice’s artistic tradition of Murano glass, the website locates the casino in its broader local cultural context. Similarly, when we look at the important role of casinos in Venice’s Carnival celebrations, we see how we cannot separate the venue from the main intangible cultural aspects – and traditions – of the city. An analysis of Venice’s tangible and intangible heritage, moreover, cannot ignore the fact that Venice and its lagoon have been part of the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1987: The structure and urban morphological form of Venice has remained broadly similar to the one the city had in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The maintained integrity of the layout and urban structure of Venice therefore attests to the formal and organizational conception of space and the technical and creative skills of a culture and civilization that created exceptional architectural values. Despite the diverse styles and historical stratifications, the buildings and constructions have organically fused into a coherent unit, maintaining their physical characteristics and their

Playing with Heritage

architectural and aesthetic qualities, as well as their more technical features, through an architectural language that is both independent and consistent with the function and design principles of the traditional urban structure of Venice. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 2019)

Also in this case, we see how traditions, architecture and the urban space cannot be separated from each other. UNESCO highlights the idea that the ‘structure and urban morphological form of Venice’ tourists see in the city today ‘remained broadly similar’ to how they were in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. This is important for this research, especially because descriptions of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi often point out that the casino, as we see it today, kept its original Renaissance form. Finally, guides and websites mention famous personalities – such as the architect Mario Codussi and the composer Richard Wagner – who had important roles in the city’s past. Although Ca’ Vendramin Calergi became a casino only in 1959, its communication strategies go beyond the idea of the location as a mere gambling venue, describing the history of the building from its origins. Information such as the fact that it was previously the house of the most influential aristocratic families of the city and famous personalities show how Venice’s historic fabric is used as a promotional tool for the casino. Interestingly, these marketing strategies do not separate the cultural elements of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi from the gambling. In other words, elements such as the famous personalities who stayed in the venue and the important architectural features look intertwined with gaming activities. When the aforementioned exhibition Sei Secoli d’Azzardo nella Serenissima (Six Centuries of Gambling in the Serenissima) opened, Venice Council Member Maurizio Cecconi declared: ‘Of course we try to advertise our casino, but this is a high-quality cultural initiative’ (La Repubblica, 2019). Following the logic of these promotional activities, we can understand that gambling and cultural heritage are not two separate components of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, but we rather comprehend that the first is an integral part of the latter.

Classic games as tradition Together with the architectural and geographical elements, an analysis of the material on Ca’ Vendramin Calergi shows that classic games are also

269

270

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

part of Venice’s cultural heritage. Ca’ Vendramin Calergi’s official website reads: The heart of Casinò di Venezia beats on the Grand Canal in Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, the sophisticated theatre of the most classic games. In 1638 the Casinò di Venezia quickly established itself as the centre of entertainment of international notoriety while in the 1950s it moved to this location. (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.)

The website Casinoseurope​.c​om writes: The casino’s city branch is located in an old, grand palace, reminiscent of the casino’s long history, and offers all the classic casino games, including Poker, Roulette, Blackjack, Punto Banco / Baccarat, Trente et Quarante, the old French card game, as well as electronic games. (Casinos Europe, n.d.)

In both cases, the list of the classic games offered by the casino goes hand in hand with the description of the palace and its history. Moreover, in the second description, greater emphasis is given to classic games rather than to electronic games. Understanding the importance of classic games in this context helps us, once again, to fully comprehend the concept of cultural fabric and collective memory. We cannot separate classic games from the kind of heritage Ca’ Vendramin Calergi represents since they are part of the same collective memory. Moreover, several scholars analysed how tourists travel in order to live authentic experiences. As Urry and Larsen (2011) explain, ‘the tourist is a kind of contemporary pilgrim, seeking authenticity in other ‘times’ and other ‘places’ away from that person’s everyday life’ (10). Playing classic games in the oldest casino in the world, in the city where classic games characterized a big part of local life for centuries, is the premise for an unforgettable and authentic Venetian experience. Finally, if we focus on the differences between classic and electronic games, we have to take into consideration the role of senses, which is being increasingly studied by sociologists. Analysing the difference between casino and online gaming, Cotte and LaTour (2009) explain: Another difference between the online gambling and casino gambling contexts is sensory experiences, particularly haptic (touch) stimulation. Although online gambling Web sites have added sounds of casino gambling, including cards shuffling, wheels spinning, and chips hitting the table, most online gamblers report that online gambling lacks the sensory stimulation that they get in the casino. . . . There is a lack of smells (which

Playing with Heritage

is generally positive, as casino smells are inevitably negative because of smoking), a lack of sights (people, lights), and a lack of touch. The touch stimulation can be further unpacked into touching the accoutrements of gambling (chips, money, cards) and the touch of other people. While the latter is related to social connection, it is also an unusual sensory phenomenon. (749)

Going back to the perceived authenticity notion, it is easy to understand how the more the senses are involved, the more authentic the experience may feel. This last aspect is further reinforced by the historical symbolism of the location. The player who is gambling with classic games in the oldest casino in the world can have the sensation to be part of a totally immersive experience in the history and traditions of the city. We notice the importance of tradition also in the analysis of the ‘Tables Games’ section of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi’s official website. For example, the part on the classic game ‘Chemin de Fer’ reads: Beautiful, magical and absorbing, Chemin de Fer has, since time immemorial, excited the greatest players in the world and in all casinos. It would seem that its origins date back to medieval times when a game called ‘Baccarà’ was played with tarots that were considered magic, so much so that they were decorated by famous artists and used as tools of divination. (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.)

Although what is written does not directly relate to Venice’s heritage, it shows once again how historical descriptions are part of the casino’s communication strategy. In this case, the focus is on the intangible heritage aspect, mentioning the game’s tradition, the etymology of the word Baccarat, and its history.

Ca’ Vendramin Calergi and the comparison with Ca’ Noghera As previously mentioned, Venice hosts two casinos: Ca’ Vendramin Calergi and the more modern Ca’ Noghera, which opened in 1999. Describing the two locations, the section ‘Venues’ of the casinos’ official webpage reads1:

The official website is the same for both Ca’ Vendramin Calergi and Ca’ Noghera, since they are both owned by the Municipality. 1

271

272

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

The heart of Casinò di Venezia beats on the Grand Canal in Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, the sophisticated theatre of the most classic games. (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.) Ca’ Noghera, Italy’s first American-style casino, opened in 1999 not far from Marco Polo airport. It offers over 5,000 square meters of entertainment. (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.)

Similarly, the section ‘Table Games’ on the official website, explains: Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, the historical venue for the Casinò di Venezia, houses tables for French Roulette, Chemin de Fer and Punto Banco, Fair Roulette, Black Jack and Caribbean Stud Poker. Ca’ Noghera, on the other hand, is the modern, colourful venue where it is possible to play Fair Roulette, Black Jack, Caribbean Stud Poker, French Roulette, Chemin de Fer and Punto Banco. (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.).

Interestingly, also the descriptions of the two casinos reveal a strong relationship between Ca’ Vendramin Calergi and concepts such as heritage and collective memory. This happens especially on two levels, which are the geographical location and the relationship with tradition. Firstly, the casinos’ official website describes its strategic position on the Grand Canal, differently from Ca’ Noghera, which is highlighted for its proximity to the airport. Once again, through the depiction of its location in the heart of Venice, Ca’ Vendramin Calergi is portrayed as an integral part of the city’s cultural landscape. Secondly, it is clear that the message that the website aims to transmit is related to the contrast between the tradition of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, described as ‘the sophisticated theatre of the most classic games,’ and Ca’ Noghera, which is ‘the modern, colorful venue’ (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.). This happens also with the description of the gaming-related activities. According to the website, in fact, Ca’ Vendramin Calergi is the home of the most classic games, while Ca’ Noghera follows the American casino model, with several entertainment activities. This last finding plays a crucial role in terms of my research questions. If we look at how the material analysed here describes the two venues, we understand that Ca’ Noghera is marketed uniquely for visitors interested in gambling, differently from Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, which appears to be both a cultural and a gambling attraction. Ca’ Noghera, in fact, seems to recall what Etches (2009) defines as commercial gambling. This new vision of gambling was born well after the Renaissance:

Playing with Heritage

The period of the industrial revolution in the 19th century shaped the contemporary commercialization of gambling. . . . This is the era that gave rise to mass market gambling via casinos, racetracks, betting offices, mechanized slot machines, bingo and pools. (192)

Rather than focusing on Venice’s gambling tradition, Ca’ Noghera looks at the overseas models and at that kind of gambling that characterizes cities like Las Vegas or Macau. As we saw previously, the Ca’ Noghera’s official website reads: ‘Italy’s first American-style casino’ (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.). This is particularly interesting in terms of contrast with Ca’ Vendramin Calergi’s ties with the city of Venice. In the previous pages, we saw how Ca’ Vendramin Calergi constantly connects its image to the history and collective memory of the city of Venice, while the image of Ca’ Noghera seems to be more centred on the American model. The activities of Ca’ Noghera, moreover, seem to be strongly intertwined with the entertainment industry: It offers over 5,000 square meters of entertainment, including a new poker room for Texas hold’em Poker tournaments. . . . It is also possible to play Fair Roulette, Black Jack, Caribbean Poker, Punto Banco, French Roulette, Chemin de Fer and there are more than 600 of the latest generation slot machines. And for those who want make their evening last even longer, there is the Entertainments Arena, staging concerts, theatrical productions and fashion parades. (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.)

As mentioned earlier, the marketing activities of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi seem often to be directed towards the gambler (or tourist) who could find something meaningful in the historic features of the venue. This aspect could range from the pleasure of playing traditional games to the authentic feeling of being in the oldest casino in the world. As we see from the last description of Ca’ Noghera, it looks like their focus is on the gambler who is interested in entertainment and technological innovation, and whose motivations could be less related to history.

Discussion For this chapter, it is fundamental to understand the relationship between cultural tourism and gambling. The UNWTO declares that ‘cultural tourism is a type of tourism activity in which the visitor’s essential motivation is

273

274

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

to learn, discover, experience and consume the tangible and intangible cultural attractions/products in a tourism destination’ (UNWTO, n.d.). Consequently, UNWTO defines cultural tourism attractions as related ‘to a set of distinctive material, intellectual, spiritual and emotional features of a society that encompasses arts and architecture, historical and cultural heritage, culinary heritage, literature, music, creative industries and the living cultures with their lifestyles, value systems, beliefs and traditions’ (UNWTO, n.d.). Ca’ Vendramin Calergi is a casino, and therefore visitors’ main motivation is supposed to be gambling. At the same time, if we look at the definition of cultural tourism through the lenses of this research’s findings, it can be easily defined as a cultural tourism attraction. This aspect is fundamental for this study, which centres on the overlaps between tourism typologies. And this aspect is even more interesting if we think that, increasingly, casinos all over the world are becoming part of the gambling-culture dichotomy analysed in this chapter. In their descriptions of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, websites mainly focus on the architectural and historical features of the location, sometimes even privileging these characteristics over the gambling-related ones. This aspect helps to understand how cultural tourism goes hand in hand with the notions of cultural landscape and collective memory. The material analysed in this research demonstrates that websites of different natures describe Ca’ Vendramin Calergi as part of Venice’s tangible and intangible heritage. Firstly, the constant focus on the Renaissance-style architecture aims to attract visitors from a cultural and artistic perspective. Similarly, Ca’ Vendramin Calergi’s communication strategy often recalls the notion of intangible heritage. Concepts such as traditions and history are often used to depict the cultural role of the casino for the city’s cultural landscape. Moreover, websites highlight aspects that are part of Venice’s collective memory. They do so by mentioning elements such as the role played by Ca’ Vendramin Calergi in the past and the relationship between the casino and personalities who were important for the history of the city and its culture. It is also not a coincidence that the ‘Games’ section of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi’s official website depicts both the gambling area and activities focusing on history, by using adjectives such as ‘classic’ and ‘traditional’ (Casinò Di Venezia, n.d.). This last aspect is important especially because Venice is one of the most famous cultural tourism destinations in the world, being also inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Looking

Playing with Heritage

at the promotional material, we understand that Ca’ Vendramin Calergi is not presented as an isolated venue but is strongly rooted in the physical and cultural context that surrounds it. From a strategic point of view, this marketing decision makes sense, since it aims to attract not only gamblers but also the numerous cultural tourists who populate the city every day. This happens also in the comparison with Ca’ Noghera, where Ca’ Vendramin Calergi is portrayed as a cultural tourism destination, differently from the first that is more gambling-oriented.

Limitations and Future Research Although this research gives a new contribution both to the heritage and gambling fields, it presents some limitations. Firstly, this study only focuses on the websites, not giving voice to the tourists. In terms of future research, it would be beneficial to conduct an investigation that focuses also on tourism motivations from the tourists’ perspective, including interviews. Similarly, it would also be fruitful to interview the professionals who work on the promotion of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, such as the casino’s marketing coordinators. Additionally, although we can state that Ca’ Vendramin Calergi is a cultural tourism attraction, it is important to keep in mind that it differs from mainstream cultural attractions, such as museums. The main activity of a casino, in fact, is gambling, and we cannot state that we are describing an attraction whose primary vocation is cultural tourism. As explained in the methods section, tourists increasingly choose their destinations through the internet, and the data I collected from the websites helped me understand the gambling-culture dichotomy that characterizes Ca’ Vendramin Calergi. As this chapter shows, if we look at Ca’ Vendramin Calergi as a tourist attraction, we notice that it has (as it happens with the majority of tourist attractions) a main vocation, which in this case is gambling. Some tourism and marketing scholars would argue that the cultural trend followed by the casino could be seen as a diversification strategy, directed towards tourists that are not primarily interested in gambling. Although this chapter aims at giving a sociological, rather than a marketing, perspective on the topic, keeping in mind concepts such as the diversification of tourist products helped me investigate the different

275

276

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

natures of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, and how they merge together in a unique attraction. As a last consideration, it is important to specify that it is challenging to give fixed definitions of tourism phenomena and, therefore, to make data fall under a precise category. This chapter uses UNWTO and UNESCO’s definitions since these organizations are some of the most reliable in the heritage and the tourism fields, although I am aware that the findings could change if looked at under the lenses of different definitions. For example, some scholars might argue that cultural tourism is a phenomenon that is limited to certain venues, such as museums and art exhibitions. From this perspective, a casino does not fall under the cultural tourism definition, although in the case of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi we are in front of a blended attraction, since it hosts the Wagner Museum. While analysing this last point, however, it would be fruitful for future research to investigate if, as a container of collective memory and traditions – such as classic games – casinos can be compared to museums. If we follow UNESCO’s definition of intangible heritage, in fact, we notice how the culture of classic games could fall under this category. Classic games represent not only a tradition and a set of skills transmitted by ancestors, but they are also part of what UNESCO labels as social practices and festive events. Looking at the past, we can see how these definitions can be related to the social role that ridotti had in the past in terms of community gatherings and celebrations – the famous tradition of the Venetian Carnival, for example, which is still celebrated today. With regards to the present, we can see how the traditional set of skills that classic games require helps Ca’ Vendramin Calergi promote a gaming culture based on heritage and collective memory.

References Casinò Di Venezia. n.d. ‘Casinò Di Venezia’. https://www​.casinovenezia​.it​/en (accessed 10 August 2018). Casinos Europe. n.d. ‘Venice’. http:​/​/www​​.casi​​noseu​​rope.​​com​/i​​taly/​​​venic​​e/ (accessed 10 August 2018). Cotte, J. and LaTour, K. A. 2009. ‘Blackjack in the kitchen: Understanding online versus casino gambling’. Journal of Consumer Research, 35(5): 742–58.

Playing with Heritage

Elo, S. and Kyngäs, H. 2008. ‘The qualitative content analysis process’. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 62(1): 107–15. Etches, Marc W. 2009. ‘Commercial gambling’. In The Entertainment Industry: An Introduction. Wallingford: CABI Tourism Texts. Fine, G. A. and Beim, A. 2007. ‘Introduction: Interactionist approaches to collective memory’. Symbolic Interaction, 30(1): 1–5. Gu, Z. 2004. ‘Macau gaming: Copying the Las Vegas style or creating a Macau model?’ Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 9(1): 89–96. Howard, D., Quill, S. and Moretti, L. 2002. The Architectural History of Venice. Yale University Press. ICCROM. 2005. ‘Definition of cultural heritage: International centre for the study of the preservation and rstoration of cultural property’. http:​/​/cif​​ .icom​​os​.or​​g​/pdf​​_docs​​/Docu​​ments​​%20on​​%20li​​ne​/He​​ritag​​e​%20d​​​efini​​tions​​ .pdf ICOM. 2014. ‘The Siena charter – Museums and cultural landscapes’. ICOM, 2014. icom.​​museu​​m​/en/​​resso​​urce/​​the​-s​​iena-​​chart​​er​-mu​​seums​​-and-​​cultu​​ r​al​-l​​andsc​​apes/​ Kingma, S. 2010. Global Gambling: Cultural Perspectives on Gambling Organizations. London: Routledge. La Repubblica. 1989. ‘Sei secoli d’ azzardo nella serenissima. Archivio – La Repubblica​.​it’. https​:/​/ri​​cerca​​.repu​​bblic​​a​.it/​​repub​​blica​​/arch​​ivio/​​repub​​ blica​​/1989​​​/01​/1​​4​/sei​- secoli​-azzardo​-nella​-serenissima​​.html (accessed 17 February 2019). Le Tarot. n.d. ‘Edizioni Le Tarot. Le Tarot Associazione Culturale’. http:​/​ /www​​.asso​​ciazi​​onele​​tarot​​.it​/p​​age​.a​​​spx​?i​​d​=497​ (accessed 18 February 2019). Lofland, J. 2006. Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis, 4th edn. Belmont: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. Loi, K., and Kim, W. G. 2010. ‘Macao’s casino industry: Reinventing Las Vegas in Asia’. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 51(2): 268–83. Lončarić, D., Bašan, L. and Marković, M. G. 2013. ‘Importance of DMO websites in tourist destination selection’. In 23rd CROMAR Congress: Marketing in a Dynamic Environment– Academic and Practical Insights. Lonely Planet. n.d. ‘Casinò Di Venezia’. https​:/​/ww​​w​.lon​​elypl​​anet.​​com​/i​​ taly/​​venic​​e​/ent​​ertai​​nment​​/casi​​no​-di​​​-vene​​zia​/a​​/poi-​ ent/400229/360029 (accessed 10 August 2018). Luxen, Jean-Louis. n.d. ‘Reflections on the use of heritage charters and conventions’. In The Getty Conservation Institute. http:​/​/www​​.gett​​y​.edu​​ /cons​​ervat​​ion​/p​​ublic​​ation​​s​_res​​ource​​s​/new​​slett​​ers​/1​​​9​_2​/f​​eatur​​e​.htm​l (accessed 10 August 2018).

277

278

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Milligan, M. J. 2007. ‘Buildings as history: The place of collective memory in the study of historic preservation’. Symbolic Interaction, 30(1): 105–23. Monte-Carlo Société Des Bains De Mer. n.d. ‘Monte-Carlo SBM’. https​:/​/ww​​ w​.mon​​tecar​​losbm​​.com/​​en​/ca​​sin​o-​​monac​o (accessed 13 February 2019). National Park Service. 2012. ‘El Cortez Hotel and Casino’. National Parks Service. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nps​​.gov/​​nr​/fe​​ature​​/plac​​es​/13​​​00001​​0​.htm​ (accessed 16 February 2019). Olick, J. K. 1999. ‘Collective memory: The two cultures’. Sociological Theory, 17(3): 333–48. Raento, Pauliina, and Steven Flusty. 2006. ‘Three trips to Italy: Deconstructing the New Las Vegas’. In Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism, 97–124. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publ. Tushingham, D. 2003. ‘Theatre: Fassbinder’s adaptation of The Coffee House’. The Guardian, 23 July 2003. https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/st​​age​/2​​003​/j​​ul​ /23​​/thea​​tr​e​.a​​rtsfe​​ature​s (accessed 16 February 2019). UNESCO Culture. n.d. ‘Tangible Cultural Heritage | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’. http:​/​/www​​.unes​​co​.or​​ g​/new​​/en​/c​​airo/​​cultu​​re​/ta​​ngibl​​e​-cul​​​tural​​-heri​​tage/​ (accessed 10 August 2018). UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. n.d. ‘What is intangible cultural heritage?’ https​:/​/ic​​h​.une​​sco​.o​​rg​/en​​/what​​-is​-i​​ntang​​ible-​​he​rit​​age​-0​​0003 (accessed 10 August 2018). UNESCO World Heritage Center. n.d. ‘Venice and its Lagoon’. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. https://whc​.unesco​.org​/en​/list​/394 (accessed 28 February 2019). UNWTO. 2019. ‘UNWTO Guidelines for Institutional Strengthening of Destination Management Organizations (DMOs)’. https​:/​/ww​​w​.e​-u​​nwto.​​ org​/d​​oi​/pd​​f​/10.​​18111​​/9​789​​28442​​0841 (accessed 6 May 2021). UNWTO. n.d. ‘Tourism and culture’. https​:/​/ww​​w​.unw​​to​.or​​g​/tou​​rism-​​and​​-c​​ ultur​e Urry, J. and Larsen, J. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0: Theory, Culture & Society (Unnumbered). 3rd edn. Los Angeles and London: SAGE. Venezia Unica. n.d. ‘Casino di Venezia’. http:​/​/www​​.vene​​ziaun​​ica​.i​​t​/en/​​conte​​ nt​/ca​​s​inov​​enezi​a (accessed 7 August 2018). Venice the Future. n.d. ‘Venezia e le sue Lagune. Le Case Da Gioco’. https​ :/​/ww​​w​.ven​​iceth​​efutu​​re​.co​​m​/sch​​ede​/i​​t​/225​​-ali​u​​sid​=2​​25​.ht​m (accessed 7 August 2018).

Part V Spaces and times 15 Locating Native American gambling traditions in contemporary Indian casino gaming 16 On the infrastructure of gaming: The case of pachinko 17 An enchanting witchcraft: Masculinity, melancholy and the pathology of gaming in early modern London 18 Everyday casinos: The expanding gambling landscape in America’s neighbourhoods 19 The market in the conclave: Gambling on election outcomes in Renaissance Italy 20 Eighteenth-century lotteries

280

15 Locating Native American gambling traditions in contemporary Indian casino gaming Laurie Arnold

Native American casino gambling, commonly referred to as Indian gaming, is a $30 billion industry operated by more than 200 distinct tribes in twenty-nine states in the United States. Indian gaming is government gaming. There are 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States, each governing through their own tribal sovereignty. Because gaming is operated by tribal governments, Indian gaming is akin to state lotteries even if it looks like the commercial gambling operating in Las Vegas. And while Indian gaming revenues have grown from a few thousand dollars in the 1980s into today’s vibrant economic engine, the roots of Indian casino gaming still reflect tribal traditions of games, play and gambling. This chapter will explore contemporary Indian gaming and link today’s practices to some of the cultural traditions which reinforce tribal sovereignty and which provided tribes with evidence to successfully defend their rights to operate gaming enterprises. We will consider select traditional games and gambling practices, we will observe connections between spirituality and gambling, and we will examine how culture resonates: today’s casinos serve as gathering places for Native American communities just as sites of games and competitions did for their ancestors.

282

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

We will also observe some of the internal and external tensions Native American communities experience because of Indian gaming, while ultimately recognizing that Native American cultural practices provide a meaningful lens through which to consider Indian casino gaming. Contemporary Indian gaming began with high-stakes bingo, and it emerged at the beginning of a new era of tribal self-determination in the 1970s. The Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin launched a bingo operation in 1976, and the Seminole Tribe of Florida opened the first high-stakes bingo operations in 1979. Unlike granny’s bingo, high-stakes games offered prizes in the five-to-six-figure range, a departure from church bingo practices which infuriated states and motivated players. The success of these enterprises inspired tribes across the United States, and by 1984 eighty tribes offered bingo on their reservations, including at least twenty sites offering high-stakes games (House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Indian Gambling Control Act: Hearings on H.R. 4566, 98th Cong., 2nd sess., 1984: 41; Hoeft, 2014; Cattelino, 2008). States considered Indian gaming ‘illegal’ because states were not involved in the regulatory processes of that gambling. A series of state and federal court cases would occur throughout the 1980s, culminating with the Supreme Court decision over California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians in 1987, which upheld lower courts’ decisions that gambling regulations are a type of civil law, and state civil laws are unenforceable on Indian lands unless expressly allowed by Congress (480 US 202 1987). The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) was signed into law in 1988, after five years of research across Indian Country. Many observers unfamiliar with the complexities of tribal sovereignty believed that the IGRA gave gaming to tribes. In fact, the IGRA was developed in response to tribal gaming, and the policy reinforces the inherent nature of tribal sovereignty as expressed through tribes’ inherent rights to conduct gaming. The IGRA created three regulatory classes and also a national gaming commission, the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC). Class I is defined as traditional and ceremonial games, which do not require regulation. Class II includes bingo and other similar games, which are regulated by the tribe first and then the NGIC. Class III is casino-style gambling and is regulated at the tribal, state and national levels (Pub. L. 100–497, § 3, Oct. 17, 1988, 102 Stat. 246). That the legislation included traditional and ceremonial Native American games signifies recognition by the federal government that

Locating Native American Gambling Traditions

those cultural practices persist and that they retain meaning for tribal communities. Some of the court cases observed this as well. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals noted in California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians that the state focused too narrowly when it defined ‘tradition’ in order to assert that, because tribes did not historically operate high-stakes commercial gambling, tribes could not employ an assertion of tribal sovereignty to allow it. The court would not rule on the issue because of the state’s narrow focus. ‘The focus in determining whether a tribal tradition exists should be on whether the tribe is engaged in a traditional governmental function, not whether it historically engaged in a particular activity. The Tribes in this case are engaged in the traditional governmental function of raising revenue’ (783 F.2d 900 1986). To counter the state’s argument about an absence of tradition, the tribes in the case called upon the expertise of Lowell Bean. Bean, a professor of anthropology at California State University Hayward, had lived on the Morongo reservation, conducted extensive ethno-historical research, and published extensively on the Cahuilla Indian culture, which includes both the Cabazon and the Morongo bands. Bean declared that ‘traditional gambling techniques have continued among these people from time immemorial until the present. Gambling has at no time in the history of the Cahuilla peoples ceased as a significant activity, including today’. He further asserted, ‘this gambling included wagers of significant amounts of money’ (Rossum, 2011: 91). Tribes have long observed that Native American cultures, like all cultures, practise adaptation. Contemporary popular culture may use stereotypical images of Native peoples which seem to maroon them in the past, but adaptation has been part of intercultural exchange for millennia. The Cabazon and Morongo tribes agreed with Bean’s conclusion that tribal bingo enterprises are ‘a presentday adaptation of the traditional ways of the Cahuilla people, e.g., the use of tribal lands for gaming, recreation, and generating an income from gambling and spending by outsiders for the benefit of the reservation’ (Rossum, 2011: 109). From this example, we can observe that while the types of games played in casinos differed from traditional games, tribes saw continuity. Ethnographer Stewart Culin spent decades researching games and gambling throughout Native North America. His research revealed for scholars what Native communities already knew, that gaming has ancient roots in North America (Culin, 1975). At a hearing on Indian gaming in

283

284

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

1999, Keith Tinno, chairman of the Shoshone Bannock tribe, noted, ‘Gaming is the oldest form of recreation: the Shoshone and Bannock peoples have conducted traditional games since time immemorial. Hand games and traditional card games still take place on weekends at community lodges’ (Spilde Papers, box 39). This observation indicates the interconnectedness of tribal governing and cultural practices. Writing generally about tribal self-determination, scholar Vine Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux) explained, ‘the old scholarship that treated political and economic activities as separate from the rest of human experience can no longer describe political and economic developments in Indian tribes’ (Deloria and Lytle, 1984: 244; 266–7). Scholars have studied gambling traditions based in spirituality and community belief systems and tribes pass those practices down through generations. Most Native American communities had social contexts for gambling. Gambling could be a reflection of the strength of one’s spirit power, meaning something more significant than luck or skill was engaged in a player’s success. Gambling was also a method for redistribution of wealth, an avenue that was not trade or charity, but which signified shared community responsibilities. Anthropologist Eve Darian-Smith noted, ‘gaming is a supremely sacred activity, tied up with narratives of social behavior and competitive interaction between tribes. The luck involved in winning and losing is very much linked to ideas of morality, sanctity, and the will of supreme deities or gods’ (Darian- Smith, 2003: 57). On the Columbia Plateau, in the interior Pacific Northwest, players called upon their spirit powers to win at gambling, including stick game. Columbia Plateau people acquired spirit powers through vision quests or meaningful deeds. The spirit power, perhaps an animal or even the wind, chose the person, not the other way around, and because this was a reciprocal relationship, the spirit power aided the person so long as the person continued to behave correctly. If a person misbehaved, in the moral sense, a spirit power could abandon the person. Individuals could honour their spirit powers in a variety of ways, and during gambling play, spirit singing was central to the game, as players called on their guardians to bring them victory. Stewart Culin divided traditional Native American games into play of chance and play of skill. He characterized stick game as a game of chance. It is played by two opposing teams, typically with one polished bone and ten sticks on each side (Figure 15.1). Traditionally, players would kneel

Locating Native American Gambling Traditions

Figure 15.1  Colville men’s stick game during the Ceremony of Tears, 15 June 1940, Kettle Falls, Washington. Used by permission: Wallace Gamble Collection, Negative #L96-90.37, unknown photographer, Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture/Eastern Washington State Historical Society.

facing each other over a log or long piece of wood, separated by a few feet, allowing space for items to be placed in the pot. Each team beat on the log during their turn to keep time with singing. Today, players commonly use camping chairs and hand drums to play. During play, one person held the bone in one hand, seeking always to confuse opposing players in order to prevent correct guessing. An opposing player would make a guess, and the player holding the bone would open their hand to reveal either the bone or an empty palm. If the guess was incorrect, the guessing team had to surrender a stick. If correct, the other player ended their turn and gave a stick to the opposing team. All the sticks had to be on one side to finish the game. Culin noted that it was common to play until one team had won three times in a row – not best of three. Scholars and missionaries noted with equal despair that the games could last for days or a week or more, and there would not always be a winner (Culin, 1975: 300–1). Outsiders chronicling this play did not understand that the practice of stick game – not victory in the game – was significant on its own. Historian Larry Cebula contradicted Culin’s designation of stick game, ‘to Plateau Indians, stick game was by no means a game of chance, since it was a person’s spirit power which determined

285

286

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

the outcome. So pervasive was gambling that some anthropologists believe that it was the primary means of exchange on the Plateau’ (Cebula, 2003: 34–5). Ethnomusicologist Chad Hamill (Spokane) described a mid-twentiethcentury account by a Jesuit observing a stick game competition. A husband and wife pair of players was trying to guess against another player, but the player’s songs were too powerful to allow penetration. A Jesuit in attendance at the game, a friend of the player, put his energy alongside the player’s song, and the husband on the opposing side could not make a guess. He gave his turn to the wife, who stared down the priest until he adopted a neutral energy position. At that point, the wife was successful in winning against the player (Hamill, 2012: 105–6). This account illustrates the belief by players that spirit power could be augmented by another kind of spirituality, and it also demonstrates that colonization did not fully diminish ancestral spiritual practices. Jesuit missionaries aimed to end the practice of gambling, viewing it as both pagan and vice. For example, Father Etienne de Rouge, S.J. recounted how, throughout his service on the Columbia Plateau in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he required Indians to bring their decks of cards and gambling bones to him to be burned in order to receive Catholic mass or conversion. Individuals probably adhered to these coercive measures to varying extents, but it is likely that far more Plateau peoples only partially submitted or completely ignored the directive. The Jesuits did not understand that while the instruments of gambling allowed for play of the game, spirit power connected to individuals was what informed one’s success in card games or stick game (The Indian Sentinel, 1912: 42– 4). In 1851, anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan concluded, with some level of frustration, ‘Betting was never reprobated by Native religious teachers; instead they encouraged it.’ Morgan asserted that this led to dangerous overindulgence. ‘It often happened that the Indian gambled away every valuable article which he possessed; his tomahawk, his medals, his ornaments, and even his blanket’ (Morgan, 1975). Like the Jesuits, Morgan did not comprehend the cultural complexities of gambling. From players’ perspectives, it likely seemed entirely probable that they would win next time, not due to luck, as Western thinking might hold, but because of spirit power. And even the loss of goods meant players participated in the cultural processes of exchange, which reinforced connection to community.

Locating Native American Gambling Traditions

Given these cultural contexts for gambling, it becomes easier to appreciate the tradition of gambling as inextricably linked to the past and to cultural traditions. Darian-Smith notes, ‘for Native American communities, the lessons learned from such behavior [gambling] inform complex traditions and myths. Instead of thinking that the state or church should control such gambling behavior, as the dominant non-Indian population claims, for many Native Americans the lessons learned from winning and losing, which often involve the overcoming of temptation and adversity, are regarded as an important part of personal growth and community experience’ (Darian-Smith, 2003: 58). It might be easy for outsiders to dismiss these cultural contexts when comparing them to contemporary Indian casino gaming, but to do so overlooks how the past continues to inform the present for tribal governance and cultural continuity. Non-Native players at penny slots may not call upon a spirit power in the same way that a Native grandma would, but that does not invalidate her practice of believing that doing good deeds for the community could draw support from her spirit power and help her win the jackpot. Indian casinos serve as sites for other forms of cultural and social practices as well. Scholar Caroline Laurent describes casinos as ‘social magnets, places where people go in part because they know they will see their friends or family, and where being Indian is accepted by everyone in the facility’. Casinos host community events of all kinds – powwows, conferences, classes, youth gatherings and elders’ day dinners, cultural and academic events. Non-Native visitors to casinos might view their sole function as economic, but tribal citizens acknowledge that the spaces represent more than that. While it may seem counter-intuitive to casino guests, ‘In a paradoxical way, tribal casinos are the place where Indian culture and identity are at their pinnacles because their presence there is guaranteed’ (Laurent, 2018: 103). Cultural revitalization on display at casinos, through Native-made art decorating the spaces and through performances of traditional dance or music sung in ancestral languages demonstrate the scope of casinos’ impacts on communities. Outside the walls of casinos, in locations across communities, casino revenue funds cultural revitalization programmes including Native language programmes, training which is central to many tribes’ priorities because nearly 200 Native languages are on UNESCO’s list of endangered languages (UNESCO n.d.). On the Columbia Plateau,

287

288

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

community classes are offered in traditional food gathering and preservation, ancestral arts such as basket-weaving, and language classes in multiple dialects traditionally spoken in the region. For example, at the Colville Confederated Tribes government offices, employees answer their phones in their preferred dialect. This may seem like a small shift, but in fact it moves the tribe one step closer to fully re-engaging with knowledge and practices interrupted during 150 years of colonial encounter. Funds for this revitalization could perhaps have eventually been generated by other tribal industries, but the impact of gaming revenue combined with similar programmes launched by other gaming tribes at the same time builds important momentum which cannot be overlooked. In light of these examples, it becomes easier to understand why tribes do not view gaming only as a wealth generator, but also as a mechanism which supports the real wealth: community, culture, self-determination and sovereignty. In testimony during a 1998 congressional subcommittee hearing on Indian gaming, Daniel Tucker, chairman of the California Nations Indian Gaming Association, prepared to discuss the social impact of Indian gaming, ‘Today you will hear about a new world. A new world that replaces welfare dependency with full employment and selfsufficiency’ (Spilde Papers, box 40). During another hearing, Clifton Pattea, president of the Fort McDowell Mohave-Apache Indian Community, asserted, ‘A few short years of revenue cannot reverse years of poverty, despair, and lack of quality education’ (Spilde Papers, box 39). He urged the subcommittee to recognize the social impacts of economic development through Indian gaming. Social impacts of gaming extend beyond tribal borders to reach nonNative communities as well. It is important to remember that tribes believe they are charged with caring for ancestral homelands, regardless of reservation, county, city, state or national boundaries. Consequently, it is intuitive that tribal governments engage in more charitable giving more broadly because of gaming. For example, the non-profit Cherokee Preservation Foundation is funded by gaming revenue generated in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ (EBCI) casinos. Their funding goes to preserve Native culture, protect and enhance the natural environment, and create appropriate and diverse economic opportunities in order to improve the quality of life EBCI citizens. The Kalispel Tribe of Indians in Washington state funds not only tribal programmes, but awards $1 million in charitable funds each year through grants to regional non-profits

Locating Native American Gambling Traditions

working in the areas of education, health care, social services, arts and culture, and environmental preservation (Cherokee Preservation Foundation, n.d; Kalispel Tribe Community Fund, n.d.). In Wisconsin, the Potawatomi Tribe’s Hotel and Casino created a charitable fund, the Heart of Canal Street. In 2018, the fund celebrated twenty-five years of giving hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to hundreds of local children’s charities, to the tune of $18 million so far (Potawatomi Hotel & Casino, n.d.). Gaming tribes across Indian Country support their own communities through employment and social and cultural programmes, and they also support their local and regional communities through employment and charitable giving. This interconnectedness reinforces tribal cultural values of reciprocity and the broad charge of caring for communities. As tribes became more successful and more self-sufficient, some Americans questioned whether Indians who were not impoverished could still be Indian. Historian Alexandra Harmon noted, ‘When it seemed that Indians could also be millionaires, many people tried to sort out their thoughts on ambition and on Indians simultaneously’ (Harmon, 2010: 3). Anthropologist Julie Pelletier observed that mainstream society’s stereotypes of Indians still placed Native peoples at a far remove from American society, in an idealized place where Indians were not ‘supposed to engage in capitalistic business enterprises or thrive economically in contemporary modes. The Noble Savage has no interest in economic development – he or she is at one with Nature and is not driven by economic interests’ (Pelletier, 2018: 35). For many, Indian gaming created a new and complicated lens through which to view the question of whether Americans could reconcile Indian aims of prosperity (Harmon, 2010: 4). For tribes, prosperity meant employment, cultural revitalization and economic development. This wasn’t a question of luxury cars or European vacations, but instead gaming meant getting tribal citizens off welfare and working towards full employment, as well as supporting education in all forms for tribal citizens. At a congressional subcommittee hearing in 1998, Stan Rice, Jr., president of the Yavapi-Prescott Tribe, declared, ‘Today, I come before you to share a success story. A true story of self-sufficiency, growth, community involvement and, most importantly, a story of pride. . . . Once the recipient of charity and governmental support, we are now giving back to our community and supporting many of those charitable groups which once

289

290

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

helped us. . . . In summary, I pose the question, “What has gaming revenue done for the Yavapi-Prescott Tribe?” The answer is . . . fulfill a dream. What we once thought was impossible has now been made possible. . . . Now we are in a position to realize our dreams, to build a community, and to preserve our heritage’ (Spilde Papers, box 39). Tribes freely discuss the many benefits of Indian gaming, but not all Native people are equally supportive of gaming enterprises. Tribal citizens and scholars alike question assertions that Indian casino gaming really is connected to the past. Literary scholar Paul Pasquaretta observed that social and sacred games have little in common with today’s Indian casino gambling and Ojibwe scholar Gerald Vizenor asserted ‘pull tabs are not moccasin games and bingo is far from a traditional giveaway to counter materialism’ (Pasquaretta, 2000: 123). Some tribes had cultural traditions of not gambling within their group, in order to preserve community resources and material goods. Anthropologist Gabriel Yanicki drew upon decades of scholarship to discuss how some Columbia Plateau tribes, including the Okanagan, Kalispel and Yakama, preferred to gamble with strangers or with players from different villages or tribes. He noted that gambling was thus considered a liminal kind of exchange for these groups; local players gambled against distant acquaintances or perhaps strangers because of their cultural preferences to play against out-group gamblers (Yanicki, 2017: 113). Some Indian gaming leaders have characterized casino gambling as ‘exporting the product’ to non-Indians, which reinforces practices of out-group play, but at the same time, in the contemporary era, in-group members consume that product right alongside visitors. Within tribal communities, fears persist that casinos are taking money out of family pockets and putting it into slot machines. Tribal casino employees generally know community members, and many tribes have processes in place to bar players who have crossed the line into overspending or problem gambling. In addition, tribes fund problem gambling prevention and treatment programmes both within and outside their communities. Arizona tribes, for example, have invested roughly $2 million a year in state programmes since 2007 (Bentley, 2016; Arizona Department of Gaming, 2017). Questions about Native American identity and heritage have also become central to conversations about Indian gaming. Beyond outsider confusion related to ‘rich Indians’ or academic apprehension that ‘Indians are “losing their culture” by participating in gaming and running casinos’ (Pelletier, 2018: 33), some tribal citizens fear that by ‘performing’ culture

Locating Native American Gambling Traditions

in casino settings, tribal practices are being diluted. Literary scholars have used fiction to explore these complexities in more depth, creating narratives that offer glimpses into true stories while obscuring specifics from the public eye (Gercken, 2018: 5–7). Some Native citizens believe that casino gaming reinforces the worst stereotypes about Indians – these include depictions of Indians as lazy or greedy or worse – and they fear that no matter how much tribes succeed, hearts and minds of non-Natives will remain unchanged. Indeed, as Indians become ‘rich’, characterizations of laziness and entitlement can increase. There are many practical scenarios where Indian gaming offers win-win solutions for tribes and their neighbours, but tribes also experience the no-win end of this equation: Indians might only ever be perceived as a stereotype because in public minds they are static and unchanging. Non-Indian people often query tribal citizens, ‘are casinos good for tribes?’ The question might originate from curiosity, anxiety about ‘lost’ culture, jealousy about ‘rich Indians’, genuine interest in tribal political and economic development, or myriad other reasons. Regardless of the motivation for the inquiry, there is not one universal answer nor are there uncomplicated answers. Each gaming tribe has its own reasons for operating casinos and each citizen of that community has their own perspectives on the benefits and costs of what gaming means for their communities and their families. It is clear, however, that Native American cultural practices provide a meaningful lens through which to consider Indian casino gaming. Ancestral games grew out of both the desire to play and the impetus to practise spirituality. Today, as yesterday, spirituality informs culture, culture informs tribal governance, tribal governance supports culture. Today’s electronic roulette may seem different than an ancient wheel game, but in reality, they are both the same circle. Adopting that perspective will result in deeper comprehension of Indian gaming, one informed by complexity rather than by stereotypes. And here in the twenty-first century, isn’t it about time?

References Arizona Department of Gaming. 2017. ‘Tribal gaming contributions show increase for third straight quarter’, 3 November 2017. http:​/​/www​​.azin​​

291

292

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

diang​​aming​​.org/​​triba​​l​-gam​​ing​-c​​ontri​​butio​​ns​-sh​​ow​-in​​creas​​e​-thi​​rd​​-st​​raigh​​ t​-qua​​rter/​ (accessed 9 August 2018). Bentley, A. 2016. ‘Do more casinos mean more problem gambling?’ 15 March 2016. http:​/​/blo​​g​.nat​​ivepa​​rtner​​ship.​​org​/d​​o​-mor​​e​-cas​​inos-​​ mean-​​more-​​pro​bl​​em​-ga​​mblin​​g/ (accessed 9 August 2018). California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, 480 US 202 (1987). California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, 783 F.2d 900 (9t Cir 1986). Cattelino, J. 2008. High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press. Cebula, L. 2003. Plateau Indians and the Quest for Spiritual Power, 1700– 1850. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cherokee Preservation Foundation. n.d. ‘Our mission’. http:​/​/che​​rokee​​prese​​ rvati​​on​.or​​g​/who​​-we​-a​​re​/a​t​​-a​-gl​​ance/​ (accessed 9 August 2018). Culin, S. 1975. Games of the North American Indians. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Darien-Smith, E. 2003. New Capitalists: Law, Politics, and Identity Surrounding Casino Gaming on Native American Land. Boston: Cengage Learning. Deloria, V. and Lytle, C. M. 1984. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gercken, B. and Pelletier, J., eds. 2018. Gambling on Authenticity: Gaming, the Noble Savage, and the Not-So-New Indian. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Hamill, C. S. 2012. Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau: The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Indian Hymn Singer. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. Harmon, A. 2010. Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Hoeft, M. 2014. The Bingo Queens of Oneida: How Two Moms Started Tribal Gaming in Wisconsin. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Indian Sentinel. Jesuit Oregon Province Archives. De Rouge Papers, box 1: folder 7. Gonzaga University Special Collections. Kalispel Tribe of Indians. n.d. ‘Charitable fund’. https​:/​/ww​​w​.kal​​ispel​​tribe​​ .com/​​commu​​nity/​​chari​​​table​​-fund​ (accessed 9 August 2018). Laurent, C. 2018. ‘Casinos, culture, and cash: How gambling has affected Minnesota Tribal Nations’. In B. Gercken and J. Pelletier (eds), Gambling on Authenticity: Gaming, the Noble Savage, and the Not-So-New Indian, 85–110. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Morgan, L. H. 1851. League of the Iroquois: A Classic Study of an American Indian Tribe (1975): 293. Quoted in Paul Pasquaretta, Gambling and

Locating Native American Gambling Traditions

Survival in Native North America, 119. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003. Pasquaretta, P. 2000. ‘Contesting the evil gambler: Gambling, choice, and survival in American Indian Texts’. In A. Mullis and D. Kemper (eds), Indian Gaming: Who Wins? 131–51. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center. Pattea, C. M. ‘Fort McDowell Indian Community’. Spilde Papers. University of Nevada Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives. Pelletier, J. 2018. ‘The noble savage as entrepreneur: Indian gaming success’. In B. Gercken and J. Pelletier (eds), Gambling on Authenticity: Gaming, the Noble Savage, and the Not-So-New Indian, 33–56. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Potawatomi Hotel & Casino. n.d. ‘Heart of Canal street’. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pay​​ sbig.​​com​/b​​usine​​ss​/he​​art​-c​​​anal-​​stree​t (accessed 9 August 2018). Pub. L. 100–497, § 3, 17 October 1988, 102 Stat. 246. Rice, S. ‘Yavapi Prescott Tribe’. Spilde Papers. University of Nevada Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives. Rossum, R. A. 2011. The Supreme Court and Tribal Gaming: California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Tinno, K. ‘Shoshone Bannock’. Spilde Papers. University of Nevada Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives. Tucker, Daniel. Spilde Papers. University of Nevada Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives. UNESCO. n.d. ‘Atlas of the World’s languages in danger’. http:​/​/www​​.unes​​co​ .or​​g​/lan​​guage​​s​-atl​​as​​/in​​dex​.p​​hp (accessed 9 August 2018). U.S. Congress. House. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Indian Gambling Control Act: Hearings on H.R. 4566, 98th Cong., 2nd sess., 19, June 1984. Yanicki, G. M. 2017. ‘Reinventing the wheel game: Prestige gambling on the plains/Plateau Frontier’. In B. Voorhies (eds), Prehistoric Games of North American Indians: Subarctic to Mesoamerica, 104–18. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

293

16 On the infrastructure of gaming The case of pachinko Keiji Amano and Geoffrey Rockwell

Chapter Outline Introduction294 On Pachinko 295 On infrastructure 299 On the evolution of pachinko infrastructure 301 Early manual ball systems 303 The development of automatic ball supply system 305 The development of the hall computer 307 Conclusions309 Appendix: Pachinko playing resources 311

Introduction In July of 2018, the National Diet of Japan passed a law legalizing gambling resorts in Japan (Sugiura, 2018). This represents a major change in the national

On the Infrastructure of Gaming

infrastructure of gaming in Japan as the country moves from neighbourhood pachinko parlours to fancy integrated destination resorts that combine gambling, video arcade games and other activities like golf. In this chapter, we will look at the evolution of pachinko infrastructure in Japan leading up to this change. We will begin by introducing pachinko, a gambling game related to pinball that dominates leisure economics in Japan. We will then make the case for looking at the infrastructure of gambling in general, and that of pachinko in particular, as a way of understanding not only gambling, but also the integration of game culture and gambling in Japan. This will lead to a discussion of the evolution of the infrastructure of pachinko from the small halls set up in entertainment districts to the large neighbourhood parlours with automated systems. Finally, we will conclude by speculating on the changes coming as destination resorts get built bringing pachinko into integrated spaces with everything from hotels to restaurants to golf.

On Pachinko Pachinko is a game like pinball, but it is played on a vertical playing field and the goal is to get the balls fired into winning pockets instead of keeping them constantly in play. In a traditional pachinko machine (see Figure 16.1), you would flip the handle on the right to fire a ball over the top. The ball would then fall through the pins and either fall into a winning pocket like the red one in the middle or fall to the bottom and be lost. With a machine like the Masamura Gauge All 15 from 1950, for every ball that fell into a winning pocket you would get 15 balls back. The goal then is to figure out how to fire the balls so that they reliably fall through the pins and spinners into winning pockets more often than once every fifteen tries. That way you would win more balls than you lost, and with your winnings you could redeem prizes. Modern pachinko has a number of added features (see Figure 16.2). First, the balls are fired automatically at a set number per minute; the player uses a throttle that controls the force with which they are fired. Second, there is a screen in the playing field, usually on the right, but sometimes in the centre. When you get a ball into the winning pocket, instead of winning a fixed number of balls, you trigger a slots-like random game that allows you to win far more than fifteen balls if you are lucky. Modern pachinko machines have complicated decision trees with ‘fever’

295

296

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

Figure 16.1  ‘Masamura Gauge All 15’, by Masamura (1950). Photographs of machines are by authors. This machine is preserved in the Pachinko Museum in Nagoya.

modes where the odds get better for a period of time. Further, the screens will play content tied to the theme of the machine. This allows the machines to be themed according to popular soap operas, computer games or anime. Getting balls in the winning pocket not only wins balls, but unlocks custom content from your favourite franchise. We have compiled a collection of resources in an appendix, ‘Pachinko Playing Resources’, including links to videos that show how pachinko is played. You can’t understand pachinko, however, without understanding the way that it is and isn’t gambling. Gambling is technically illegal (at

On the Infrastructure of Gaming

Figure 16.2 ‘CR Pachinko Fuyu no Sonata 2’, by Kyoraku (2008)2. This machine is tied to the Korean TV drama Winter Sonata and was aimed at drawing women into pachinko parlours.

least until the recent legislation) in Japan, but there are a limited number of games including pachinko where you can play for prizes and then there are ways to get cash for the prizes won (Harmon, 2016). Thus, pachinko is for some a form of neighbourhood gambling where you rent the steel balls that you play, and if you win more balls, then you can redeem them for prizes in the pachinko parlour. Certain prizes (special plastic chits) can be taken to a small prize booth hidden in the neighbourhood where you can sell the prizes back for cash. The combination of the pachinko parlour, the prize booth and the prize wholesalers (to whom the booths sell the prizes and from whom the parlours buy them) form the ‘three-shop’ system that is the high-level infrastructure of types of commercial entities that thrive on pachinko and make it not technically gambling. One might also include

297

298

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

the National Police Agency that regulates pachinko and, in turn, benefits from this regulation (Sibbitt, 1997). This byzantine arrangement allows players that want to gamble to be able to make of pachinko a form of gambling. For others it remains a way of killing time at an acceptable price. It should be noted that economically players lose money on this three-shop system just through the difference in exchange value of the balls. Sibbitt (1997: 569) estimated that balls bought for 4 ¥ each would only yield 2.5 ¥ if redeemed directly without playing at all. If you bought 1,000 ¥ worth of balls, walked over to the counter in the pachinko parlour and traded them for prizes, and then went directly to the prize booth to sell them, you would get about 625 ¥. This means that the actual odds offered in pachinko can be quite good, creating a false sense that you are winning when all you are doing is winning balls not money. Creating a false sense of winning, is of course, one of the ways to get people to keep on playing (Schüll, 2012). We will return to the infrastructure of balls later on. What is truly astounding about pachinko is how it dominates the leisure market in Japan. Sibbitt (1997) estimated that in the 1990s it accounted for 4 per cent of GNP. While the economic impact of pachinko is diminishing as the number of players drops, it is still around a US$200billion-a-year business (Chan, 2018). Pachinko makes so much money that it is not surprising that there are large parlours in choice real estate locations in Japanese cities like major intersections. Pachinko is ‘neighborhood gambling’ that most can play near home. It is not ‘destination gambling’ like the recently legalized integrated casinos or those in Macao that many Japanese frequent. We can thus sketch a preliminary outline of the commercial three-shop infrastructure of pachinko that ensures that it is not considered gambling: zz

zz

Pachinko is played in parlours. These parlours will have rows of machines, rest areas, food areas and prize counters. Players buy balls and play them in order to win more balls. The balls won can be exchanged for prizes. The prizes can be exchanged at prize booths discretely located near parlours for cash. The separation, both physical and economic of parlours and prize booths, is what ensures that the parlours are not gambling dens according to the penal code,

On the Infrastructure of Gaming

zz

These prize booths in turn sell the redeemed prizes to wholesalers who sell them back to the parlours. The wholesalers are the third commercial entity in the three-shop system.

This commercial structure is not, however, the only type of infrastructure. In this chapter, we will follow the balls (ko) as they cascade through the machine making a ‘pachi’ sound. When you enter pachinko parlours, you can’t help but be struck by the sound of thousands of steel balls tumbling through pins. The noisy flow of these balls combined with the smell of cigarettes marks the parlours as a different space, a space of gambling entertainment. In fact, the operators will even play a ‘pachi’ soundtrack when the hall is empty to make it feel full of hidden players. This chapter will thus turn to the mechanical infrastructure inside the parlours that manage the balls from when they are played to when they are cleaned and passed back for sale. But first we will ask how we can best study infrastructure?

On infrastructure Hiroki Azuma (2009) describes postmodern Japanese otaku (fan) culture as one of ‘database animals’. By this he means that otaku no longer believe in grand narratives; instead otaku consume across postmodern transmedia ‘databases’ of content where there is no coherent story, no given genres and no clear moral message. A Pokémon fan will play on UFO Catchers to get a rare stuffed toy of her favourite character, watch the anime at home, play the games on a mobile console and buy the pillows for her bedroom. While Azuma didn’t mean that otaku are literally databases, he was drawing our attention to the random way content is framed and consumed in the Japanese media mix. Grand narratives are teleological, and databases are random access for optimized retrieval the way a pachinko ball bounces through pins. That which enframes the content and makes it available for consumption is what we mean by infrastructure. It is that which makes possible the access to content, randomly or otherwise. Bowker et al. talk about it as ‘pervasive enabling resources’ (2009: 98) and how they can be studied. For gaming, infrastructure starts with the mediating platform or console on which the game is played. In the case of pachinko there isn’t

299

300

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

really a separate platform in the sense that there is mediating machine or console in video gaming. Each pachinko machine is different, though they share components and basic architecture. Infrastructure then extends to the people, technologies and spaces that service the game machine, allowing players to access it. In the case of video games, this would include the network services, online stores and physical stores where you can buy games and peripherals. In the case of pachinko, it is the parlour that holds the machines and technologies that support the machines in the parlour. The parlour is then part of the three-shop system introduced earlier. The in-parlour technologies will be the focus of this chapter, but, first, some more on infrastructure: The term ‘infrastructure’ evokes vast sets of collective equipment necessary to human activities, such as buildings, roads, bridges, rail tracks, channels, ports, and communications networks. Beyond bricks, mortar, pipes or wires, infrastructure also encompasses more abstract entities, such as protocols (human and computer), standards, and memory. (Bowker et al., 2009: 97)

The infrastructure of gaming is harder to study than the content because it is taken for granted when it works. As Bowker et al. (2009) put it, when we think of infrastructure we think of common utilities like roads that no one notices until they stop working. Infrastructure technologies tend to become invisible in the using so one can concentrate on the game content. You might pay attention to the platform or pachinko parlour when preparing to play, but once you get into the game, the infrastructure recedes into the background. What we want to do in this chapter is to bring that infrastructure back into view. We want to look at pachinko the way Jones and Thiruvathukal look at the Nintendo Wii (2012). Like Alan Liu (2016), we are interested in infrastructure beyond the immediate machine. A full study of the infrastructure of a game looks also at the supporting technologies, the habits of consumption and the economics that enframe a game like pachinko. For pachinko, the background technologies, the parlours, the staff and the economic infrastructure are already changing as the number of players drops and the government changes the laws on gambling. These changes affect the experience of playing. Now is the time to take stock before integrated resorts further change the spaces of play and economics of pachinko, by going back to when the infrastructure of pachinko evolved into what it is today.

On the Infrastructure of Gaming

On the evolution of pachinko infrastructure Let us therefore return to the steel balls of pachinko. The evolution of the infrastructure of pachinko since the game first became popular in the 1950s is particularly instructive of how infrastructure influences the game experience. The first parlours were small spaces in entertainment districts where parlour staff replenished balls manually behind the wall of machines and players stood while playing. If you watch a movie like Yasujiro Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952) you see pachinko being played standing in small rectangular spaces with machines on three sides that are open to the crowd. Likewise, in Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), you see the hero playing pachinko in an amusement district goaded on by his ‘Mephistopheles’. Both Ozu and Kurosawa present pachinko as a leisure time and space separate from the serious places of home and work. Paradaisu Yokohama was crowded at eight o’clock in the evening. The volcanic rush of tinny balls, the clanging of tiny hammers across miniature metal bowls, the beeping and flashing of colorful lights, and the throaty shouts of welcome from the obsequious staff felt like a reprieve from the painful silence in his head. Haruki didn’t even mind the thick swirls of tobacco smoke that hung like a layer of gray mist above the heads of the players seated opposite the rows upon rows of vertical, animated machines. (Lee, 2017: 381)

As pachinko exploded in popularity, Japan began to see larger and more dedicated parlours located in neighbourhoods rather than entertainment districts until pachinko came to dominate the valuable real estate of city intersections and the time of a significant percentage of the Japanese population. The more social parlours of the 1950s evolved into the closed parlours where the machines are in the narrow rows that you see in Wim Wender’s tribute to Ozu (and pachinko) titled Tokyo-Ga (1985). In the narrow rows, one doesn’t talk to others or look over anyone’s shoulder. One plays alone to kill time. The evolution of the infrastructure is not only about the space and about location of parlours, but also about the network of businesses. The pachinko industry today is connected to many ancillary device manufacturers and other related businesses such as golf resorts and trademark rights businesses. In the modern pachinko industry, there are

301

302

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

a variety of peripheral device manufacturers and related industries other than pachinko manufacturers and pachinko parlours. When you drop into a pachinko parlour, you tend to pay attention only to pachinko machines, but the pachinko parlour is also a space where high-tech infrastructure necessary for enjoying playing pachinko is hidden away. Among the various peripheral devices supporting the parlour operation, there are devices familiar to the players located right next to the machines, such as the Ball Rental Unit that lets you buy (rent) balls with cash, and a Call Lamp that lets you call for staff with a Data Counter that provides statistics on the machine. These are installed next to the pachinko machine itself around the edge of the game machine, the Ball Rental to the left, and the Call Lamp/Data Counter is mounted on the top of the machine. The Call Lamps/Data Counters, it should be mentioned, are remarkably sophisticated. They have displays that visualize jackpot

Figure 16.3  ‘Hyper Sea Story in Carib’, by SANYO (2007).

On the Infrastructure of Gaming

statistics for the machine, and they can show the odds for each game machine. If you win a lot of balls, they summon staff that bring trays to hold your winnings. They also play a role as an information disclosure terminal about the parlour and the odds of winning. Meanwhile, there are other essential systems in the background which customers do not see directly. The key pieces of hidden infrastructure in the parlour are the system that supplies balls to each pachinko machine, and the ‘Hall Computer’ that accumulates and analyses machine and customer data. This chapter will now step through the development history of these types of infrastructure and how they changed the play of pachinko over the decades. The chapter will not look at the pachinko machine itself as infrastructure; instead, we will follow the pachinko balls.

Early manual ball systems Pachinko is a game where one tries to earn more balls than you lose to the machine. Therefore, in addition to the physical game machine, it is necessary to have a system that smoothly replenishes the steel balls that are at the heart of the mechanical experience so that the game is not interrupted. Unlike pinball, a pachinko throttle now automatically launches balls at a rate of 100 balls a minute when you play. Given that today’s parlours typically have a few hundred pachinko machines or more, that means a lot of balls have to be gathered and fed back to the machines. Each machine usually has to have 10,000 balls as a stock should someone win big. To operate on a busy night, a parlour needs to be able to feed over a million balls into their machines. Thus, the importance of ball handling infrastructure. Even with the early pachinko machines, where balls were launched individually and a winning ball only paid ten to fifteen balls, it was necessary to constantly replenish machines. The balls won by players are called ‘dedama’, and given how limited the space is around the pachinko machine, it was hard to store enough balls for a night’s worth of play in the machine itself. For this reason, until the late 1950s, a parlour clerk entered the space behind the pachinko machines and supplied balls as needed. According to Mizoue (1999), each parlour clerk took care of ten pachinko machines in a narrow corridor. In Kirio Urayama’s film Foundry Town

303

304

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

(1962), there are establishing shots from above where one can see the narrow corridors with clerks feeding the machines. This feeding of the machines was stressful physical work mostly carried out by young women called ura-mawari (back rotators – see Figure 16.4). While it was demanding work, the number of young women working at pachinko parlours increased through the 1950s, as it was not easy to find jobs with such good pay especially for ethnic Koreans. The film Foundry Town (1962) and the earlier novel by Chiyo Hayafune depict this period. The main character Jun, a junior high school girl, works hard in the narrow corridors of a pachinko parlour. When the parlour opens, the ura-mawari replenish the ball tanks above the pachinko machines to prevent a shortage of the balls. After closing, the balls collected from each machine were washed by the ura-mawari with hot water mixed with powdered soap, wiping them dry with a cloth. Usually this work continued until midnight. As part of this process it was important to polish the balls. Even today, pachinko parlours polish the balls as it makes the balls faster and less likely to fall into winning pockets. Speaking of staff, until 2015, another important staff person in addition to the ura-mawari was the ‘kugi-shi’ or ‘nail doctor’, who adjusts the nails of the pachinko playing field. The nail doctor would go through the parlour after closing to fix machines whose nails were bent out of line. He would tap the nails that were aiding players back into position. In short, arranging the angles of the nails and polishing the balls were important tasks that could have an effect on the payout to players.

Figure 16.4  Pictures of ura-mawari and ball cleaning baskets (Pachinko Museum 2011, 8).

On the Infrastructure of Gaming

The development of automatic ball supply system An attempt to automate the harsh work of the ura-mawari began in 1955 and was led by a parlour manager Kohei Takeuchi (Mizoue, 1999: 128). Takeuchi was a craftsman who originally created woodworking joints. During the Second World War, he worked at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries where he acquired metalworking skills. In 1958, he developed the ancestor of the automatic ball supply system called ‘Octopus Arms’. He implemented this system in a new pachinko parlour in Nagoya City. It was a system that automatically supplied balls to 161 pachinko machines (Jinbou, 2007). The Octopus Arms worked as follows: 1. The out balls (balls that didn’t go into a winning pocket) flowed to the cellar, where a machine polished the balls automatically. 2. The balls were then piped back up above the machines through a conveyor system in the parlour. 3. The balls were then supplied to the machines through individual pipes (octopus arms) radiating out from the ceiling of the parlour. 4. The supplied balls were then stored in a tank installed above the pachinko machine. Furthermore, Takeuchi attached mechanical counters that counted the balls being loaded into each machine and those leaving the machine. This made it easy to calculate the number of balls to be supplied to each machine (Mizoue, 1999). The combination of Octopus Arms and ball counting technologies are the early versions of the basic infrastructure of the pachinko parlour that led to the contemporary automatic ball supply systems and hall computers. In 1959, when the Isewan Typhoon landed in Nagoya, the southern part of Nagoya was flooded. Because Octopus Arms needed there to be a basement in the parlour, many parlours were flooded and their Octopus Arms became unusable. So Takeuchi improved the Octopus Arms system. His basic idea was to polish the balls on each island with a resin belt while raising them and thus not use the basement. He got the idea from one of the many spinning factories in the Chita Peninsula in Aichi prefecture. In 1962, he developed an improved system that spread rapidly nationwide. Out balls were polished behind the rows (islands) of machines and sent up

305

306

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

to be redistributed on a conveyor belt. This automation not only saved on staff, but also on space as one didn’t need as much space behind machines. Of course, Takeuchi was not the only one who tried to develop automatic ball supply systems. In 1960, Nishijin developed the unmanned pachinko machine that didn’t need to be supplied balls. Another invention by Nishijin was a 1963 ‘Space Pipe’, which was an automatic ball supply system for the entire parlour like Octopus Arms. ‘Space Pipe’ was named after the Space Race because it had a command room on the ceiling of the parlour where a manager could direct balls to be sent to each machine. After Space Pipe, Nishijin developed a fully automatic ball supply system called ‘Moonlight Line’ that appeared in 1964. By the early 1970s, automatic ball supply systems had penetrated many pachinko parlours, replacing the ura-marawi. This was also a time when various electromechanical devices were introduced to pachinko, including the electric throttles that replaced the launch handles of the early machines. The throttle meant players now controlled the continuous firing of balls rather than launching one after another manually as you do in pinball. The throttle doesn’t control the number of balls shot over the pins, which is actually controlled by legislation, but the force with which they are launched. Turning the throttle sends them farther or closer. The goal is to find a sweet spot which increases the odds of the balls falling down into winning pockets. The introduction of the throttle thus led to a dramatic increase in the consumption of balls which both meant players could lose more balls in less time (or win faster) and that balls had to be moved though to machines faster. Needless to say, the introduction of the electric throttle would have been impossible without automatic ball supply systems. Thus, parlour infrastructure made possible one of the major changes in pachinko play mechanics, the switch from manual single launch handles to electric throttles that continuously fire balls. The change in play mechanic was not the only change to the player’s experience brought about by the introduction of automatic ball supply systems. With less space needed behind the machines for staff, the space between islands of machines could be expanded. With more space between the rows, it became possible to design deeper machines and to put a chair in front of each pachinko machine. By deeper machines we refer to the newer machines that have sculpted frames with figures, lights and sometimes moving parts. This enhances the theatrical framing of the play.

On the Infrastructure of Gaming

This framing is like that of a paper theatre with a succession of frames starting from the sculptured outer frame, then the ring of pins through which the balls are shot and then a screen in the centre or to one side. (See Figures 16.2 and 16.3.) With the increase in space making room for chairs, this encouraged players to play longer and thus lose (or win) more. While in the 1950s, as mentioned earlier, players stood before the machines and played by launching balls individually, by the 1970s players were sitting and launching hundreds of balls electromechanically. Manufacturers reacted to these changes and developed pachinko machines that then had more complicated gaming features where certain events might trigger different odds. Such games with complicated odds then rewarded longer playing as players now had more to explore. Together with the electric throttle revolution, automatic ball supply systems literally expanded the room for innovation for those developing pachinko machines.

The development of the hall computer The second pillar of parlour automation was computerization, especially the introduction of the ‘Hall Computer’ that gathers data for the entire parlour (or hall). Installation of automatic ball supply systems increased the number of pachinko machines that could be installed in a parlour and the authorization of quick-firing pachinko machines (that use throttles to let the player shoot 100 balls a minute) by the police in 1969 brought significant change to parlour operation. Not only did the parlour have to supply an increased number of balls, they also had to track the real time flow of the balls to predict demand. This led to automation of the back office as well. The 1970s saw the development of computers for industrial use in Japan. In the pachinko industry, Kita Denshi started their business in 1962, Ace Denken was established in 1966, Daikoku Denki started their operation in 1973, and in 1974, Sun Denshi was founded. These companies started developing systems for real-time management of the entire parlour called ‘Hall Computers’ in the early 1970s. Ace Denken released the first Hall Computer in 1972. Sun Denshi developed and began selling

307

308

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

computers for pachinko halls in 1974. Daikoku Denki released the Omicron computer type 1 in 1974.1 By 1972, Takeuchi’s automatic ball supply system Almighty occupied 25 per cent of the market, and Takeuchi introduced the computer system developed by Kita Denshi, which is the pioneer of hall computer systems. It could manage the balls for a parlour without any human intervention. In 1976, Takeuchi developed an improved system called Minoc 1000, which connected to Daikoku’s hall computer. Soon after that, the combination of hall computers and automatic ball supply systems became indispensable for pachinko parlours. Until replaced by contemporary network technologies (Local Area Networks or Wifi), information electronically collected at the pachinko machines was transmitted through dedicated cables connected to the hall computers. In the 1980s, when pachinko machines were still electrom­ echanical machines, not electronic as they are now, the ball information would be sent from electrical counters to the hall computer. Now each pachinko machine has its own electronics as they have LCD screens that show media content and run video slots triggered by winning balls. The contemporary machine is thus a hybrid of electronic and electromechanical components. Among other things, the individual machines can now both track ball usage, track jackpots and track payouts. This information is then not only transmitted to the hall computer, but also shown in summary form above the machine on the Call Lamp/Data Counter display. Based on the information gathered, the parlour manager can predict sales and decide on the sales strategy for the next day. For example, it is possible to change the settings of those pachinko machines that have paid out too much (to the extent that it does not break the law). The important task of trying to control the payout done by nail doctors in the past has been replaced by the hall computer. This computerization has had an interesting effect on player behaviour, especially the behaviour of ‘pachi-pros’ or those who consider themselves professional pachinko players. When players became aware of the

See the Kita Denshi Company Profile, https​:/​/ww​​w​.kit​​adens​​hi​.co​​.jp​/c​​ompan​​y​/ki​t​​adens​​hi/; History of Ace Denken, http:​/​/www​​.ace-​​denke​​n​.com​​/comp​​any​/h​​isto​r​​y​.htm​​l; Daikoku Denki Corporate Profile: History, https​:/​/ww​​w​.dai​​koku.​​co​.jp​​/en​/c​​p​/​his​​tory/​; History of Sun Denshi, https://www​.sun- denshi​.co​.jp​/company​/hist​ory/; and Development History of Ace Denken, http://www​.ace- denken​.com​/company​/development​.​html. 1

On the Infrastructure of Gaming

existence of hall computers, they began to second guess the imagined manipulation of machines by parlours. As a result, ‘winning’ strategies based on presumed parlour manipulation circulate in pachinko culture even today, much as they do in other gambling cultures. Such strategies predate the computerization of pachinko, but they now assume that management is manipulating the machines electronically, and therefore there are better and worse times and machines to play. Sedensky (1991), for example, has a chapter (5) of pro tips. He writes about how one should not play on the days when ‘salary men’ are paid because that is when parlours assume they will get players who don’t mind losing and set the machines to pay out less. The general assumption now with computerization is that the parlour is manipulating jackpots in each machine by remote control while players are playing, so that players could lose not because of their skills and techniques, but because the parlour is doing some dirty tricks. In closing, we should add that in recent years the functions of hall computers have diversified. The hall computer can now be used for customer management such as distributing membership cards and so on. There are even face recognition systems being installed in some machines in order to track what kind of machines customers prefer. More concretely, usage data suggests sales strategies to the parlour. By analysing sales data and the composition of the pachinko machines of the entire parlour, managers can decide what type of the pachinko machines to be introduced or removed based on which ones are popular. In the competitive business of pachinko, tracking what machines are popular among what demographic can make a difference. The hall computer has, in effect, evolved from just managing balls, to becoming a business management system for the whole parlour.

Conclusions To conclude, from an infrastructure point of view, pachinko started as small stalls of stand-alone machines in parlours in entertainment districts. It has evolved into networked systems of machines with automatic ball supply systems managed by hall computers. From a relatively simple setup maintained by staff, we now have large automated parlours. We can

309

310

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

summarize the changes from the players’ point of view in the following ways: Machine design. The invention of automatic ball supply systems made electromechanical throttles possible, which changed the mechanics of play which in turn led to changes in game design. Parlour design. With the introduction of ball supply systems, the parlours no longer needed corridors behind the machines which allowed parlours to change the configurations of machines in space. The machines could have deeper sculpted frames. It also meant extra room for chairs for players in the parlour which changed how long players typically played. Computerization. With the introduction of hall computers, parlours changed how they gather data and use it to manage their machines and their business. This has led players to speculate about how they might take advantage of business decisions. In addition to the introduction of hall computers, the machines themselves have been computerized, which allows them to present some statistics back to the player and to include screens in the playing field. The screens can run mini-games and provide animated content. Changes in staffing. With automated ball supply systems, the need for women ura-mawari went away, changing the gender distribution of parlour staff. No longer were there young women running around behind the machines. The majority of clerks left were men. This may have had the effect of making the pachinko parlour less attractive to women customers. We now return to the legalization of integrated resorts. After a peak number of parlours in 1995, the pachinko playing population and the number of parlours have been continuously decreasing. Many small-scale parlours and family-owned parlours have closed. It is mostly chains with the capital to set up large automated parlours in premium locations that have survived. The decrease in players has been blamed on everything from the availability of home entertainment alternatives like video game consoles, to the perception that pachinko is for older generations, to the increasing complexity of the games themselves. The legalization of integrated resorts may accelerate the decline of pachinko, or at least provoke more changes to the infrastructure. In fact, recently we see companies like Dynam Japan developing new forms of neighbourhood parlours that include some of the

On the Infrastructure of Gaming

features of the anticipated integrated resorts (‘Balls in the air’, 2014). Pachinko seems to be proactively changing to resemble the resorts which are coming. Parlours are adapting to provide an integrated resort experience before the resorts even open. Integration may be how pachinko survives: integration in continuous spaces with other types of games from golf to video games, integration of businesses and possibly integration of new play mechanics to make pachinko seem less dated. Another change that has been provoked by the legalization of resorts is renewed attention to gambling addiction (‘Cozy Ties Between the Police and Pachinko Industry’, 2017). The public is rightly concerned about the social costs of gambling, especially gambling addiction. This has drawn attention to pachinko, which despite the pretense that it is not gambling is obviously a major source of addiction in Japan. Legislation is therefore being introduced to deal with the features of pachinko that make it addictive, and the National Police Association is more tightly regulating these features, especially the availability of big payouts. Pachinko addiction is being targeted to reduce concerns about the introduction of legalized gambling resorts which then has an effect on the game and the business. The pachinko business is paying the price for public concerns about the resorts. A dramatic change is in the works that will affect the infrastructure of gaming in Japan.

Appendix: Pachinko playing resources How to play pachinko (from Pachinko-Play.com): http://www.pachinkoplay.com/en/how_to/playp/rent.html Modern Pachinko: https://modernpachinko.com/ History of pachinko: http://pachinkoplanet.com/zencart/index.php? main_page=page&id=2 Vintage pachinko machines: https://www.messynessychic.com/2017/ 09/13/these-fabulous-vintage-japanese-slot-machines-are-a-collectorsdream/ Pachinko Portal: Restored Machines: http://pachinkoplanet.com/zencart/ index.php? main_page=index&cPath=1_11 E-Bay: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=pachinko+machine Newer machines: www.clovercollectables.com

311

312

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

References n.a. 2011. Pachinko Museum Masamura Shiryo-Kan. Nagoya. Masamura Shiryo-Kan. n.a. 2014, September 27. ‘Balls in the air: Legal gambling and changing tastes threaten the huge Pachinko business’. The Economist. http:​/​/www​​.econ​​ omist​​.com/​​news/​​busin​​ess​/2​​16202​​48​-le​​gal​-g​​ambli​​ng​​-an​​d​-cha​​nging​- taste​ s-thr​eaten​-huge​-pach​inko-​busin​ess-b​alls-​air (accessed 1 January 2017). n.a. 2017, May 20. ‘Cozy ties between the police and Pachinko industry’. Japan Times, online. https​:/​/ww​​w​.jap​​antim​​es​.co​​.jp​/o​​pinio​​n​/201​​7​/05/​​30​ /co​​​mment​​ary​/j​​apan-​comme​ntary​/cozy​-ties​-poli​ce-pa​chink​o-ind​ustry​ (accessed 12 May 2021). Ace Denken. 2015. ‘History of Ace Denken’. http://www​.ace- denken​.com​/ company​/history​​.html (accessed 15 June 2018). Ace Denken. 2015. ‘Development history of Ace Denken’. http://www​.acedenken​.com​/company​/development​​.html (accessed 15 June 2018). Azuma, H. 2009. Otaku, Japan’s Database Animals, trans. J. E. Abel and S. Kono. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bowker G. C., Baker, K., Millerand, F. and Ribes, D. 2009. ‘Toward information infrastructure studies: Ways of knowing in a networked environment’. In J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup and M. Allen (eds), International Handbook of Internet Research, 97–117. Dordrecht: Springer. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​007​/9​​78​-1-​​4020​-​​9789-​​8_5 Chan, T. F. 2018. ‘Japan’s Pinball gambling industry makes 30 times more cash each year than Las Vegas’. Independent. Online article. https​:/​/ww​​w​ .ind​​epend​​ent​.c​​o​.uk/​​news/​​world​​/asia​​/pach​​inko-​​japan​​-pinb​​​all​-g​​ambli​​ngrevenue​-money​-las​-vegas​-a8464881​​.html (accessed 10 February 2019). Daikoku Denki. 2019. ‘Corporate profile: History’. https://www​.daikoku​.co​.jp​ /en​/cp​/history/ (accessed 30 March 2019). Harmon, H. 2016, December 19. ‘New gambling laws in Japan - Casinos come to Japan’. Gaming Post. https​:/​/ww​​w​.gam​​ingpo​​st​.ca​​/cana​​dian-​​casin​​ o​-new​​s​/new​​-gamb​​lin​g-​​laws-​​japan​- legalized-casino-gambling/ (accessed 1 January 2017). Haszard, T. 2017. The Ultimate Pachinko Guide - How to Play Japanese Pachinko Today. Kindle Edition by T. Haszard. Hayafune, C. 1961. Cupola no Aru Machi. Tokyo: Yayoi Shobo. Jinbou, M. 2007. Pachinko Chronicle. Tokyo: Basilico. Jones, S. E. and Thiruvathukal, G. K. 2012. Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

On the Infrastructure of Gaming

Kiso, T. 2014. Nihon-ban Casino no Subete: All about Japanese Casino. Tokyo: Nihon Jitsugyo Shuppan. Kita Denshi. 2019. ‘Kita Denshi Kaisha Gaiyo’. https​:/​/ww​​w​.kit​​adens​​hi​.co​​.jp​/ c​​ompan​​y​/k​it​​adens​​hi/ (accessed 3 February 2018). Lee, Min Jin. 2017. Pachinko. London: Apollo. Liu, A. 2016. ‘Drafts for against the cultural singularity (book in progress)’. Blog entry, 2 May 2016. http:​/​/liu​​.engl​​ish​.u​​csb​.e​​du​/dr​​afts-​​for​-a​​gains​​t​-the​​ -cult​​ur​al-​​singu​​larit​y (accessed 1 January 2017). Mizoue, N. 1999. Pachinko no Rekishi. Tokyo: Bansei-sha. Pachinko Hissho Guide, ed. 2017. Pachinko Rekishi Jiten. Tokyo: Guide Works. Rankin, A. 2012, February 11. ‘Recent trends in organized crime in Japan: Yakuza vs the Police, & Foreign Crime Gangs ~ Part 2: The State, the Police and the Yakuza: Control or symbiosis?’ The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 10:7.1. http:​/​/apj​​jf​.or​​g​/201​​2​/10/​​7​/And​​rew​-R​​ankin​​/3692​​​/arti​​ cle​.h​​tml (accessed 1 January 2017). Sedensky, E. C. 1991. Winning Pachinko: The Game of Japanese Pinball. Kindle Edition. Tokyo: Yenbooks. Schüll, N. D. 2012. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sibbitt, E. C. 1997. ‘Regulating gambling in the shadow of the law: Form and substance in the regulation of Japan’s Pachinko Industry’. Harvard International Law Journal, 38: 568–86. Sugiura, E. 2018, July 20. ‘Five things to know about Japan’s New Casino Law’. Nikkei Asian Review. Online article. https​:/​/as​​ia​.ni​​kkei.​​com​/ B​​usine​​ss​/Fi​​ve​-th​​ings-​​to​​-kn​​ow​-ab​​out-Japan-s-new-casino-law (accessed 10 February 2019). Sun Denshi 2018. ‘Company history’. https​:/​/ww​​w​.sun​​-dens​​hi​.co​​.jp​/c​​ompan​​​y​ /his​​tory/​ (accessed 4 January 2019).

313

17 An enchanting witchcraft Masculinity, melancholy and the pathology of gaming in early modern London Celeste Chamberland

Chapter Outline The context of gaming in Stuart England Contemporary responses to gaming

317 319

In the heart of early modern England’s rapidly expanding commercial networks and flourishing economy, London was the epicentre of a burgeoning culture of merchant capitalism that emphasized speculative investments and unpredictable market ventures.1 In the shifting social landscape of Stuart England, this emphasis on risk-taking, combined

As Gerda Reith (1999) asserts, ‘this period saw a dramatic transition in the locus of value that was founded in a shift in power in a capitalizing economy. It was a transition in which the economic power of a declining feudal aristocracy, represented by gold, was overtaken by a mercantile bourgeoisie, whose wealth was rooted in money.’ According to Gijs Rommelse (2010), 1

An Enchanting Witchcraft

with the uncertainties of the English economy, fostered a groundswell of enthusiasm for games of chance, particularly after the restoration of the libertine monarch, Charles II, in 1660.2 Although gambling had been well established in the English consciousness by the sixteenth century, the late Stuart age marked the first sustained period of widespread enthusiasm for games of chance.3 Dice, cards and table games, such as backgammon and chess, not only provided an opportunity for those wishing to ameliorate their social station by participating in a traditionally aristocratic pastime, but also reflected the growing preoccupation with classical probability that offered a means of mitigating the perils of speculative risk (Hacking, 1975; Shapiro, 1983; Daston, 1995). Mounting interest in games of chance and the rise of speculative capitalism not only transformed popular pastimes in the Stuart age, but also emerged alongside a stringent shame culture that reinforced the connections between self-control, honour and concepts of normative manhood. Excessive behaviour characterized by a lack of restraint or intemperate passions, such as problem gambling or overconsumption of alcohol, challenged prevailing norms of masculinity, which emphasized the importance of self-restraint and occasioned the need for novel categories of identity and pathologies of mental illness. Such categories provided a means of mitigating the tension between fears of social instability and shifting patterns of consumption that resulted from the influence of speculative capitalism. More specifically, the incipient pathology of the ‘gamester’ emerged as a label denoting the habitual, dedicated gambler, a category that epitomized the proto-medicalization of addiction prior to industrialization. Although modern concepts of addiction and dependence were not culturally available to authors of the Stuart era, many scholars nevertheless increasingly recognized excessive gambling as a medical concern rather than a moral affront over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite the absence of a consistent nomenclature of addiction in early modern texts, by abandoning

many historians refrain from using the term ‘mercantilism’ because there is no clear consensus about its definition (Grassboy, 1970; Smail, 2005). 2 Although the interregnum period was not devoid of pastimes, they were far more tightly controlled prior to Charles II’s accession (Unglow, 2010). 3 According to Nicholas Tosney (2013), by the late seventeenth century gaming had become so popular in England ‘that over one millions packs of cards were being produced every year.’

315

316

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

modern actors’ categories of addiction and assessing the significance of the concept of the gamester within the context in which it was created, a fuller picture of pre-industrial pathologies of addiction will emerge. This endeavour not only enriches our understanding of social and cultural responses to ludic culture in the early modern period, but also provides valuable insight into early attempts to medicalize behaviour deemed aberrant by the standards of the day. Although there were no equivalents to modern neuroscientific categories of addiction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was an increasing shift away from moral and religious perceptions of mental illness towards what early modern medical theorists referred to as the more generalized category of madness. The discourse of moralizing never disappeared completely from the rhetoric of gaming – indeed, it still persists to this day. However, during the reign of Charles II, attempts to frame the activities of the gamester in medical terms began to challenge such sanctimony. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the behaviour of habitual gamblers who were driven to the depths of despair or the heights of joy was to a greater extent couched in terms of an emergent medicalization of the passions and thus provides an important template for understanding early medical models of addiction before the rise of modern psychiatry. Notwithstanding the absence of a consistent pre-industrial nomenclature of addiction, attempts to identify and classify the behav­ ioural component of problem gambling began to emerge in early modern gambling texts, particularly Charles Cotton’s The Compleat Gamester, one of the first English treatises on gaming that does not vilify games of chance (Cotton, 1680). Although treatises published prior to Cotton’s text in the sixteenth century, such as James Balmeford’s tome, A Short and Plaine Dialogue Concerning the Unlawfulness of Playing at Cards or Tables and Gilbert Walker’s invective, A Manifest Detection of Diceplay, acknowledge the existence of problem gambling, they generally moralize and condemn ludic culture as sinful and demonstrative of idleness (Blameford, 1593; Walker, 1580). Cotton, by contrast, represents one of the first attempts not only to develop a practical guidebook for games of chance, but also to portray the dangers of compulsive gambling as an illness rather than a moral defect. Subsequent treatises, such as Richard Seymour’s Court Gamester, an early eighteenth-century guidebook for the games of chess and ombre, and Theophilius Lucas’ Memoirs of the Lives, Intrigues, and

An Enchanting Witchcraft

Comical Adventures of the Most Famous Gamesters and Celebrated Sharpers in the Reigns of Charles II, James II, William III, and Queen Anne further expand on the proto-medicalization of problem gambling by elaborating on the cultural role and social status of the gamester (Seymour, 1722; de la Bruyere, 1705).

The context of gaming in Stuart England References to games of chance in England appear in medieval sources as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; moreover, the first public lottery in England was drawn in 1569; thus, gaming was not an invention of the Stuart period (Ashton, 1969: 222). However, over the course of the seventeenth century, England experienced an unparalleled surge of interest in card and dice games. Among the popular games of the period were hazard, a dice game that was the precursor to the modern game of craps, table games such as backgammon, and card games, including ombre and primero. Notwithstanding a brief mid-century disruption caused by the turmoil and ensuing solemnity of the Civil War and Protectorate of the Puritanical Oliver Cromwell, to whom gaming was anathema, games of chance continued to grow in popularity, and, ultimately, gained a significant boost with the Restoration of King Charles II upon his return from French exile in 1660.4 In addition to Charles II’s influence, the growth of speculative capitalism in general, and more specifically, the legacy of stock and credit companies in particular, along with the development of The Bank of England in 1695, created a context in which speculation was rampant and the connection between economic wealth and pure chance was reinforced. A mathematical model designed to mitigate the hazards of financial risk in the era of speculative capitalism, probability theory not only provided a means of predicting odds in volatile commercial ventures, and the

As Gerda Reith (1999: 82) asserts, ‘the condemnation of gambling was virtually a shibboleth of the Protestant bourgeoisie.’ 4

317

318

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

administration of the modern state, but also bolstered the growing popularity of gambling. Although probability theory eventually became closely aligned with institutional responses to uncertainty, particularly in the service of insurance practices, its foundations first emerged through careful analysis of games of chance (Reith, 1999: xiv–xv). Girolamo Cardano, an Italian mathematician and inveterate gambler, articulated the first model of probability in his mid-sixteenth-century treatise Liber de Ludo Aleae, also known as Book on the Games of Chance, which represented the first text published on the theory of probability (Schwartz, 2006: 74). Although Cardano’s work specifically reflected the context of Italian gambling in the sixteenth century, his work was posthumously published in England in the mid-seventeenth century and contributed significantly to the growth of probability theory in the English context. His theories were widely embraced and adopted by scholars and mathematicians in seventeenth-century England. As scholars such as Barbara Shapiro and Lorraine Daston have demonstrated, although English mathematicians did not do much to advance the theory of probability, they did embrace the model propounded by Cardano, which ‘came to be viewed as a “reasonable calculus” within an intellectual milieu in which older notions of rationality were being challenged’ (Daston, 1995: xi). By reducing the risk and uncertainty of bets and separating ‘chance’ from broadly religious beliefs, the new knowledge of probabilities enabled gamesters to exert some control over the whims of fortune and randomness. In addition to the larger relationship between gambling and new mathematical models associated with a developing capitalist economy, gaming also provided a means of living for some and increasingly functioned as a mode of leisure, entertainment and polite sociability for many others. By the end of the seventeenth century, gaming had become so fashionable that it was considered an essential component of polite society; it initially had aristocratic underpinnings, but was widely emulated and popularized by commoners. By the early seventeenth century, gaming had become so firmly entrenched within the English cultural context that it can be found throughout the works of early dramatists. References to dice-playing alone appear in no less than seven of Shakespeare’s plays, and the dramatic works of Ben Jonson are rife with allusions to dicing (Ashton, 1969: 16; Schwartz, 2016).

An Enchanting Witchcraft

Contemporary responses to gaming As the popularity of gaming continued to escalate in the seventeenth century, contemporary church and state authorities issued warnings about the moral depravity and social disruption occasioned by ludic culture. Prior to the Restoration, the most widely documented invectives were those of moralists. The Anglican preacher, John Northbrooke, for example, who sought to toe the line of Protestant morality, wrote a treatise in 1572 against the evils of theatre-going, dancing, dicing and other ‘idle pastimes’. In this treatise, Northbrooke describes dice-playing as wicked, odious, and a ‘filthie sinne’ (Northbrooke, 1579: f. M2v). He also considered dice-playing particularly vile, because it ‘opened a doore and a window’ into other immoral acts such as ‘theft, murther, whoredom, swearing, blaspheming, banqueting, dauncing, rioting, drunkennesse, pride, covetousnesse, deceit, lying, brawling, fighting, etc’ (Northbrooke, 1579: f. 43v). Incidentally, he also gendered games of chance as female, with his description of ‘diceplaying as the mother and cardplaying as the daughter’ (Northbrooke, 1579: f. 43v). Northbrooke was joined in his aversion to gambling by contemporaries such as Thomas Elyot, James Balmford and other critics who condemned gambling because it encouraged idleness, challenged divine providence, created social disorder by impoverishing people who got carried away, or encouraged theft and deceit. In addition to the moralists who typically represented the interests of the Protestant mainstream, prior to the Restoration, the English crown and Parliament sought to regulate gambling mostly in an attempt to maintain social order and prevent disruptions. However, since most gambling activities were officially illegal, as Dave Schwartz points out in Roll the Bones, it was difficult to develop or enforce any sort of licensing system (Schwartz, 2006: 63). Edward IV in the fifteenth century and Henry VIII in the sixteenth, for example, legally restricted all dicing and card play to the twelve-day Christmas holiday, with the rationale that most people would be celebrating during Christmas anyway. Gambling, consequently, would not add any extra disruption to the busy holiday season. Despite the crown’s efforts to limit its spread, however, gambling only continued to grow in popularity and efforts shifted to legislation designed to curb excessive gambling rather than bring all gambling to a standstill. After the Restoration in 1660, Charles

319

320

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

II reopened theatres and legalized card and dice games under licence, which further encouraged the spread of gambling. However, England’s political elite still attempted to regulate gambling and limit the potential for financial ruin. In 1664, for example, parliament passed an act against ‘deceitful, dishonest, and excessive gaming’ (Houses of Parliament, 1664). Ten years later, furthermore, parliament passed an act to limit the stakes at ombre to five pounds, which was still a considerable amount of money; it represented the average annual household income in London at the time. Despite their severity, such measures ultimately failed to make a significant dent in the popularity of gaming, as evidenced by contemporary social critiques, such as the London weekly newspaper, The Connoisseur, which in the early eighteenth century describes the widespread prevalence of games of chance and the growing incidence of gamester suicide as an epidemic. Notwithstanding the likelihood that such accounts exaggerated their descriptions, there are other indications that gambling continued largely unfettered, such as the increased output of card makers and the never-vacant office of the groom-porter, a royal official charged with the responsibility of overseeing card and dice games at court and resolving any gamingrelated disputes (Mr. Town, 1757). Although the responses of moralists and state authorities represent some of the most well-known depictions of gaming in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, other scholars and commentators sought to reframe this discourse by shifting the focus towards health-related concerns. Among the first treatises to acknowledge the harmful mental and physical effects of problem gambling, Girolamo Cardano’s Book on Games of Chance, reflected upon Cardano’s personal experience with the anguish of excessive gambling. Though originally written in Latin in 1520, by the 1660s, it was translated and published in English. An inveterate gambler, Cardano (1663) explained that ‘gambling arouses anger and disturbs the mind’. In seeking to distance the mental damage associated with addictive gambling from moral judgement, moreover, Cardano (1961: 5) explained that ‘it ought to be discussed by a medical doctor like one of the incurable diseases’. It is worth noting, however, that Cardano did temper his description of gambling by asserting that, in moderation, it could also serve as a counterbalance to anxiety. Nevertheless, Cardano’s portrayal of habitual gambling as an incurable disease demonstrates the ways in which

An Enchanting Witchcraft

he drew connections between the lack of self-restraint engendered by the lure of games of chance and the physical manifestations of illness. Like Cardano, Charles Cotton and Richard Seymour challenged the moral condemnation of gaming by writing practical instruction manuals and explaining the rules of popular games of chance. Cotton and Seymour were not solely apologists for gambling, however, as they recognized that the passions evoked by compulsive or habitual gaming could lead some gamesters to both financial ruin and mental collapse. Representing a shift in the politics of blame and responsibility, writers like Cotton began moving the rhetoric of the habitual gamester away from constructs of sin and immorality and instead couched problem gambling in terms of sickness or ill health. Cotton, the notorious pundit and burlesque poet, in particular, warned his readers of an insidious paralytic distemper that in its mildest form struck its hapless victims as ‘an itching disease, that makes some scratch the head’; in its more severe form it assaulted its ill-fated prey ‘as if they were bitten by a tarantula . . . laughing themselves to death’ (Cotton, 1680: B1r). This treacherous affliction, which Cotton likened to an infection, led its victims to be disregarded, despised and shunned by kith and kin until at last they were forced to make a ‘despicable exit’ (Cotton, 1680: 20). This terrifying spectre, described in lurid detail by Cotton, was the result of a pan-European gambling boom that seemingly hypnotized his countrymen by adopting the guise of an ‘enchanting witchcraft’ (Cotton, 1680: 123). Like Cotton, the authors of The Connoisseur in 1757, roughly a century after the publication of The Compleat Gamester, describe the despair and frenzy associated with games of chance and the financial and personal ruin they frequently occasioned as similar to being poisoned by wine, concluding that as a result of their fixation, gamesters not only ran the risk of squandering their fortunes, but hastened their own deaths, as though destroyed by ‘rottenness and filthy diseases’ (Connoisseur, 111). Suicide, or self-murder, as it was also known in the eighteenth century, was thus, according to The Connoisseur, a tragic consequence of the folly and passion induced by compulsive gambling. The publication, furthermore, contended that if ‘this madness should continue to grow more and more epidemical, it will be expedient to have a bill of suicide distinct from the common bill of mortality’, which was a weekly mortality statistic compiled and published in the city of London to keep a record of all deaths within the city (Mr. Town, 1757: 117).

321

322

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

In delineating the larger historical significance and cultural impact of such depictions, it is clear that an early model of addiction emerged alongside the rhetoric of problem gambling that intersected with two distinct yet pervasive threads of cultural discourse in the seventeenth century. On the one hand, games of chance were performed within the ubiquitous context of a rigid honour-bound culture that reinforced the connections between self-control and concepts of normative manhood. On the other hand, attempts to understand the intemperate passions and despair frequently occasioned by chronic gambling arose in tandem with evolving concepts of mental illness, particularly the emerging pathology of melancholy and madness as articulated by the Oxford theologian Robert Burton and his predecessor, Timothie Bright.5 Within the lexicon of early modern humoral theory, the prevailing medical and physiological model of the seventeenth century, madness referred to a generalized category of mental illness typically subdivided into four main categories: frenzy, mania, melancholy and fatuity, each the result of a specific imbalance within the body. Although there was widespread disagreement among medical theorists about the aetiology and physiological causes of madness, as Roy Porter has demonstrated, its diagnostic significance began to increase by the Stuart period due to a combination of contemporary fears of demonic possession, a desire to contain the socalled social nuisances, and emerging concepts of mental illness as a bodily rather than exclusively spiritual condition (Porter, 1988). Though far from devoid of religious moralizing that associated gambling and its accordant loss of restraint with concepts of sinfulness, sloth and gluttony, seventeenth-century English descriptions of the addictive qualities of gaming depicted the condition as an illness or disease that evoked pity for the ill-fated victim who succumbed to both an inward loss of self-control and outward loss of status and honour in the face of abject desperation and the whims of Providence. Exploring these connections not only demonstrates the ways in which medicine, social expectations and religion intersected in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also sheds light on the historical relationship between evolving concepts of mental illness, stigma and the politics of blame and responsibility in the early modern period.

Timothie Bright published the first English treatise on melancholy in 1586 (Porter, 2002: 52).

5

An Enchanting Witchcraft

In differentiating early modern categories of mental illness and subjectivity from modern paradigms of psychological diagnosis, however, we must resist the temptation to interpret concepts of melancholy, madness or addiction in modern clinical terms that describe pathological conditions distinct from the cultures that created them. Not only were humoral conceptions of the body that underscore early modern perceptions of madness obsolete by the nineteenth century, but in the early modern period, the individual and social components of mental health and subjectivity were inseparable. As Mark Breitenberg asserts, ‘what Freud and his legacy develop as individual, psychic phenomena exists in the [early modern period] as predominantly social phenomena . . . in the more public context we associate with shame cultures’ (Breitenberg, 1996: 12). Within the cultural context of Stuart England, distinctions between the corporeal body and the body politic of society were immaterial, since disruptions in one directly affected the well-being of the other. In particular, loss of control and self-restraint were especially damaging because they simultaneously threatened one’s social standing, physical health, and the larger macrocosm of social order. Medical theorists and moralists commonly attributed the causes of such intemperance to the loss of reason and humoral imbalance resulting from an inextricable confluence of social, physiological and mental trauma. In seeking to place the torment of problem gambling in early modern England within the larger rubric of mental health, however, it is necessary to define the nebulous concept of addiction. Many scholars seeking the origins of a consistent nomenclature have accepted H.G. Levine’s argument that the clinical concept of addiction did not emerge until the nineteenth century; others, such as Jessica Warner and Harold Skulsky, contend that, despite the lack of standard terminology, by the seventeenth century there was fairly widespread recognition of the dangers of addictive behaviours among medical theorists and moralists. As Warner explains in her analysis of alcoholism in seventeenth-century England, early modern attitudes towards heavy drinking conform to larger historical patterns of the medicalization of addictive behaviour long before the development of a consistent nomenclature. According to Warner, the Anglican clergyman John Downame and his contemporaries described the excessive or chronic consumption of alcohol as a ‘madnesse’ due to the ways in which it transformed perceptions of reason, emotion and control of the passions

323

324

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

(Warner, 1994).6 Although early modern medical theorists lacked a uniform vocabulary or epistemology regarding addiction, it is worth noting that even in modernity, ‘addiction’ remains notoriously difficult to define (Skulsky, 2003). Inasmuch as consensus regarding any sort of standard historical definition of addiction remains elusive, in part because of the pervasive pejorative or trivialized associations of the term, this chapter contends that the medical category of addiction within the context of humoral psychology denotes several key characteristics: imbalance, loss of control, dependence and, perhaps most importantly, in the honourbound society of Stuart England, a loss of shame. Under the purview of humoral theory, such symptoms were at times classified as generalized madness and, at others, associated with the more specific category of melancholy, the result of an imbalance of black bile. Within the cultural framework of early modern England, the traits of melancholy and addiction coalesced in the identity of the ‘gamester’ (Zucker, 2010: 76). With regard to the link between gaming and mental illness, it is clear that financial ruin was a factor that led some gamesters to the depths of despair; but the financial consequences of gaming were not solely to blame for such emotional distress. It is important to recognize that there were compelling social and cultural explanations for such distress that also stemmed from the social dimensions of games of chance. Card playing, in particular, provided an opportunity to temporarily erase social distinctions in a time of profound social stratification, since all participants were, at least in theory, equal in opportunity and subject to the same rules. Gambling, moreover, could potentially offer ‘relaxation from the mental rigour of public affairs’, thus serving a cathartic purpose (Walker, 1999: 32). At the same time, however, as Michael McDonald asserts, ‘the elaborate rules of contemporary card games mirrored the intricate rules of manners; violations of decorum were such an affront to the unbreakable conventions of honor that they could lead to suicidal despair, as evidenced by the somewhat embellished tale of Franny Braddock, a well-known Bath socialite who killed herself in 1731 after succumbing to the “hazardous dependence of gambling”’ (McDonald and Murphy, 1990: 279). Honour was a crucial form of social currency in an era during which one’s ability

Virgina Berridge and Sarah Mars (2004), by contrast, assert that addiction was first adopted into widespread use in the early twentieth century to describe ‘compulsive drug taking’. 6

An Enchanting Witchcraft

to function in society, participate in the market or engage in any sort of financial transaction was wholly contingent on the quality of one’s reputation. Losing one’s honour was tantamount to dying a social death in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and could be a significant source of mental and emotional distress, particularly for men, for whom honour provided a means of attaining social mobility and recognition. Inasmuch as honour and card playing were both tied to norms of polite male sociability, the emergent medical discourse of problem gambling, furthermore, draws links between madness and normative concepts of the balanced male body, suggesting that it was most commonly a distinctly male disease. In his description of the paralytical distemper of addictive gambling, Cotton refers to the inability for some of his contemporaries to extricate themselves from the lure of the game as ‘extreme folly’ and ‘madness in the highest degree’ (Cotton, 1680: 16). Exemplifying the extent of this madness, Cotton cites the example of a gamester reduced to the desperation of a drowning man who ‘fastens upon anything next at hand. Amongst other of his shipwrack he hath happily lost shame, and this want supplies him’ (Cotton, 1680: 20). Within the honour-bound society of early modern England, this loss of shame was inconceivable and could only be attributed to a lack of volition on the part of the afflicted. As Mark Breitenberg asserts, humoral psychology associated the male body with a dangerous fluidity that was in constant need of regulation and control. Addictive gambling and its deleterious social consequences was a potential cause for the ‘vigilance of male reason’ to be overthrown (Breitenberg, 1996: 12). As Cotton acknowledges, gambling could potentially result in such extreme outcomes that it would either lift the gamester ‘up to the top of mad joy with success, or plung’d to the bottom of despair by misfortune, always in extreams, always in a storm’ (Cotton, 1680: B1-B2). The role of the passions in provoking mental illness was further corroborated by Robert Burton’s lengthy assessment of melancholy that devoted a chapter to the role of the ‘love of gaming’ as a cause of melancholy. Although Burton chastises the ‘idleness’ of habitual gamblers, he also identifies the ‘violent passions’ engendered by gambling as a cause of ‘misery, sorrowe, shame and discontent’ that ‘makes sound men sicke and sad and wise men mad’ (Burton, 1628: 160–1). For Burton, who understood melancholy to be an especially widespread social phenomenon, immoderate gambling not only caused grievous harm to mind and body,

325

326

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

but also led many to neglect their vocations, abandon common sense, and degenerate into beasts. Trained as a clergyman without formalized medical education, Burton describes himself as a physician in inclination only. Nevertheless, his treatise on melancholy, which he authored with the intent of addressing his own struggles with the condition and offering some therapeutic utility to others, provided a widely published encyclopaedic compendium of knowledge about melancholy that firmly established the moral and physiological consequences of habitual gambling as a potential cause of madness. Whereas Burton, Cotton and Cardano offer important insight into the connection between problem gambling and conceptions of mental illness in the seventeenth century, their work reflects a growing trend in the medico-philosophical literature of the early modern period. In an age during which European global commerce increased the flow of addictive commodities, such as sugar, tobacco and caffeine, into London, the larger social impact of and attitudes towards addiction would continue to expand through the age of industrialization. Prior to the advent of modern neuroscientific theories of addiction, seventeenth-century writers and scholars, such as Charles Cotton, Girolamo Cardano and Robert Burton, began developing physiological explanations for excessive behaviour in general and problem gambling in particular that represented a shift away from the sanctimony of long-standing moral invectives against gambling. Although many of their contemporaries reviled gambling and the figure of the gamester as tantamount to sin and sloth, Burton, Cotton and Cardano represent an emerging attempt to diagnose, classify and potentially treat both the moral and the physical effects of addiction as a particularly pitiable category of madness. As concepts of chance and risk began to diverge from engrained religious beliefs in the seventeenth century, the discourse of gambling expanded to include practical guidebooks and didactic manuals written to bolster success in games of chance, such as The Compleat Gamester. Although condemnation of games of chance, particularly in the pulpits of the reformed church continued unabated, such moralizing was increasingly matched by a growing social acceptance of games of chance alongside the recognition that excessive gambling could be explained in medical rather than moral terms. As the unprecedented popularity of gambling intersected with the stringent demands of shame culture and evolving concepts of mental illness, it led to the emergence of a model of addiction that reflected a culturally specific

An Enchanting Witchcraft

confluence of humoral psychology, concepts of honour and normative manhood, and the expanding acceptance of gambling in tandem with the ability to calculate probabilities and the potential profit resulting thereof. The conclusions of this study are not intended to suggest that a clinical concept of addiction anachronistically emerged in isolation from the culture in which it was created in the seventeenth century, but rather to demonstrate that just as modern concepts of addiction are notoriously mired in an intricate synthesis of neurobiological research, cultural stigma and debates about social causes and consequences, so too was the incipient awareness of addiction encapsulated in the figure of the gamester entangled in a profoundly complex fusion of moral, philosophical and medical theory in early modern England. Inasmuch as early modern attitudes towards problem gambling were muddled by the tensions between a stringent shame culture and the burgeoning proto-medicalization of addiction, contemporary neuroscien­ tific paradigms of addiction continue to co-exist with an implicit moralizing discourse that reflects the persistent challenges of separating addiction from long-standing patterns of social censure. Although an ostensibly objective nomenclature eventually emerged in tandem with the medicalization of addiction in the nineteenth century, the legacy of early modern moralizing remains a pervasive feature of contemporary paradigms of addiction. Infused with the rhetoric of personal responsibility, political censure and widespread social disdain, attitudes towards addiction in general, and addictive gambling in particular, remain mired in the language of stigma and self-discipline. From a contemporary vantage point, the figure of the gamester may seem historically far-removed from the presumed scientific objectivity of modern health paradigms, but the ways in which early modern writers framed habitual gambling sheds much light on the origins of early medical concepts of addiction and the continued challenges faced by activists, neuroscientists and medical researchers in seeking to overcome the weight of social stigma and medical moralizing.

References Ashton, J. 1969. The History of Gambling in England. Montclair: Patterson Smith.

327

328

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Balmeford, J. 1593. A Short and Plaine Dialogue Concerning the Unlawfulnes of Playing at Cards or Tables. London: R. Boile. Berridge, V. and Mars, S. 2004. ‘History of addictions’. Journal of Epidemial Community Health, 58: 747–50. Breitenberg, M. 1996. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burton, R. 1628. The Anatomy of Melancholy. London. Cardano, G. 1663. Liber de ludo aleae. Lyons. Cardano, G. 1961. The Book on Games of Chance, ed. Sydney Henry Gould. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Cotton, C. 1680. The Compleat Gamester. London. Daston, L. 1995. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press. de la Bruyere. 1705. The Characters of the Manners of the Age. London. Grassby, R. 1970. ‘English merchant capitalism in the late seventeenth century: The composition of business fortunes’. Past & Present, 46: 87–107. Hacking, I. 1975. The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Houses of Parliament, 1664. 16 Car. II. c. 7. McDonald, M. and Murphy, T. R. 1990. Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mr Town, Critic and Censor General. 1757. The Connoisseur. London: R Baldwin. Northbrooke, J. 1579. A Treatise wherein Dicing, Dancing, Vaines Plaies or Enterludes. London. Porter, R. 1988. Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Porter, R. 2002. Madness: A Brief History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reith, G. 1999. The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Rommelse, G. 2010. ‘The role of mercantilism in Anglo_Dutch political relations, 1650–1674’. Economic History Review, 63: 591–611. Schwartz, D. 2006. Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling. New York: Gotham. Schwartz, D. 2016. ‘Hazard all he Hath: Shakespeare’s gambling world’. Gaming Law and Economics, 20: 822–31. Seymour, R. 1722. The Court Gamester. London: E. Curll. Shapiro, B. J. 1983. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

An Enchanting Witchcraft

Skulsky, H. 2003. ‘The figure of the addictive personality-type in the classical tradition’. In D. L. Patey (ed.), Of Human Bondage: Historical Perspectives on Addiction, 83–93. Northampton: Smith College Studies in History. Smail, J. 2005. ‘Credit, risk and honor in eighteenth-century commerce’. Journal of British Studies, 44: 439–56. Tosney, N. 2013. ‘Gaming in Britain and America’. In D. G. Schwartz (ed.), Frontiers in Chance: Gaming Research Across the Disciplines. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Las Vegas Gaming Press. Unglow, J. 2010. A Gambling Man: Charles II’s Restoration Game. New York: Farrare, Straus and Giroux. Walker, G. 1580. A Manifest Detection of Diceplay. London. Walker, J. 1999. ‘Gambling and Venetian noblemen, c.1500-1700’. Past & Present, 162: 28–69. Warner J. 1994. ‘Resolv’d to drink no more: Addiction as a pre-Industrial construct’. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 55: 685–91. Zucker, A. 2010. ‘The social stakes of gambling in early modern London’. In A. Bailey and R. Hentschell (eds), Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650. New York: Palgrave McMillan.

329

18 Everyday casinos The expanding gambling landscape in America’s neighbourhoods Rex J. Rowley

Chapter Outline American casino archipelago 332 Illinois regional casinos 336 Local infiltration of gambling 340 An American landscape 345 Acknowledgements347

Americans have always been a ‘people of chance’. Indeed, various forms of informal and institutional gambling have played a role in this country’s development since its earliest days (Findlay, 1986; Schwartz, 2003). In the years following the Second World War, however, Americans became sceptical of casinos in their cities, largely based on the suspected detrimental effects of gambling-mob connections, crime and exacerbated poverty in low-income populations. The result, as David Schwartz explained in his book Suburban

Everyday Casinos

Xanadu (2003), was that Las Vegas became a (literal) place of resort for institutionalized gaming. Nevada had legalized games of chance in 1931 as a way to boost visitation to the state, and Americans began to vacation there in increasing numbers in the post-war era. The desert gambling town was a perfect fit; bettors could do what they enjoyed, but at a distance. By sequestering gaming ‘far away’, Americans – those who could afford the trip – could still gamble and could simultaneously keep crime and gambling-related poverty out of their home communities. Thus, Las Vegas became a ‘suburban casino resort’ destination, a place where Americans could go to play and then return to their suburban home in Chicago or Los Angeles (Schwartz, 2003). The expansion of casinos throughout the United States in recent decades signals a change in national attitudes towards gambling. Today, a string of casino resorts dot the landscape in forty states. That gaming properties are now found inside or within a short drive from many major cities is indicative of cultural shift towards a broader acceptance of casino gambling. In other words, the casino resort that Schwartz described as ‘suburban’ – referring to the draw to Las Vegas from suburban America – has now become truly suburban. I hope to add a geographical perspective to our understanding of gambling expansion in the United States. Such expansion and its legal, cultural and sociological impacts within the United States is, of course, well documented by scholars from a range of disciplines (Eadington and Cornelius, 1997; Barker and Britz, 2000; Mason, 2000; Grinols, 2004; Morse and Goss, 2007; Wolfe and Owens, 2009; Cohen and Schwartz, 2018). Less discussed is the place implications of gaming establishments. Las Vegas has been the site for several geographers who have sought to understand gambling’s influence on place identity (Raento and Schwartz, 2011; Rowley, 2013a; Nedelec, 2017) as well as the proximal relationships between people and gaming institutions, particularly neighbourhood casinos catering to a local population there (Rowley, 2013b). Beyond Las Vegas, others have invoked the perspective of place and space to understand the impacts of casinos on urban renewal in the Netherlands (Kingma, 2011) or regional identities in the American Midwest (Sharp, 2004) and South (von Herrmann, 2011). Additionally, a handful of scholars have explored a more direct connection between gambling behaviour and proximity (Govoni et al., 1998, Welte et al., 2004, Shoemaker and Zemke, 2005, Pearce et al., 2008). And Doran and his colleagues (2007 and 2010 are just two examples) have

331

332

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

done expansive work using geographic information systems (GIS) to map gaming catchment and vulnerability in Australia. In this chapter, I draw on Schwartz’s analysis and metaphor of the casino archipelago to explore and describe the spatial, institutional and cultural normalization of American casino gambling from a historical core in Nevada to a national periphery. My aim is not to retell the history of gaming’s expansion but, rather, to analyse it through the lenses of space and place to better understand the role of gambling in American culture and the national character. Indeed, gambling’s normalization is an indicator of moral changes (i.e. how ‘vice’ is or is not acceptable in proximity to a population) that have occurred in American culture over the last half century (Findlay, 1986; Schwartz, 2003). I employ GIS techniques and cultural landscape observation to map and analyse the legalized gaming domain in the United States. This mixed-methods approach, situated within the emerging field of qualitative GIS (Cope and Elwood, 2009; Knigge and Cope, 2006), reaches beyond a simple understanding of gaming’s spatial expansion to reveal the meaning such expansion has in the everyday lives of residents whose activities exist in proximity to gaming institutions. I will present my analysis in three geographic scales. I start at the national level, using observations from throughout the country in conjunction with casino databases to map the spatial extent of gaming today and to point out some key indicators of its infiltration into an everyday American context. Next, I turn to a regional scale, narrowing my focus to major neighbourhood casino-resort complexes. Here I describe access to Vegas-style gaming for huge numbers of Midwesterners. I will then drill down to the local scale, identifying how a new type of gambling parlour has peppered nearly every community in Illinois over the last six years, providing opportunities for residents to play electronic games of chance in bars, restaurants and gas stations. Finally, I summarize findings from this multiscale analysis, connecting the American gambling experience today to the once-faraway Las Vegas hearth of gambling and what such a connection says about American identity and culture.

American casino archipelago Nevada remained the only state with legalized casino gambling until 1976. That year, New Jersey lawmakers looked to state-controlled gaming as a

Everyday Casinos

safe and economically viable revenue source for the state and its struggling resort town of Atlantic City. Elsewhere, starting in 1979, Native American tribes invoked their sovereign status to offer bingo and other games of chance on reservations, a trend quickened by the passage of the National Indian Gaming Act in 1988. By the next year, several states began to realize what could be gained from taxing gaming revenues, allowing controlled casino licences on riverboats in Iowa and Illinois and in old mining towns in Colorado. Thus, a ‘casino archipelago’ began to extend across the United States (Schwartz, 2003). As of 2018, every US state, other than Utah and Hawaii, allows some sort of legalized gambling. In forty-four of those states, this is in the form of a state lottery. Forty-eight states allow charitable bingo and forty-three parimutuel wagering (largely horse- and dog-race betting at tracks and off-track betting facilities). Beyond these less visible, less controversial opportunities for play, all but ten states allow commercial gambling, whether it be at ‘traditional’ land-based or riverboat casinos or in Native American casinos on tribal lands. According to the American Gaming Association, primary lobbying group for commercial gambling in the United States, twenty-six states allow gambling at casinos or ‘racinos’ (racetrack casinos) and twenty-eight have Indian gaming venues, while fourteen have both (AGA, 2017). Geographic patterns of casino properties throughout the country offers another view of the infiltration of gambling in America. I used data from Casino City Press’s Gaming Directory Online, which catalogues the world’s casinos (2018), to map currently open casinos (in April 2018) according to type (Figure 18.1). In all, 1,589 casino properties dot the land. Of these, 496 are operated by Native American tribes and 1,093 are corporately owned. Geographic patterns underscore the trajectory of gambling legalization in the United States. Nevada, of course, has dense casino clusters in Las Vegas and Reno, and in smaller towns throughout the state. Atlantic City, New Jersey, is also easily identifiable on the map. Additional clusters of Native American casinos can be seen where one might expect: throughout Oklahoma, in Indian Country of the upper Midwest and in Western and Southwestern tribal lands. Other distinct patterns include strings of casinos along major riverways and Great Lakes shorelines in the Midwest, another stretch of properties along the Interstate-90 corridor in Montana, and two bunches in Louisiana, one along the Texas border in the shaft of the boot and

333

334

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

Figure 18.1  Gambling venues in America. Map by author.

another along the Mississippi River and Gulf Coast in the heel and toe. I include an additional 500 bingo hall locations in Figure 18.1 to illustrate holes in the commercial gaming market in some locations (particularly in the Carolinas, Kentucky and Texas) filled with another type of gambling. (Given the nature of bingo as a lower-stakes game of chance, and the fact that much of it is centred on benefiting charitable organizations and churches, I do not include bingo in any further analysis.) Figure 18.1 illustrates two additional patterns easily overlooked in a surficial scan of the American gambling scene. The first is insignificant in numbers, but significant in impact; its story illuminates gambling’s ubiquity in the United States. Eight locations on the map are classified as Casino Cruises. These boats offer multi-hour cruises several times each day, where Vegas-style table and machine gambling is available to hundreds of passengers once the boat reaches federal waters several miles off-shore. Thus, in states where casino gambling is restricted to Native American casinos (Texas and North Carolina) or others where all casino gambling is ‘prohibited’ (Georgia and South Carolina), residents have direct opportunities to gamble, provided they can travel to and pay the cruise fee. Another pattern is actually more of an absence of data in the

Everyday Casinos

Casino City dataset depicted in Figure 18.1. This map is missing venue locations housing more than 16,000 electronic gambling terminals in Illinois, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota and West Virginia. These states allow ‘convenience gaming’, which most often takes the form of a handful of video poker, video gambling and video lottery terminals in bars and convenience stores (AGA, 2017). I will address this phenomenon in more depth later. I used US Census data from the most recent American Community Survey (2016) to identify the population with easy access to casino gambling. I did so at two thresholds. I computed the total residential population at a radius of 5 miles from the casino. This distance signifies what Eadington would have termed ‘urban casinos’ (1998), where residents have easy access to casinos with minimal friction of distance (e.g. access for someone who could choose to make a quick trip to a casino with only a few minutes travel time). I also found the total residential population at a radius of 50 miles, which would include a population very near casino properties but would also include those who might travel farther. This distance is indicative of Eadington’s ‘destination casinos’, which are farther away from a patron’s home and may also involve a night out for dinner or a show or even an overnight stay at a casino-hotel resort. The numbers tell an important story about the availability of gambling. According to 2016 Census numbers, 58.5 million Americans live within 5 miles of one of the country’s 1,589 casino establishments. This equates to more than 18 per cent of the population. At the 50-mile threshold, that number jumps to 240.6 million people, nearly 75 per cent of the country’s population. Considered from a different angle, 785 casinos (nearly half) are within a 5-mile radius of cities of 50,000 people or more (a designation by the Census Bureau indicating an ‘urbanized area’). And, 1,307 of 1,589 casinos lie within the extended 50-mile zone of American urbanized areas. Buried within these numbers are the stories of millions of Americans, in locations all over the country, who now find casinos a ubiquitous part of their everyday landscape where thirty years ago such institutions would have been shocking. Mountain roads west of Colorado Springs lead travellers through Cripple Creek, where picturesque brick buildings marking the bygone days of that town’s mining past no longer exist as storefronts or saloons but as a complex of casinos. A driver on Interstate 35 passes three casino opportunities when crossing the Paseo Bridge into

335

336

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

Downtown Kansas City. Two of these are marked by signage and exist off the interstate, but one, the Isle of Capri, is unmistakable along the river, its neon as bright as any in Las Vegas. Residents in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, have the option of a short drive across the Big Sioux River into Iowa to gambling and entertainment amenities at Grand Falls Casino and Golf Resort. But, they don’t have to leave town to find an assortment of miniature casinos interspersed between restaurants, car dealerships and retails shops along the main streets of Sioux Falls and at its major junctions with interstates. Visitors and residents in the Southern New Mexico tourist mountain town of Ruidoso can play slots or place bets on a horserace at the Ruidoso Downs Race Track and Billy the Kid Casino. Or they may prefer a casino getaway at the Mescalero Apache-owned Inn of the Mountain Gods Resort and Casino, where they can hire a guide to take them on an outdoor adventure during the day and hit the tables at night before taking in a concert by a country music headliner. It is difficult to find any corner of Oklahoma where gambling isn’t within a few minutes’ drive. Residents there have watched casinos evolve in the past several years from temporary tents along a well-travelled highway to permanent, full-fledged Vegas-style resorts. New Yorkers no longer look to Atlantic City as their only option to gamble without making a trip to Nevada. Today, Connecticut’s Foxwoods Resort-Casino caters to clientele not only from the Big Apple, but other cities in the Northeast, including Providence and Boston. Jack Casino is only one of many within the floodplain of the Ohio River, but is unmistakably embedded in downtown Cincinnati and adjacent that city’s bustling Overthe- Rhine entertainment district. And, no longer do vacationers to the Gulf Coast limit themselves to leisurely time at a beach house when their plans might also include a night out at Treasure Bay in Biloxi, Mississippi. After a generation of shunning games of chance following the Second World War, gambling has indeed returned to everyday America and, as such, has entrenched itself within the American consciousness in the twenty-first century. The casino archipelago has come to stretch from Atlantic to Pacific.

Illinois regional casinos Zooming into a regional focus on the casino landscape in and around Illinois gives a more in-depth and representative perspective on

Everyday Casinos

commercial gaming in the United States. Here we can see the type of casino and the manner in which Americans can now gamble without a flight and multi-day trip to Las Vegas or Atlantic City. In this sector of the American casino archipelago, twenty-six gambling islands dot the map. Ten fall within state boundaries, and an additional sixteen properties can be found within 20 miles of the state border (see Illinois in Figure 18.1). These casinos are located on or near rivers or lakeshores, a legacy of legalization rules common in the Midwest requiring gambling only on boats (Figure 18.2). Some still maintain stationary boats (e.g. Pair-a-Dice in Peoria, Illinois, and Majestic Star I and II in Gary, Indiana) that no longer cruise, but most are now built firmly on land in locations in proximity to water so as to enable them to meet the requirements of state gambling laws. Each property is a large commercial enterprise offering a variety of gambling options for patrons. The rural properties, such as the Catfish Bend Casino in Burlington, Iowa, or the Mark Twain Casino in La Grange, Missouri, have less than 1,000 slots and around twenty various table games. Urban casinos in the Chicago and St. Louis metropolitan areas have between 1,000 and 2,000 slots in addition to dozens of table games. The largest in the group, the Horseshoe in Hammond, Indiana, just across the state line from South Chicago, has more than 2,500 slots and 153 table games (Casino City Press, 2018). One of the defining characteristics of a destination casino resort is the attraction of patrons from a broad, regional market (Eadington, 1998). Gambling is, of course, the raison d’être of each casino, but the other amenities provide further incentive for patrons to make the trip. As such, casino properties offer hotel accommodations, dining and other amenities to make possible such an opportunity. All but seven Illinois-area casinos have between 60 (in rural properties) and 514 (for urban casinos) rooms in adjacent hotel structures. The Mark Twain Casino has an RV park, and the majority of casinos without hotel accommodations advertise on their website for partner hotels offering rooms for those wanting to stay and play. Since most patrons drive to the casinos, the expansive parking lot or, more commonly, multi-storey parking garage is an ever-present component of the casino complex’s design and construction (Figure 18.2). Other non-gambling amenities are also ubiquitous in Midwest casinos. Every property markets its bars, lounges and a range of restaurants, from fast food to formal sit-down dining. Most locations in and around Illinois provide an event space for small conventions or weddings and nineteen of

337

338

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

Figure 18.2 Hollywood Casino (with parking garage) in Aurora, Illinois. Photo by author, June 2014.

the twenty-six host venues for performances by local and national artists. As one representative example, Isle Casino Hotel in Bettendorf, Iowa, hosts a series of concerts by nationally known artists in its concert venue. In addition, it offers 40,000 square feet of convention space for small and medium-sized meetings and events (Casino City Press, 2018). The Diamond Jo Casino in Dubuque, Iowa, has bowling lanes, and the Ameristar in St Charles, Missouri, offers spa treatments, an arcade, pools for hotel guests and a nightclub. Catfish Bend Casino in Burlington markets vacations and staycations for the whole family with restaurants, bowling, a spa, a golf course and live entertainment as well as kid-centred attractions in FunCity, which includes a water park, an arcade, go-carts, laser tag, a play place for small children and a private birthday party space. Location, of course, plays an important role in terms of access for patrons, but also is a key characteristic in how casino complexes have become an integrated part of everyday life in the Midwest. As noted, most Illinois casinos profiled here are on the region’s major rivers or lakes. Many city centres in this region also exist on waterways due to their historical importance in shipping and transportation. As a result, we find a number of Illinois casinos in or directly adjacent to downtowns. This is the case for properties in Alton, Aurora, Elgin, Joliet, Dubuque, the Quad

Everyday Casinos

Cities, St Louis, and St Charles (in the St Louis metro area). Central location provides ease of access for patrons, but also connects the casinos to activities in the city centres. When I visited Harrah’s Casino in Joliet, I noted a crowd milling about outside the historic Rialto Square Theatre for the performing arts. I was struck with the thought of this historic institution’s proximity to the newer casino, just a short walk away, and how visitors to downtown Joliet might visit both during a night out. Joliet’s minor league baseball stadium and its Amtrak and Metra (Chicago’s commuter rail system) station are also nearby. A similar pattern can be found in Aurora, where the Hollywood Casino sits on an island in the Fox River surrounded by the busy shops, businesses and Paramount Theatre in that Chicago suburb’s downtown (Figure 18.2). During a visit to the Quad Cities, I got stuck in slow-moving traffic with dozens of decades-old automobiles as the Isle Casino was hosting a classic car show in downtown Bettendorf. As some states have relaxed their rules requiring ‘riverboat casinos’ to be actually on boats, some operators have moved their casinos away from the riverfront and downtown. Such change has given way to another locational pattern that underscores the entrenchment of casinos in everyday spaces, this time in the ‘new’ downtowns of suburban development at interstate interchanges. The Quad Cities has two such properties. Jumer’s Hotel and Casino was once located on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River near downtown Rock Island. In 2008, it moved to a new, sprawling complex and a land-based location at the intersection of Interstate 280 and Illinois Route 92 in the southwest corner of Rock Island (Figure 18.3; Jumer’s, 2018).

Figure 18.3 Jumer’s Hotel and Casino at the suburban edge of Rock Island, Illinois. Photo by author, June 2014.

339

340

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

More recently, after twenty-five years on the Davenport, Iowa, riverfront, the Rhythm City Casino moved to a suburban location at Interstate 80 and 74 in June 2016, the original boat leaving dock and heading south on the Mississippi (Tibbetts, 2016). The Rivers Casino in Des Plaines, Illinois, was built at one of the busiest interchanges in the Chicagoland area where Interstates 90, 190, 294 and Illinois Route 72 converge. Just a few minutes from Chicago O’Hare Airport’s main entrance, this area hosts malls, movie theatres, office complexes, restaurants, hotels and an arena, just as one might expect to see at a location passed by tens of thousands of people everyday. The casino has become one more entertainment amenity in an amenity-rich part of the city. Suburban locations allow casino operators more space for resort complexes, and provide easier automobile access, larger parking areas, proximity to other shopping and entertainment attractions away from the casino, and high visibility to motorist passersby. In short, casinos have embedded themselves in the urban and suburban landscape. Such casinos have become part and parcel of everyday American retail and commercial contexts in these communities and thus part and parcel of many Americans’ everyday lives.

Local infiltration of gambling In 2015, I was shocked by an advertisement I received in the mail for a new gambling parlour, called Emma’s, located near my home in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. The licence-plate-sized card was addressed to ‘Residential Customer’ with no specific address, indicating it was likely delivered throughout the community. It offered ‘$20 in Slot or Video Poker Free Play’. One side of the card showed simplistic maps of two locations in well-known shopping centres in Normal: one Emma’s is sandwiched between Pizza Hut and Great Clips adjacent to Aldi grocery store and Walmart Supercenter; the other lies between a Schunck’s grocery store and Rosati’s Pizza and adjacent to Discount Tire Company and Walgreens. It listed the establishments’ hours – Sunday–Thursday 1:00 pm to 10:00 pm and Friday–Saturday, 1:00 pm to 11:00 pm – and the availability of complimentary soft drinks, coffee and snacks, in addition to beer, wine and ‘great food & sweets’ available for purchase. The other side of the card showed an image of a man and a woman cheering on another woman

Everyday Casinos

apparently winning as she smiles at a video gambling machine, with the caption ‘Normal’s Best Place to Play Slots & Video Poker’. My shock stemmed not so much from the idea of gambling itself, but from its location just around the corner from my home. The closest riverboat casino is in Peoria, nearly an hour’s drive away. I have grown accustomed to the idea of Midwestern riverboat casinos, having watched their expansion since moving to the region in the late 1990s. And, growing up in Las Vegas, the idea of gambling in a local shopping centre was nothing new. But, I never expected to see such establishments outside of my hometown, let alone in shopping centres I regularly patronize. The advertisement screamed aloud that gambling had expanded even further than I ever imagined, entering into the everyday neighbourhoods or ordinary Americans. Emma’s – ‘A New Kind of Fun’ – is one example of thousands of such slot parlours offering limited video gambling in thousands of locations in Illinois. The Illinois state legislature passed the Video Gaming Act (230 ILCS 40) in July 2009 as a way to generate revenue to make up for diminishing funds for capital projects within the state (Voyles, 2017). The act allowed for licensed establishments serving alcohol, fraternal and veterans establishments, and truck stops to house up to five video gaming terminals (VGT) offering games, such as video poker, electronic black jack an line up. Although the name of the law and the terminology for the machines available in these small gambling parlours invoke the term ‘gaming’, these should not be confused with the more common usage of ‘video gaming’ as a reference to computer, phone, or other console video games so prevalent in today’s society. The law in Illinois (and similar ones in other states) offers ‘video gambling’ at terminals that deliver a number of games of chance at which players can win and lose money. It is gambling. I will refer to them, thus, as VGTs and video gambling properties or parlours. Such establishments in Illinois may not be located within 1,000 feet of an existing race track or riverboat casino and may not be within 100 feet of an existing church or school. Furthermore, anyone under the age of twenty-one is prohibited from entry. The act limits the maximum bet to $2, requires machines payout (on average) 80 per cent or more of what is bet, and limits such payouts to a maximum of $500 per wager (paid through ticket voucher, not cash). The revenues (the difference between what is taken in and what is paid out) are then taxed at a 30 per cent rate: 5 per cent to the local municipality

341

342

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

and the remaining 25 per cent to the state. The act also allows for municipalities to prohibit gambling parlours. The first slot parlours opened in September 2012. At that time, the Illinois Gaming Board counted 13 establishments in 13 municipalities with a combined 61 VGTs. A year later, the numbers swelled to 2,469 establishments in 673 municipalities with over 10,000 VGTs. In March 2018, the state had approved 6,679 licences and was tracking nearly 29,000 machines at 6,455 operating establishments in 975 communities (Figure 18.4). In short, gambling parlours litter the state. Revenues are

Figure 18.4  Locations of establishments licensed to offer video gaming in Illinois. Map by author.

Everyday Casinos

staggering. In one month (March 2018), the combined revenues for the 6,455 locations was more than $128.5 million. Taxes for this revenue provided $32.1 million to the state’s coffers and $6.4 million to cities, towns and counties. Since 2012, the State of Illinois has received almost $1.2 billion in tax revenues from VGTs. Putting these numbers into a more local perspective, the two Emma’s locations are accompanied by an additional 66 locations with a combined 309 VGTs in the BloomingtonNormal area (made up of the two cities totalling around 135,000 people). In March 2018, these 68 locations garnered $1.9 million in revenue, yielding $478,828 for the state and $95,765 for the two cities (IGB, 2018). It is difficult to go anywhere in the state where you won’t find VGTs. The aforementioned description of Emma’s gives a good idea of where one will find many of these, as stand-alone video gambling parlours. They occupy storefront locations in downtowns or strip malls (Figure 18.5a) or former gas stations (Figure 18.5b). Inside you might see tables and chairs to take some food or drink, but in my observations patrons are more likely to be at one of the machines in cubbies or side rooms of what looks to the outsider as a largely empty lobby space. The focus with such stand-alone parlours is clearly the gambling (Voyles, 2017). Other VGTs are found in traditional restaurants and bars. Several local Mexican restaurants in Bloomington-Normal, for example, now offers slots. Another common location is in the convenience store at a truck stop, often near the alcohol aisle, where a semi-enclosed space controls entry of patrons to the VGTs. The machines are also popular at veterans and fraternal organizations, and, according to one account, some laundromats and floral shops have met the state law’s guidelines to host VGTs (Voyles, 2017). In each case, advertising in front of the establishments (especially the bars, restaurants and other traditional spaces where VGTs may not be expected) helps to alert passersby to gambling in these otherwise banal, everyday spaces. Since their inception, video gambling parlours have drawn praise and criticism. They have certainly added to state and local coffers. In addition to providing the needed funds for state capital projects, lawmakers also saw the Video Gaming Act as a salve for struggling small businesses after the state implemented an indoor smoking ban (Voyles, 2017). And, from filling empty store fronts to diversifying income for food- and alcoholbased businesses, the act has likely contributed to local economies beyond the tax revenues. Critics have also voiced concerns. As one might expect, religious and addiction groups have spoken out against the expansion,

343

344

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

pointing to social concerns accompanying a proliferation of games of chance into every corner of the state. Others see diminished casino revenues at the riverboat properties resulting from increased play at local gambling parlours (Pantagraph, 2013; Voyles, 2017). Why travel the hour to Pair-A-Dice in East Peoria if you can visit Emma’s a five-minute drive from home? Some municipalities, in fact, have limited slot parlours to prevent losses at local casinos (Freishtat, 2018). Additionally, 133 Illinois cities, towns and villages have completely banned the development of video gambling (IGB, 2018).

Figure 18.5 (a) Strip mall location of slot parlour in Normal, Illinois, in January 2018. (b) Slot parlour in former service station in Cairo, Illinois, in June 2014. Photos by author.

Everyday Casinos

Notwithstanding the criticism, video gambling parlours have become truly ubiquitous in Illinois. And, as I have talked with residents over the past several years, it is surprising how Illinoisans rarely think about or notice them, despite the explosion over the past five years. It is almost as if it has happened without people recognizing the phenomenon. This is significant and echoes what I have noted in the previous two sections: gambling has become a part of American life. Illinois is a particularly poignant example of this, with its strings and clusters of gambling parlours across the state. But, it is not alone. According to the American Gaming Association, eight states have legalized ‘convenience gaming’. Illinois has thousands more locations than any of these other states, and will likely be seen as a bellwether as other states look to expand gambling options and as games of chance continue infiltrate America’s everyday spaces (AGA, 2017).

An American landscape Just off site from River City Casino in St Louis, a billboard shows an image of the Bellagio on the Las Vegas Strip, with the caption: ‘Vegas is Calling’. Its ostensible purpose is to inform and attract visitors to River City and Ameristar casinos in St Louis and to alert them to the possibility of winning a trip to Las Vegas as part of their membership in a player awards programme. Until gambling’s expansion across the country, a billboard in this neighbourhood might have advertised a Vegas vacation package with a local travel agent or airline. Today, travel agents are a dying breed, and there is no need for St. Louisans to go to Las Vegas to gamble. They can do so, practically in their backyard. The gambling experience, itself, is not all that different between Sin City and River City. But, as an incentive for playing at St Louis casinos, gamblers may be looking for a free trip to Las Vegas to experience more than just the slot machines and tables in the mecca of American gambling and entertainment. I see two implicit messages about American gambling in this billboard. One, Las Vegas is never far from the casino experience in America. So much of what happens in the casino archipelago mimics, imitates and holds as a standard the Las Vegas experience. Most of the large casinos in

345

346

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

and around the state of Illinois share similarities to Las Vegas Strip casinos in types of play, but they are almost mirror reflections of what Las Vegans call locals casinos or neighbourhood casinos. As the names suggest, these establishments are off the Strip, near where Las Vegans live, and they cater to a local population. Before the expansion of casinos across the United States, neighbourhood casinos in Las Vegas used dining, shopping and entertainment amenities to attract patrons. They also share similar locational characteristics with the Midwestern counterparts profiled earlier: Las Vegas locals casinos are found at interstate interchanges and along high-trafficked surface streets throughout the Las Vegas Valley (see Rowley, 2013a). Beyond casino complexes, electronic gambling has long been a part of everyday life for Las Vegans with video poker machines found in the airport and nearly every convenience store, grocery store and bar in the city. The second and more important message in the River City billboard is that, despite the historical place of Las Vegas as the place to gamble, this is no longer the case. The ubiquity of gambling – on the Strip, in locals casinos, in grocery stores – that we expect in Las Vegas is now ubiquitous all over the country. More significant than simple availability, I would argue, is gambling’s proximity to people. The vast majority of Americans have relatively easy access to casinos, embedded in the geographic contexts of their everyday lives – in their downtowns, at interstate interchanges and in local strip malls. Such embeddedness normalizes an activity that was expelled from American cities in the post-war years. And, it doesn’t seem that gambling’s expansion will slow. New casinos are planned in a number of locations throughout the country. Casino City lists an additional sixty casinos announced or under construction as of March 2018, including a much-anticipated addition of a Vegas-style casino on the waterfront of Boston Harbor. This expansion will also likely include sports betting, heretofore limited to Las Vegas. In recent years, more and more sports leagues – even the NFL, which has historically opposed betting on its teams – have opened up to the prospect of expanded sports betting. And, a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court allowing states to decide whether or not to legalized sports wagering will probably trigger an expansion of sportsbooks within existing casinos and, likely, in other venues as well (e.g. convenience stores, sports arenas and smartphone apps).

Everyday Casinos

Several states plan to move quickly in this direction (KNPR, 2018a, 2018b). In sum, ‘Vegas’ has not only become accessible to Americans where they live; it has become normal. From a broad vantage point, the expansion of gambling underscores a set of changes in American culture and national identity in the last fifty years. The conservatism, for example, that characterized so many American social values in the 1940s and 1950s shifted dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s and continues to the present. Acceptance and legalization of both gay marriage and marijuana are noticeable examples of a shifting American moral code. On a practical level, gambling’s expansion throughout the country was driven by budgetary goals in both states and tribes, but the acceptability of such goals to the people in various political jurisdictions highlights that, in lockstep with other moral issues, taboos surrounding gambling have also relaxed. Longtime Las Vegas journalist, John L. Smith, noted that sports gambling is just the next step – ‘that last pariah’, he called it – in the normalization of gambling in American culture (KNPR, 2018b). The Las Vegas Strip, gambling culture and the casino landscape is part of life for residents of that city. It is something that they hold in common, so much so that stereotypical ‘Vegas’ is a defining characteristic in the city’s place-based identity (Rowley, 2015). The expansion of gambling throughout the United States may not signal that our national identity is defined by gambling. But, the three-decades-long, meteoric expansion of casinos throughout the country and the ubiquitous presence of games of chance in our everyday landscapes cements gambling as an important trait in the changing American sense of identity.

Acknowledgements The genesis for this work came from my time as a Gaming Research Fellow at the Center for Gaming Research at UNLV in 2010–11. I thank Director David Schwartz and the staff at the Lied Library’s Special Collections for their friendship and kind assistance during my time there. Additional assistance came from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, and a research grant from the Illinois Geographical Society. I also thank Rachel and our children for their patience as we have wandered down obscure highways on road trips to observe casino landscapes.

347

348

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

References American Gaming Association [AGA]. 2017. State of the States: The AGA Survey of the Casino Industry. www​.americangaming​.org. Barker, T. and Britz, M. 2000. Jokers Wild: Legalized Gambling in the TwentyFirst Century. Westport: Praeger. Casino City Press. 2018. Gaming Directory. Online. http:​/​/www​​.casi​​nocit​​ ypres​​s​.com​​/gbd/​​gb​don​​line/​ Cohen, J. D. and Schwartz, D. G., eds. 2018. All In: The Spread of Gambling in Twentieth-Century United States. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Cope, M. and Elwood, S., eds. 2009. Qualitative GIS; A Mixed Methods Approach. London: Sage Publications. Doran, B. J., McMillen, J. and Marshall, D. C. 2007. ‘A GIS-based investigation of gaming venue catchments’. Transactions in GIS, 11 (4): 575–95. Doran, B. J. and M. Young. 2010. ‘Predicting the spatial distribution of gambling vulnerability: An application of gravity modeling using ABS Mesh Blocks’. Applied Geography 30 (1): 141–52 Eadington, W. R. 1998. ‘Contributions of casino-style gambling to local economies’. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 556: 53–65. Eadington, W. R. and Cornelius, J. A., eds. 1997. Gambling: Public Policies and the Social Sciences. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Findlay, M. 1986. People of Chance: Gambling in American Society from Jamestown to Las Vegas. New York: Oxford University Press. Freishtat, S. 2018. Video gambling brings millions to Illinois, but casino cities aren’t seeing the benefits. The Beacon News, 10 May. http:​/​/www​​ .chic​​agotr​​ibune​​.com/​​subur​​bs​/au​​rora-​​beaco​​n​-new​​s​/new​​s​/ct-​​abn​-c​​asino​​ -vide​​o​-gam​​ing​-r​​evenu​​​e​-st-​​0509-​​story​​.html​. Govoni, R., Frisch, G. R., Rubcich, N. and Getty, H. 1998. ‘First year impacts of casino gambling in a community’. Journal of Gambling Studies, 14(4): 347–58. Grinols, E. L. 2004. Gambling in America: Costs and Benefits. New York: Cambridge University Press. IGB [Illinois Gaming Board]. 2018. ‘Video gaming’. https://www​.igb​.illinois​ .gov/ Jumer’s Hotel and Casino. 2018. ‘About us’. http:​/​/www​​.jume​​rscas​​inoho​​tel​.c​​ om​/ab​​out​​-u​​s​.asp​x Kingma, S. F. 2011. ‘Waterfront rise: Urban casino space and boundary construction in the Netherlands’. In P. Raento and D. G. Schwartz (eds),

Everyday Casinos

Gambling, Space, and Time. Shifting Boundaries and Cultures, 83–104. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Knigge, L. and Cope, M. 2006. ‘Grounded visualization: Integrating the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data through grounded theory and visualization’. Environment and Planning A, 38 (11): 2021–37. KNPR. 2018a. ‘Will sports betting nationwide kill the industry in Nevada?’ KNPR’s State of Nevada, 14 May. https​:/​/kn​​pr​.or​​g​/knp​​r​/201​​8​-05/​​will-​​sport​​ s​-bet​​ting-​​natio​​nwide​​-kill​​​-indu​​stry-​​nevad​a KNPR. 2018b. ‘John L. Smith on the supreme court decision to allow sports betting in every State’. KNPR’s State of Nevada, 14 May. https​:/​/kn​​pr​.or​​g​/ knp​​r​/201​​8​-05/​​john-​​l​-smi​​th​-su​​preme​​-cour​​t​-dec​​ision​​-allo​​w​-spo​​rts​​-b​​ettin​​ g​-eve​​ry​-st​​ate Mason, W. D. 2000. Indian Gaming: Tribal Sovereignty and American Politics. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Morse, E. A. and Goss, E. P. 2007. Governing Fortune: Casino Gambling in America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Nédélec, P. 2017. ‘The stigmatisation of Las Vegas and its inhabitants: The other side of the coin’. In P. Kirkness and A. Tijé-Dra (eds), Negative Neighbourhood Reputation and Place Attachment, 23–40. Abingdon: Routledge. Pantagraph. 2013. ‘Expanding gaming sites is a poor bet for Illinois’. The Pantagraph, 22 December, C2. Pearce, J., Mason, K., Hiscock, R. and Day, P. 2008. ‘A national study of neighbourhood access to gambling opportunities and individual gambling behaviour’. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 62 (10): 862–8. Raento, P. and Schwartz, D. G., eds. 2011. Gambling, Space, and Time: Shifting Boundaries and Cultures. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Rowley, R. J. 2013a. ‘Where locals play: Neighborhood casino landscapes in Las Vegas’. In D. G. Schwartz (ed.), Frontiers in Chance: Gaming Research across the Disciplines, 99–114. Las Vegas: UNLV Gaming Press. Rowley, R. J. 2013b. Everyday Las Vegas: Local Life in a Tourist Town. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Rowley, R. J. 2015. ‘Multidimensional community and the Las Vegas experience’. GeoJournal, 80(3): 393–410. Schwartz, D. G. 2003. Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and Beyond. New York: Routledge. Sharp, J. I. 2004. ‘The political geography of gambling in the Midwest’. Middle States Geographer, 37: 62–71. Shoemaker, S. and Zemke, D. M. V. 2005. ‘The “locals” market: An emerging gaming segment’. Journal of Gambling Studies, 21(4): 379–410.

349

350

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

Tibbetts, E. 2016. ‘Former Rhythm City casino riverboat heads south’. Quad-City Times, 26 November. https​:/​/qc​​times​​.com/​​news/​​local​​/form​​er​ -rh​​ythm-​​city-​​casin​​o​-riv​​erboa​​t​-hea​​ds​-so​​uth​/a​​rticl​​e​_202​​6aff8​​-1b42​​-581b​​​ -8beb​​-2877​​bccba​​1ac​.h​​tml US Census. 2016. American Community Survey. https://factfinder​.census​ .gov/ von Herrmann, Denise. 2011. ‘The Cultural impacts of casino gambling in the deep South’. In P. Raento and D. G. Schwartz (eds), Gambling, Space, and Time: Shifting Boundaries and Cultures, 129–44. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Voyles, R. 2017. ‘Illinois flush with video gaming but problems arising’. NWI Times, 6 July. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nwi​​times​​.com/​​busin​​ess​/g​​ambli​​ng​/il​​linoi​​s​-flu​​sh​ -wi​​th​-vi​​deo​-g​​aming​​-but-​​probl​​ems​-a​​risin​​g​/art​​icle_​​c9164​​3cf​-1​​885​​-5​​12a​-9​​ e6a​-f​​ce26e​​b625f​​3​.htm​l Welte, J. W., Wieczorek, W. F., Barnes, G. M., Tidwall, M. and Hoffman, J. H. 2004. ‘The relationship of ecological and geographic factors to gambling behavior and pathology’. Journal of Gambling Studies, 20(4): 405–23. Wolfe, A. and Owens, E. C., eds. 2009. Gambling: Mapping the American Moral Landscape. Waco: Baylor University Press.

19 The market in the conclave Gambling on election outcomes in Renaissance Italy John M. Hunt

Chapter Outline Introduction352 Fare a scommesse: The rules of the game 353 A social profile of the players 359 False news and market manipulations 363 Papal checkmate: The end of scommesse 366 Concluding comparisons 369 Archival sources 371 Printed primary sources 371

352

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Introduction During the conclave that elected the Bavarian cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger, as Benedict XVI in April 2005, many newspapers bemusedly reported that bookmakers were accepting punts on the successor of John Paul II. One of the largest bookmakers, the Dublin-based Paddy Power, took in over ₤200,000 in the betting, conducted both online and in shops in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Paddy Power, spokesperson for the firm, even advertised in Saint Peter’s Square before police evicted him from premises. Power later told reporters that the papal election was ‘biggest non-sports betting market of all time’.1 The betting continued anew with Benedict XVI’s unexpected abdication on 28 February 2013. This time a dark horse, Cardinal Jorge Mario Borgoglio of Argentina, surpassed the favoured candidates, the so-called papabili, in the voting to become Pope Francis. The enthusiasm for betting remains so fervid that bookmakers currently are making projections about Francis’s successor. More than four centuries ago, betting on the papal election raised few eyebrows, even among the most pious of prelates. However, it was nevertheless to paraphrase Power, the greatest betting market in all of Renaissance Italy. During the sixteenth century, Florentine bookmakers in Rome dominated the market of the papal election. However, Italians throughout the peninsula placed bets not only the election but also on the outcomes of political events related to the papal court, principally the promotion of cardinals. First documented in the conclave of 1503 that elected Pius III, gambling on events in Rome caught the public’s attention until its abolition by Gregory XIV in 1591.2 As with modern papal elections, Renaissance Italians from all levels of society enthusiastically risked precious scudi in playing the game.3 Besides Jean Delumeau’s brief examination of the betting in his grand survey of the economic and social life of sixteenth-century Rome, scholars have paid scant attention to this ludic phenomenon (Delumeau, 1957: 2:862–6). However, over the past twenty years a spate of studies

Gould (2005). See also Delaney (2005). For the first extant account of betting on the papal election, see I diarii di Marino Sanudo, 5:90. 3 The silver scudo was the principal coin of exchange in Rome. The papal mint also manufactured gold scudi as well. 1 2

The Market in the Conclave

have provided new insights into the betting that took place in Rome and Florence. Evelyn Welch has placed wagering in the context of civic lotteries that emerged in Italy and the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Welch, 2008). Others, including myself, have placed the betting in the context of Rome’s tumultuous public sphere, marked by rumour, false news and confusion (Villard, 2009; Hunt, 2015; Hunt, 2016). This chapter will add to this literature through a deep reading of the sources, especially the criminal records of the governor’s tribunal, to examine more deeply the rules, sociability, regulation and abolition of the betting. Moreover, the chapter will conclude with a comparative reflection between Rome and two other centres, Venice and Genoa, where gambling on political events took place. Due to the use of archival sources as well as traditional scholarly references, the former will be in footnotes, while the latter will use in-text citations.

Fare a scommesse: The rules of the game Renaissance Italians delighted in a of a variety of games of chance, ranging from simple dice and card games to betting on horse races called palii that took place in cities such as Florence and Siena on important feast days (Florin, 1989; Roberti, 1995). Wagering on the pregnancies of neighbourhood women – called scommesse de maschio o femina, was particularly popular among Italians of different backgrounds (Renucci, 1978; Ortalli, 2005; Corsi, 2013). The gusto for laying bets (fare la scommesse) on various outcomes was so great that it did not take long for gamblers to start betting on the elections of civic magistrates in the numerous republics that dotted the peninsula in the Renaissance. This was a natural consequence of election process of these city states: magistrates acquired their positions by lot, the random selection of their names from an urn, rather than by appointment or voting. The best evidence for gambling on the outcomes of civic elections comes from sixteenth-century Genoa and Venice where the governments of both cities repeatedly issued laws that prohibited the popular pastime on the pain of stiff fines, banishment,

353

354

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

and galley service.4 However, none of the measures succeeded in quelling the popular zeal for the game. Gambling on elections in Genoa and Venice was a local affair, never garnering the interest of players beyond their own inhabitants. However, circumstances were remarkably different in Papal Rome. As the seat of Catholic Europe and capital of the Papal States, Rome was an international hub of diplomacy, trade and religious affairs, all connected to the Curia, the papal court and government. Attracting ambassadors, entrepreneurs and ecclesiastics from cities and states in the peninsula and beyond, Rome became the focus of betting on the outcomes of various political events connected to the papacy. The most frequent form of political gambling in sixteenth-century Rome centred on the pope’s annual nomination of prelates to the cardinalate, the scommesse della promotione dei cardinali. Every December, generally just before Christmas, the reigning pope nominated prelates – bishops, archbishops, abbots and curial officials – to serve as cardinals in the Sacred College (Hunt, 2015). Promotions stirred speculation as to which prelates were potential candidates for a cardinal’s hat. Newssheets called avvisi kept their subscribers in Rome and Italy appraised of pope’s thoughts and discussed the qualifications of those rumoured to be the pope’s favourites. With this information in hand, gamblers placed bets with brokers (sensali) on the outcome.5 Wagers on the pope’s selection began as early as March and April, becoming increasingly intense throughout the summer and autumn, before reaching a crescendo in early December. During the course of betting, brokers shouted out odds from their counters that looked out into the streets. Newssheet writers (menanti) promptly reported fluctuations in the day’s betting. Their newssheets reveal that Italians also gambled on the timing of the promotion and the number of cardinals the pope would make. However, nothing attracted the most intense gambling more than the papal election (scommesse a fare il papa).6 Indeed, brokers often accepted

In 1561 alone, the Venetian state banished four men for scommesse; see ASVe, Censori, Capitolari, b. 3, fols. 1v and 6v. For Genoa, see Assereto (2013: 16–20). 5 Romans used the term ‘broker’ (sensale) to denote the modern term ‘bookmaker’. Brokers facilitated a number of financial transactions in Renaissance Rome, including betting. On the brokers of Rome, see Colzi (1998). 6 On the papal election, see Pattenden (2017). 4

The Market in the Conclave

bets on the election months and even years before a pope’s death. The election attracted gamblers’ attention from all over Italy since it was he was a truly international event. Moreover, the infrequency of the election built up excitement among players. On average, Italy witnessed a papal election every five years from Pius III (1503) to Clement VIII (1592), the year after which Gregory XIV had abolished the practice. Some pontificates, like those of Paul III and Gregory XIII, lasted longer than ten years, keeping adherents of scommesse in protracted anticipation. Other popes, such as Pius II, Marcellus II and Urban VII, each sat on St Peter’s throne less than a month after their coronation, creating situations where one election followed closely on the heels of another, thereby providing gamblers more opportunities to indulge in their passion. As seat of the papacy, Rome was the epicentre of the wagering on the promotion of cardinals and the election of popes. Prospective punters went to the quarter known as the Banchi, the banks, to place bets with brokers who formulated the transactions. The Banchi, the financial heart of Rome, snaked along the Tiber from Ponte Sant’Angelo and Zecca Vecchia (the Old Mint) to the Church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (Figure 19.1). The majority of bankers, merchants and spice dealers – the main occupations of the brokers – housed their shops and offices here. As the presence of the Florentine national church suggests, the majority of the brokers came from Florence or other Tuscan cities. Speculative gambling was part of a financial axis that linked Florentine entrepreneurs in Rome to their home city. During intense periods of betting, couriers serving the merchant community shuffled back and forth between the two cities, conveying news and printed cedule (wagering tickets).19.1 Clients met brokers at their counters (banchi), usually connected to a shop or office. At the counter, they placed bets on a number of candidates up for selection as cardinals or popes based on the most current information circulating in newssheets or by word of mouth.7 Some punters took big risks by betting on a dark horse candidate with the hopes of winning a hefty windfall. This was a calculated risk since anything could happen at the papal court or in the conclave, with often-unexpected results frequently occurring. Throughout the election of 1549–50, the Venetian ambassador, Matteo Dandolo, kept track of the odds in the

On newssheet writers, see Brendan Dooley (1999) and Mario Infelise (2002).

7

355

356

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Figure 19.1  Map of the Banchi region of Rome. Mattheus Merian, Roma, 1640, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute.

Banchi, observing the continued popularity of the English cardinal, Reginald Pole, among the gamblers. In the end, cardinals elected the Tuscan cardinal, Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte as Julius III. Nevertheless, on the night of Del Monte’s election, due to his attentiveness to the wagering, Dandolo put more faith in one cry in support of Pole than in the uproarious shouts of Monte, demonstrating that heavily favoured candidates often left the conclave as cardinals rather than as popes.8 With candidates selected, punters arranged the terms of the wager before the broker and several witnesses. Typically, the broker recorded designated candidates and amounts hazarded, along with the date and names of those present, on a ticket, variously called cedule or polize. Many brokers used standard tickets with boilerplate text, printed in Florence; others preferred taking down terms in manuscript. Once made, the broker gave the tickets to the client and inscribed the details in an account book.9 Once the promotion or election had concluded and the results posted, those with winning bets returned to cash in their tickets with the brokers and their agents, who kept the rest of the wagered on the events. Of course, some brokers resorted to fraud in order to avoid paying large sums to clients, especially in cases when the odds favoured the punter. More often

‘Relazioni di Matteo Dandolo, 1550’, in Albèri, ed. (1846, ser. 2, 3:347) For an examples of a these tickets, see ASR, Camerale II, Lotto, b.1.

8 9

The Market in the Conclave

than not, unscrupulous brokers either refused to yield over payouts or absconded with the box of money. This provoked quarrels, litigations and brawls. For example, the broker Lorenzo Pisano drew up a ticket for Cardinal Niccolò Sfondrati, on behalf of a Signor Sebastiano Arcione during the second election of 1590. The ticket for Sfondrati, as an unlikely candidate, would have given Arcione a bounty of 500 gold scudi. However, once the Sfondrati emerged from the conclave as Gregory XIV, Pisano tried to hide evidence of the wager.10 Similarly, Giovanni Leonardi and Marco Aurelio Dansa, accused the Jewish broker, Prospero della Torre, of refusing to recognize his winning tickets on Sfondrati as well.11 Despite the regular occurrence of fraud, the papacy at first did little to control the market in betting taking place in the Banchi. The exception was Pius IV’s prohibition of wagering on papal elections, a part of his general reform of the conclave with the bull, In Eligendis, in 1562 (Spinelli, 1955: 230–6). However, all other forms of gambling on political outcomes remained legal. Only with the pontificate of Sixtus V did regulations appear in papal edicts, albeit rather ambivalently and inconsistently. Although newssheet writers observed that Sixtus V ‘took incredible pleasure in seeing the odds that are made in the Banchi over the cardinals and other future events’, the pope issued a decree on 17 September 1587, outlawing both speculation on the promotion of cardinals and the outcome of pregnancies.12 The rationale for this decree was both financial and moral. A month before its promulgation, thousands of scudi were lost in wagering over the surprising promotion of the English prelate, William Allen.13 Furthermore, the words of the decree highlighted how ‘the pernicious game, called scommesse . . . has ruined poor artisans . . . who leave their professions because of greed…and out of desperation commit every unworthy act with offense to God and of their souls’.14 The edict proscribed severe punishments to its transgressors: noblemen and other ‘people of quality’ suffered a 500 scudi fine, artisans and ‘people of lower condition’ faced five years in the galleys, and courtesans and prostitutes

ASR, TCG, Investigazioni, t. 224, testimonies of Sebastiano Arcione and Anibale Pallator, 11 December 1590, fols. 9r-10r. 11 ASR, TCG, Investigazioni, t. 225, testimony of Francesco Peretti, 18 March 1591, fols. 3v-4v. 12 Newssheet of 28 June 1587 in Orbaan (1910: 291). 13 BAV, Urb​.l​at 1055, newssheets of 8 August 1587, fol. 358r. 14 ASR, Bandi, Governatore, vol. 410, edict of 18 September 1587. 10

357

358

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

received a public flogging and perpetual banishment from Rome.15 The edict proposed the harshest punishment for Jewish brokers and players – a lifetime stint in the galleys. The edict shocked the merchant community of Rome. Many bankers and brokers threatened to take their business to Milan, Naples and even Lyon, where a thriving Florentine community existed.16 The gambit worked. By February 1588, Sixtus V reversed course, issuing a series of new edicts throughout 1588 that permitted the gaming on a regulated basis. The first of these edicts forbade betting on feast days, at night, and between Christians and Jews. The edict further sought to prevent disturbances caused by competition among brokers: it warned them to engage in their trade ‘quietly and formally’.17 In the July 1589, the pope amplified this warning with another edict that prohibited, on the pain of twenty-five scudi for each transgression, shouting odds in the streets and using insulting words against rivals to woo prospective customers.18 Sixtus V did not stop there. On 10 August 1588, he issued an edict that struck at fraudulent brokers. The edict limited the number of brokers to forty, requiring them to register with the Apostolic Chamber, the financial arm of the papacy that regulated all economic activity, in order to accept wagers. The edict further imposed an annual registration fee of fifty scudi, which the pope used to build a poor hospital near the Vatican.19 The edict obliged brokers to submit all betting tickets to the Apostolic Commissary. Those failing to comply suffered a fine of twenty-five scudi for the first offence, doubled in addition to the deprivation of their office for the second. Papal messengers posted the edicts throughout the Banchi and surrounding areas, including on the doors of the Apostolic Chamber and in the busy market, Campo dei Fiore. To prevent confusion among the populace, the messengers posted lists of officially licensed brokers along with the edict.20

Ibid. BAV, Urb​.l​at 1055, newssheet of 31 October 1587, fol. 466r. 17 ASV, Bandi sciolti, ser. I, b. 2, edict of 18 February 1588, p. 69. 18 ASV, Misc. Arm. IV & V, t. 203, edict of 10 July 1589, p. 518. 19 ASV, Bandi sciolti, ser. I, b. 2, edict of 10 August 1588, p. 40. Papal officials later reduced the number of brokers from thirty to forty. 20 Ibid. 15 16

The Market in the Conclave

Sixtus V sought to co-opt the brokers, highlighted by his construction of a loggia in the Banchi, where they could meet clients.21 Ostensibly built to protect them from the elements, it also gathered them in one area, making it easier for policing authorities to monitor their transactions. Nevertheless, the pope’s efforts to regulate competition and cheating involved in the wagering failed dramatically. Unlicensed brokers continued to operate clandestinely. Faced with the disorder of the market, Sistux V again banned scommesse, which the intransigent brokers promptly ignored.22

A social profile of the players Betting on the promotion of cardinals and the election of popes was undoubtedly an economic venture, but it was also a game, one that brought a wide arrange of the populace together in shared risk and play. A blacksmiths could visit a broker’s shop to purchase tickets on a cardinal doing well in the wagering, demonstrating a familiarity with the elite politics, supposedly beyond his kin. A nobleman might employ the services of a witch in order to divine the outcome of the election. Jewish gamblers could wander outside the confines of the Ghetto at night to place bet with Christians. Few activities in Renaissance Italy involved such a heterogeneous association of people in mutual sociability. A reading of the newssheets, ambassador dispatches and trials of the governor’s tribunal reveal this miscellany of gamblers. We know more about the merchants and bankers of the Banchi, often associates of the brokers or brokers themselves, because they risked the highest stakes in the betting and left a deeper imprint on the historical record.23 This mercantile community, as noted, was dominated by Florentines with solid ties to wealthy banking houses – the Strozzi, Lanciati and de’ Servi – of their home city. For these wealthy entrepreneurs, wagering on political outcomes was an economic activity comparable to trade and banking (Baker, 2016). A merchant could suffer a great loss in placing bets on a

BAV, Urb​.l​at 1055, newssheet of 20 September 1587, fol. 416r. ASV, Misc. Arm. IV & V, t. 203, edict of 27 December 1589, p. 522. 23 On banking in Renaissance Rome, see Guidi Bruscoli (2007). 21 22

359

360

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

papal election just as he might if a prince defaulted on a loan or sudden storm destroyed a ship laden with spices. Thus, scommesse was another form of economic risk-taking, subject to fortune’s whim. Despite the risks, the possibility for large and easy returns in gambling proved too tempting to entrepreneurs. In 1550, a member for the Ceuli banking house won 20,000 scudi over the election of Julius III.24 In 1587, an official of the papal court won 40,000 scudi in bets on the promotion of William Allen’s promotion as cardinal.25 However, losses were also excessive, with individuals and banking houses losing several hundred thousand scudi. A newssheet of 1590 mentioned that several prominent banking houses, those of the Deti, de’ Servi and Federichi, went bankrupt due to betting on the papal election.26 A Sienese banker, Fabio Piccolomini, fled Rome over his losses. A year later, the de’ Servi again incurred financial troubles related to the wagering.27 Besides the merchants and bankers, Roman nobles and resident ambassadors from Italian and European principalities zealously threw themselves into the betting. Ambassadors often reported the odds to their princes, revealing both their own and their patrons’ fervour for the game (Villard, 2009). Wagering frequently occurred around the palaces of ambassadors and powerful barons, where gamblers congregated to find sanctuary from the policing authorities. Moreover, ambassadors used their influence to procure the freedom of retainers and familiars imprisoned by the police. The Tuscan ambassador, Giovanni Niccolini, successfully negotiated the release of a relative and several other Florentines arrested for taking during bets on papal election in October 1590.28 Cardinals, too, succumbed to the universal passion for scommesse. Inside the conclave, cardinals wagered informally on the election’s outcome with jewelled crosses, amber-scented gloves and even – in one account – a marble bust.29 Yet, according to the Florentine ambassador,

Dispatch of 12 February 1550 in Brown, Calendar of State Papers (1970: 5:310). BAV, Urb​.l​at 1055, newssheet of 15 August 1587, fol. 374r. 26 BAV, Urb​.l​at 1058, newssheet of 22 December 1590, fol. 139r. 27 ASF, MdP, Carteggio diplmatico, Roma, f. 1687 Varie Lettere non solo de proni ma de loro ministri contenuti negotii spicciolati dal 1540 al 1616, letter to Ferdinando I de’ Medici, 19 November 1591, n.p. 28 BAV, Urb​.l​at 1058, newssheets of 13 and 17 October 1590, fols. 526r and 536r. 29 For the marble bust, see ASF, MdP, Carteggio diplomatico, Roma, f. 3268, letter of the Bishop of Cortona to Cosimo I de’ Medici, 4 January 1550, fols. 586v-87r. 24 25

The Market in the Conclave

Averardo Seristori, they frequently employed servants to make official bets at the Banchi.30 Like the cardinals, Roman aristocrats employed go-betweens to place bets for them. It was common practice in Renaissance Italy to use intermediaries to carry letters and messages to others; elite women especially had recourse to the services of go-betweens since they had difficulties carrying out business beyond the confines of the home (Cohen and Thomas, 1989). In the context of betting, the use of trusted servants and familiars to carry out purchase and transports of ticked was also a means of evading the notice of policing authorities. For example, in 1590, constables seized Juan Aghilar in the Banchi carrying a purse full of coins, betting tickets and letters addressed to the Spanish ambassador and several cardinals. During his second interrogation, he admitted that he had lived in Rome for three years as the servant of a Signor Filiberto Belori and that he had bought a ticket on behalf of his master.31 He might have placed wagers himself, as another servant of Belori had exhorted Juan to take part in games, saying, ‘Come! Let’s play in those places where they usually take bets . . . Cardinal Montalto stands a good chance!’32 During the same conclave, the bargello of Rome and his men apprehended the Venetian servant, Gianbattista Baldassario, while he waited to meet a broker in the Banchi. Camilla Peretti, the sister of Sixtus V, has tasked Gianbattista to place a 500 scudi bet over the election.33 Extravagant wagers were the prerogative of the highborn. However, people further down the social ladder also tried their luck at the scommesse a fare il papa. The trials of gamblers found in the governor’s tribunal provide a spectrum of those who risked their fortunes in the betting. The majority of those interrogated by papal authorities were artisans and street vendors, including several Jewish used-clothes dealers. For example, constables apprehended the mason, Gian Antonio Peraccha, in the Banchi with three tickets he had purchased from different brokers. He had placed

ASF, MdP, Carteggio diplomatico, Roma, f. 3268, dispatch of Averardo Seristori, 8 December 1549, fol. 505r. 31 ASR, TCG, Costituti, t. 411, testimony of Juan Aghilar, 23 October 1590, fols. 72r-v. 32 ASR, TCG, Costituti, t. 411, testimony of Juan Aghilar, 29 October 1590, fols. 75r-76v. Cardinal Montalto refers to Alessandro Peretti, nephew of Sixtus V. 33 ASR, TCG, Costituti, t. 411, testimony of Gianbattista Baldassario, 27 October 1590, fols. 76v-78r. 30

361

362

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

one bet on Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, a favourite in the odds making, for fourteen scudi and two on Cardinal Girolamo della Rovere for nineteen and twenty-five scudi, respectively, a considerable portion of his earnings as an artisan.34 Likewise, risking a sizeable sum was the leather worker, Girolamo Campana, who also bought a ticket on della Rovere, which would have given him a return of 100 scudi had the cardinal succeeded to the throne. Under torture, he cried out about the needs of his poor family, demonstrating that economic need had driven many to take part in the betting.35 Others attempted to claimed poverty as alibi in their defence. The tailor, Lutio Renzo, stated before the authorities, ‘I don’t have money to wager on the pope because I have four children.’36 Edict prohibiting courtesans and prostitutes from placing bets reveal that women participated in the game. However, Roman constables did not arrest women in their raids of the Banchi, suggesting that they met brokers in less public locations. Moreover, lacking liquidity, women resorted to wagering personal possessions, given to them by lovers and husbands. Although the evidence is scanty in Rome, Margherita Corsi has examined Venetian women who placed bets on outcome of pregnancies and on the biweekly elections of electors in late seventeenth- and early eighteencentury Venice. She found that Venetian women staked rings, dresses, belts, necklaces and other personal possessions with local bookmakers (Corsi, 2013: 59–63). One trial from Rome supports Corsi’s argument. In 1593, the cheeseseller, Bartolomeo Danzi brought a case before the governor’s tribunal for his daughter, Anna, accusing the broker, Lorenzo Cirelli, of swindling his daughter in a wager over the outcome of their neighbour’s pregnancy. Anna’s father claimed that Cirelli, ‘through flattering and false words’, had ‘seduced my daughter and made her enter into the game because she was a young girl’.37 Having no money of her own, Anna used a silk dress – probably one of the few she owned – as a wager. Betting also fostered associations between Jewish and Christian gamblers; fellowships viewed with apprehension by church leaders. Sixtus

ASR, TCG, Costituti, t. 407, testimony of Gian Antonio Peraccha, 31 October 1590, fols. 127v-28r. 35 ASR, TCG, Costituti, t. 407, testimony of Girolamo Campana, 11 October 1590, 95r-v. 36 ASR, TCG, Processi, b. 230, testimony of Lutio Renzo, 11 October 1590, fol. 1090v. 37 ASR, TCG, Processi, b. 269, testimony of Bartolomeo Danzi, 27 March 1593, 238r-39r. 34

The Market in the Conclave

V plainly feared this. In his edict on scommesse of 18 February 1588, he complained that Jews ‘incited Christians to make contracts without any respect or regard’ for feast days and other holy occasions.38 While permitting Christians to serve as brokers, the edict forbade Jews from making betting contracts. However, the edict failed to prevent to Jewish involvement in the betting. It only forced Jewish brokers to work underground. Furthermore, Jews continued to leave the confines of the ghetto to gamble in the Banchi as Christians entered it to consult with Jewish astrologers and magicians on the election’s outcome.39

False news and market manipulations Gambling on the papal election and other political events related to the papacy required insider knowledge of information derived from the conclave or the papal court. Brokers and their clients, therefore, sought a variety of cunning means of discovering political secrets, which include chasing rumours and recourse to spies and other informants. In seeking out information from the conclave, brokers spread rumours, some true, others false, and even fabricated news in order to manipulate the betting in their favours. These rumours in turn misled not only gamblers but also the public, sparking riots and tumults as crowds joyfully celebrated the election. Brokers, thus, abused the hopes of the people and helped to contribute the disorder associated with the papal interregnum (Hunt, 2012). The Vatican along with the Sistine Chapel, where the conclave took place, were the central loci of this information gathering and rumourmongering. Newssheet writers, ambassadors and informants working for the brokers gathered here to gather updates on the status of the election from personal servants of the cardinals called conclavists, communal staff (cooks, barbers and carpenters) and even the cardinals themselves. Once

ASV, Bandi sciolti, ser. I, b. 2, edict of 15 February 1588, p. 69. ASF, MdP, Carteggio diplomatico, Roma, f. 3080, letter to Francesco I de’ Medici from Cosimo Bartoli, 3 July 1569, fol. 582r. 38 39

363

364

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

procured, this information found its way to the Banchi. Besides serving as the financial centre of Rome, the Banchi, like the Rialto in Venice, was the place where Romans went to hear the latest gossip and news coming from the papal court. In the adjacent quarter of Parione, newssheets writers stationed in shops near Piazza Navona took down this information, disseminating it to a wider audience. Romans intentionally stopped in the Banchi to inquire about the state of the election and the betting odds over it. For example, several artisans and servants apprehended for betting in 1590 stated before the governor’s tribunal that they came to the Banchi either to discover to confirm rumours of the pope’s election. While some may well have been innocent, others were certainly gambling. The cloth merchant and broker, Lorenzo Pollini, testified that he saw ‘in the Banchi so many people discussing the papabili’, that is, assessing the daily voting that took place in the conclave.40 Similarly, a pantry servant at the Roman College, Marco Florido, told the governor’s judges, ‘I saw in the Banchi many men speaking among one other, whispering in each other’s ears.’41 Before news from the conclave made it to the Banchi, brokers had to find means of procuring it. This included relying on informants from within the conclave, and very commonly, sitting outside the route, turntables by servants brought food and other necessities to the cardinals. Despite the presence of guards and the sealing of the conclave doors, notes and letters passed through windows and through the route, hidden in plates of food and dirty laundry (Hunt, 2016: 214–24). Spies also posted themselves near the route or windows, deliberately left open, where they communicated with those inside with a secret hand signals or in a whispered sort of cant. Through bribes, guards averted their eyes to these activities. In any case, throughout the sixteenth century, the brokers stayed notified of the activities inside the conclave. In a dispatch of 5 December 1549, Dandolo described the porosity of the conclave to the Venetian Senate: It is therefore more or less clear that the merchants are very well informed about the state of the poll, and the cardinals’ attendants in the conclave go

ASR, TCG, Costituti, t. 407, testimony of Lorenzo Pollini, 11 October 1590, 100v. ASR, TCG, Costituti, t. 407, testimony of Marco Florido, 11 October 1590, 99r-v.

40 41

The Market in the Conclave

partners with them in the wagers, which thus causes many tens of thousands of scudi to change hands.42

Dandolo blamed the brokers and the greater merchant community of the Banchi for intruding upon the space of the conclave where the election was to take place, inspired by the hand of God, rather than by the market. Not only did the brokers of the Banchi discover the secrets of the conclave, they also sought to manipulate the public opinion on the election, and thereby increase the betting on insider candidates. During the election of 1555, the Neapolitan cardinal, Gianpietro Carafa, ranked among the top three papabili in the first round of voting in the conclave that eventually raised him to the papal throne as Paul IV. According to Giovanni Cagarra, agent of the bishop of Feltre, the brokers ‘had spread a rumor that Naples [i.e. Carafa] had died’.43 The populace believed the news because Carafa missed the morning mass and, later that afternoon, the congregation of cardinals. Consequently, his odds in the Banchi rapidly fell. In response, the cardinals ordered the arrest and execution of rumour’s instigators. This was not an isolated incident. During the night of 13 October 1590, a rumour swept through the city that Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti had been elected pope. The next morning, wagering on his candidacy shot up to 70 per cent, which in turn gave credence to the rumour.44 The false news, likewise, fooled the civic magistrates of Rome. They had messengers spread the word throughout the city and posted guards at his palace and near the conclave to prevent pillaging. After the ruckus finally quieted down, observers denounced the brokers for the rumour’s provenance. Giovanni Niccolini, the Tuscan ambassador in Rome, reported, ‘Many concluded that [the rumor] was a stratagem of the Strozzi, who publicly wager [on the election]. Because of this, it is believed that they have won quite a lot.’45 The deliberately false reporting of papal elections reveals that a small cadre of merchants and brokers could foment rumours, play on the hopes

Dispatch of 5 December 1549 in Brown, Calendar of State Papers (1970: 5:281). BAV, Chigiani R II, t. 54, letter of Giovanni Cagarra to the Bishop of Feltre, 11 May 1555, fol. 230v- 31r. 44 BAV, Urb​.l​at 1058, newssheet of 13 October 1590, fol. 525r. 45 ASF, MdP, Carteggio diplomatico, Roma, f. 3301, dispatch of 12 October 1590, fol. 280r. 42 43

365

366

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

of the people and manipulate public opinion. Betting on the papal election helped contribute the confusion of the interregnum, subjected the election to the market and turned Rome into ‘a tangled mess’.46 Thus, the activities of the brokers played a major role in shaping the turbulent public sphere of Rome in which uncertainty and falsities reigned.

Papal checkmate: The end of scommesse The rumour of Paleotti’s election occurred during the second conclave of 1590, held at the end of September after the twelve-day pontificate of Urban VII. This election, in which rumours of various candidates acceding to the throne multiplied one after another, would initiate the definite end of gambling on the outcomes of conclaves and of cardinals’ promotions. Papal officials held the brokers and their clients responsible for the creation of the rumours, which kept the city on edge, and immediately took action. The tumults caused by rumours of Paleotti’s election, which had occurred on 10 October 1590, provoked a swift response from the cardinals. The following day, they had the governor of Rome, Giovanni Matteucci, reissue an edict against gambling on the election.47 The governor backed the words of the edict with heavy-handed force. Matteucci ordered his bargello and constables raid the Banchi over the course of the week, having them scour the principal squares of the Banchi in search of gamblers. The constables forcibly entered banks and spice shops, arresting brokers and players, and anyone else who happened to be in the way. The police also relied on paid informants to lead them to gambling dens. According to newssheets, the bargello arrested over thirty brokers and merchants, and used torture to discover the names of their accomplices and customers.48

For example, see the dispatch of Giulio Grandi to the Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara; ASMo, Cancellieria ducale, Ambasciatori, agenti e corrispondenti, Roma, filza 283 – XXXIII/18, 6 December 1559. 47 BAV, Urb​.l​at 1058, newssheet of 17 October 1590, fol. 536r. 48 Ibid. 46

The Market in the Conclave

Trials of the governor’s tribunal demonstrate that Matteucci had the constables target brokers, almost all of whom were Florentine and registered with the Apostolic Chamber. For example, Giovanni Forastani Fiorentini, seized at the counter of the Lanciati banking house, had served as a licensed broker for fifteen years and could boast, ‘I serve all the merchants and I am like a dean of the brokers.’49 Under the threat of torture, he named Paolo Falconieri and the brothers, Andrea and Lorenzo Pollini, all Florentine citizens who had been taking bets on the election. Constables arrested another licensed broker, Giulio Andrea Illuminati, as he wrote up tickets at the Fortune, the perfume shop of Girolamo Liverati.50 After two interrogations, Illuminati admitted that he took part in the betting on the election, but asserted that a friend had assured him that the bargello would leave him alone, suggesting that adherents previously had recourse to bribery to ensure immunity from the law. Members of Rome’s elite, usually sheltered from the prosecution, feared that brokers might divulge their names to the governor’s tribunal under torture. A newssheet of 17 October warned, ‘This intrigue could snarl and implicate many lords, and even a few of the most illustrious cardinals.’51 Entrepreneurs further worried ‘that this prohibition of the wagering will remove the freedom of the market and cause money to flow to Florence, Naples, and other cities’.52 However, these anxieties seemed hyperbolic since the Florentine community secured the release of the most important prisoners through a surety of 10,000 scudi. Even with their imprisonment and torture, brokers and their clients refused to abandon their lucrative activities. After their discharge, a number of the brokers began to exercise their trade near the palace of Cardinal Francesco Sforza, the prelate responsible for ordering their arrest. The palace, located in the Banchi, was part of a franchigia, areas around the homes of ambassadors and cardinals that provided protection from the policing authorities. The brokers were claiming sanctuary from the law, and possibly playing a joke since they could have chosen friendlier franchigie, such as the palaces of the French or Tuscan ambassador.

ASR, TCG, Processi, b. 230, testimony of Giovanni Forastani, 11 October 1590, fol. 1094r. ASR, TCG, Costituti, t. 407, testimony of Giulio Andrea Illuminati, 13 October 1590, fols. 108r-09v. 51 BAV, Urb​.l​at 1058, newssheet of 17 October 1590, fol. 536r. 52 Ibid. 49 50

367

368

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Informed by his mother that crowds had gathered in the shadows of his palace, furtively exchanging money and tickets, Sforza had Matteucci issue new orders. The bargello and his men once again hit the Banchi, this time arresting those huddled near the palace.53 Those who managed to elude the bargello relocated to the franchigia of Orsini, a powerful and venerable noble family. Still pursued by the constables, the brokers found sanctuary near palace of the Colonna, an equally prestigious Roman family. Nevertheless, hounded by the law, they gathered in vineyards near Monte Cavallo, at the time a less urbanized area and an ideal space for illicit activities.54 This reprieve, however, proved ephemeral in the end. On 5 December 1590, the cardinals elected Niccolò Sfondrati, who took the name Gregory XIV. Although he only reigned for eleven months, his impact on political gambling in Rome was enduring. On 21 March 1591, Gregory XIV promulgated the bull, Cogit Nos, the decisive prohibition on all forms of political gambling related to the papacy. The bull permanently forbade betting on the life, death and election of popes as well as banning gambling on the promotion of any ecclesiastic, including cardinals, on the pain of excommunication and perpetual banishment. In the bull, Gregory XIV trotted out the usual moral and religious complaints against the activity – it fostered greed, inspired fraud, ruined artisans and encouraged blasphemy.55 However, unlike previous edicts, the bull criticized the sacrilege committed by adherents of the game, since ‘they mix the spiritual and sacred with any sort of money and go about attaching to them the foulest customs of the market’. It reminded players that the election and the promotion of cardinals were ‘affairs belong[ing] to God’.56 Furthermore, the pope specifically condemned the brokers for the rumours and disturbances that their activities provoked. So that no one could claim ignorance of the bull, the pope had it printed in Italian and posted throughout the city and in the principal cities of the peninsula. Papal authorities vigorously enforced Cogit Nos after its proclamation, prosecuting all forms of scommesse, even maschio o femina (Hunt, 2015).

BAV, Urb​.l​at 1058, newssheet of 27 October 1590, fol. 556r. Ibid. 55 Yale University, Beinecke Library, no. 254, ‘Bolla conta chi fa scommesse’, 21 March 1591. 56 Ibid. 53 54

The Market in the Conclave

Few reports after 1591 refer to wagers made on the promotion of cardinals and the papal election. The few that do comment that they were never as many as before Gregory XIV’s bull.57 In 1592, the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Moro, credited the change to the greater diligence employed by the cardinals.58 Consequently, by the mid-1590s, wagering on events related to the papacy had virtually disappeared in Italy. The last decree against gambling on the papal election occurred in 1605, but it was part of larger edict banning a number of activities during the papal interregnum, including the possession of illicit weapons and gathering in large groups.59 The papacy’s success in outlawing wagering on political events is remarkable, considering that it attempted to forbid other forms of gambling. Popes issued thunderous edicts, threatening severe punishments, against cards, dice and various ball games, without any effect. These ludic activities seemed entrenched among soldiers, artisans and servants. Arresting and punishing such a vast group was an unrealistic task. Conversely, the merchants and brokers were easier targets. In 1590 and 1591, the papacy struck at the leaders who organized the betting, making it impossible for them to continue the practice their trade. Subsequently, political wagering in Rome and Florence – at least in its organized form – swiftly disappeared. The brokers of the Banchi, therefore, were victims of their own success.

Concluding comparisons In Rome, betting on the political events was intimately tied to great Florentine banking houses and their agents, thereby making it easy for the papacy to extirpate the practice simply by attacking its organizers. In marked contrast, betting on political events in Venice – the most popular centred on the biweekly selection of patricians as nominators of the Great Council – was severely proscribed. As early as 1526, the Venetian Senate created the magistracy, the Censori, charged with

BAV, Urb​.l​at 1059, pt. II, newssheet of 2 November 1591, fol. 351v. ASVe, Dipacci degli ambasciatori al senato, Roma, f. 29, dispatch of 18 January 1592, fol. 334r. 59 ASV, Misc. Arm. IV & V, t. 26, edict of 5 March 1605, p. 212. 57 58

369

370

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

safeguarding the state’s electoral process (Finlay, 1980: 208–19). Despite this prohibition, ample evidence exists of clandestine betting, which involved a diverse swathe of the populace. Venetian brokers, operating illicitly, came from humbler backgrounds than their Roman and Florentine counterparts. Many were barbers, scribes and petty merchants. Because of its underground and unstructured nature, betting on patrician nominators, called the piria, survived well into the eighteenth century (Florin, 1989: 126–7). Genoa, the other city with a tradition of gambling on political events, took a different approach than Rome and Venice. By 1576, Genovese gamblers had focused their attention of gamblers on the newly created executive council, the Senate with twelve governors and the Camera with eight procurators. Twice a year, the government selected by lot three governors and two procurators from a list of nobles. For more than fifty years, proscriptive laws outlawed scommesse on the two extractions. In 1644, however, the government abruptly changed course, co-opting the betting by legalizing it and turning it into a state lottery. Proceeds from the lottery funded state enterprises and civic charities (Assereto, 2013). The Genoese model proved influential. By the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century, Italian principalities and European states had begun to institute versions of the ‘Lotto di Genova’ (Zollinger, 2006). The fundamental difference between Rome and the two republics, however, was in their electoral processes. In Venice and Genoa, officials acquired their offices randomly, through extraction by lot from lists of noblemen qualified for civic appointment. In Rome, popes promoted cardinals, who in turn elected popes. This accounted contrasts in the betting style among the cities. In Venice and Genoa, the betting was based solely on chance since gamblers had no way of knowing the names that would extracted, although some turned to witchcraft for assistance (Martin, 1989: 108–10). Conversely, in Rome, devotees of scommesse relied on rumour and news to make logical assessments on the outcome of promotions and conclaves. Moreover, while Venetian and Genovese elections occurred every two weeks and six months respectively, making them routinized events, those in Rome took place less frequently, once a year for cardinals and roughly every five for popes. The contrasts in electoral process and timing explain why betting in Rome excited passion among players and stirred chaos in the streets.

The Market in the Conclave

Archival sources Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF) Mediceo del principato, Carteggio diplomatico, Roma. Filze 1687, 3080. 3268 and 3301. Archivio di Stato di Modena (ASMo) Cancellieria ducale, Ambasciatori, agenti e corrispondenti, Roma. Filza 28 Archivio di Stato di Roma (ASR) Bandi, Governatore. Volume 410. Camerale, Lotto II, Lotto. Busta 1. Tribunale criminale del Governatore (TCG). Costituti. Volumes 407, 411. Investigazioni. Volumes 124 and125 Processi. Buste 230, 237, and 269. Archivio Segreto Vaticano (ASV) Bandi Sciolti. Series I. Miscellanea Armadio IV & V. “Bolle e bandi.” Tomes 26 and 203. Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASVe) Censori. Capitolari. Busta 3. Dispacci degli ambasciatori al senato, Roma. Filza 29. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) Fondo Chigiani. R II. Tome 54. Fondo Urbinate Latino. Codici 1038, 1055, 1058, and 1059. Yale University, Beinecke Library “Bolla della Santità di N. S. Gregorio PP. XIV contra chi fa scommesse sopra la vita & morte ò sopra la futra elettione del Pontefice Romano ò sopra le promotioni dei Cardinali della Santa Chiesa Romana.” 21 March 1591.

Printed primary sources Albèri, Eugenio, ed. 1839–63. 1 Le relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti di Seneto durante il decimosesto, 15 vols. Florence: Società edictrice fiorentina.

371

372

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Brown, Rawdon, ed. 1970. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice and Other Libraries in Northern Italy, 38 vols. Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint. Delaney, Frank. 2005. ‘Holy rollers and Papal prefectas’. New York Times, 18 April 2005. Gould, Peter. 2005. ‘Bets open on Benedict’s successor’. BBC News, 22 April 2005. Orbaan, J. A. F. 1910. ‘La Roma di Sisto V negli Avvisi’. Archivio della società romana di storia patria, 32: 277–312. Sanudo, M. 1969–70. I diarii di Marino Sanudo, ed. Rinaldo Fulin et al., 58 tomes. Bologna.

References Assereto, G. 2013. Un giuoco così utile ai pubblici intrioti: Il lotto di Genova dal XVI al XVIIII secolo. Rome: Viella. Baker, N. S. 2016. ‘Deep play in Renaissance Italy’. In M. Jurdjevic and R. Strøm-Olsen (eds), Rituals of Politics and Culture: Essays in Honour of Edward Muir, Toronto: CRRS. Cohen, E. S. and Thomas V. C. 1989. ‘Camilla the go-between: The politics of gender in a Roman household (1559)’. Continuity and Change, 4: 53–77. Colzi, F. 1998. ‘“Per maggior felicità del commercio”: I sensali e la mediazione mercantile e finanziaria a Roma nei secoli XVI-XIX. Roma moderna e contemporanea, 6: 397–426. Corsi, M. 2013. ‘Andata de mal per questo ziogo:’ Storie de madri, figli, e scommesse particolari nella Venezia dei sei e settecento. Verona: Qui Edit. Delumeau, J. 1957. Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moité du XVIe siècle, 2 tomes. Paris: De Boccard. Dooley, B. 1999. The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Finlay, R. 1980. Politics in Renaissance Venice. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Florin, A. 1989. Fanti e denari: Sei secoli di gioco. Venice: Arsenale. Guidi Bruscoli, F. 2007. Papal Banking in Renaissance Rome: Benvenuto Oliviero and Paul III, 1534–1549. London: Routledge. Hunt, John M. 2012. ‘“The conclave from the outside In”: Rumor, speculation, and disorder in Rome during early modern papal elections’. Journal of Early Modern History, 16: 355–82.

The Market in the Conclave

Hunt, John M. 2015. ‘Betting on the Papal Election in sixteenth-century Rome’. Occasional Paper Series, 32. Las Vegas: Center for Gaming Research, University Libraries. Hunt, John M. 2016. The Vacant See in Early Modern Rome: A Social History of the Papal Interregnum. Leiden: Brill. Infelise, M. 2002. ‘Roman Avvisi: Information and politics in the seventeenth century’. In G. Signorotto and M. Antoietta Viceglia (eds), Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–1700, 212–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, R. 1989. Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550–1650. Oxford: Blackwell. Ortalli, G. 2005. ‘Maschio o femmina: una scommessa fiorentina del secolo per un gioco sospetto’. Ludica, 11: 169–71. Pattenden, M. 2017. Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Renucci, P. 1978. ‘Fille ou garcon? Un singleur jeu de hazard florentin’. Revue des études italiennes, 24: 164–73. Roberti, G. 1995. I giochi a Roma di strada e d’osteria. Rome: Newton Compton. Spinelli, Lorenzo. 1955. La vacanza della Sede apostolica: dalle origini al Concilio tridentino. Milan: Giuffrè. Villard, R. 2009. ‘Le conclave des pariuers: Paris, opinion publique et continuité pontifical à Rome au XVIe sieclè’. Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociale, 64: 375–403. Welch, E. 2008. ‘Lotteries in early modern Italy’. Past and Present, 199: 71–111. Zollinger, M. 2006. ‘Entrepreneurs of chance: The spread of Lotto in XVIII century Europe’. Ludica, 12: 80–99.

373

20 Eighteenth-century lotteries Mathias Fuchs

Chapter Outline Early gambling 374 Royal Lotteries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 375 Eighteenth-century gambling: the gaming craze 378 ‘Europeanization’ of gambling 385 From plague to godliness: Legal changes, religious and ethical reappraisal 387 Crowdfunding, big business 390 Conclusion391

Early gambling Lotteries have been the playground for big successes and immense losses for at least six centuries. Games of chance have a much longer history. People have been throwing the dice for millennia. In the fifteenth century, however, an Italian patrician transformed aleatoric selection processes for political candidates into a system for the monetization of gambling. The Genoese Benedetto Gentile cleverly appropriated the giuoco del seminario, a mechanism of choice of candidates for the ‘membri dei Serenissimi Collegi’ and restaged it as a lottery game for the public: giuoco del lotto. In each case – political election and aleatoric game for personal profit –

Eighteenth-Century Lotteries

the rule system was simply to pick 5 out of 90 available numbers. In the former case the chamber and the senate were selected, in the latter one the financial winners were determined by chance. Predecessors of well-organized State Lotteries and Royal Lotteries have been spotted in Germany and England. Willmann notes: ‘The first lotteries appeared in Southern Germany in the second half of the 15th century. The first lottery we know of was held in Augsburg in 1470. Others followed: Straßburg (which was German at that time) in 1473, Erfurt in 1477, Gemünden in 1480, and several lotteries in Nürnberg around 1487’ (Willmann, 1999: 17). In the chapter ‘Loteries et utilité publique’ of her book on Royal Lotteries, Marie-Laure Legay calls occasional events to raise money for fortifications in Bourgogne (1420) or for the poor in Artois ‘punctual’ (Legay, 2014: 1). These events did have a component of chance-based investment by individuals, but they were hardly lotteries in the sense of well-organized enterprises for the redistribution of gaming stakes in a plausible and traceable manner.

Royal Lotteries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries It was King François I who discovered the Genoese lotteries in Florence during his campaigns in Italy. In his homeland France he had to find a solution to cope with a disastrous financial crisis caused by the war against Spain and decided to organize a lottery to help the state (Willmann, 1999: 7). This first French lottery, the  Loterie Royale, was held in 1539 and was authorized by the edict of  Châteaurenard (Guilbert and Descotils 1993). This attempt was a fiasco since the tickets were very costly and the aristocrats, who could have afforded them, were opposed to the project. According to Marie-Laure Legay, aristocratic play ethics (Legay, 2014: 3) were incompatible with the fact that the king kept part of the ‘play money’ and turned it into ‘real money’. She assigns this attitude to the ‘moralists’ (Legay, 2014: 3). It could also be seen as a noble understanding of play and close to a Huizingan concept of ‘disinterestedness’ (Huizinga, 1949 [1938]: 13). The targeted customer segment of a few thousand aristocrats was too small to guarantee huge profits. This was a lesson to be learnt for the attempts to organize lotteries at a later point: lotteries only work if offered to a wide audience. During the seventeenth century and the first

375

376

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

half of the eighteenth century Parisian magistrate and the sovereign court forbade lotteries, as Marie-Laure Legay tells us (2014). They seem at least to have been tolerated according to other historians (Willmann, 1999: 8, 9) (Darracq, 2005). The difference in opinions might well stem from different concepts about what a ‘proper’ state lottery is, and also whether projects without any success should be counted as relevant. Obviously, there was also a difference between parliamentary Parisian legislation and the legal practice of the Crown. ‘[T]he royal power had been confronted by the opposition of the Magistrates, who had also been influenced by the Jansenist doctrine of lottery. Already in 1598, they had banned all forms of lottery,’ Legay writes. Yet, ‘[i]n 1656, the Italian Lorenzo Tonti obtained a licence for a lottery to finance the Pont Royal bridging the Seine to connect the Louvre and Saint-Germain’ (Willmann, 1999: 8). In 1699 and in 1700 other lotteries were held in Angers and Lyon (Willmann, 1999: 8) – far away from Paris’s zone of legal influence. In 1659 the King himself, Louis XIV, organized a lottery to finance his wedding. This did not go down too well with the ladies of his court when they heard that the King was amongst the prize winners (Willmann, 1999: 8). It can at least be said that seventeenth-century France was not an easy growing bed for public gambling enterprises. The discussion about the feasibility of lotteries did not stop though (cf. Figure 20.1). Cardinal Mazarin suggested in 1644 to legalize lotteries with the purpose of supporting clerical projects. This was after Richelieu’s death, when Mazarin took the former’s place as prime minister. Mazarin could, as a Cardinal, propose such a potentially heretic project as pious gambling because it seemed to bring profit to the church only. His authority as acting head of the government for Anne of Austria also supported the project. He officially held this position after the death of Louis XIII. This enabled the Cardinal to advocate a controversial gambling system with two hats on: one of profane and governmental power and the other – Cardinal of the Holy Church. But it took until 1757 for a legal lottery to be established in France. Looking for funding for his École Militaire, Louis XV started a lottery. This took place concurrently with a series of similar projects, as I will demonstrate in the next section of this chapter. Not restricted by the institutional and ethical constraints of the Catholic Church, lotteries had been carried through since the fifteenth century in Flanders and in the Low Lands. Gerald Willmann acknowledges that there have been unregulated events even before that, but the first drawings of lots supervised by the municipalities have taken place in Gent in

Eighteenth-Century Lotteries

Figure 20.1 The game: rich in the morning and a beggar at night. Copperplate engraving, seventeenth century. my translation, French orig.: ‘Le Jeu: Riche au matin et gueux au soir’.

1445 and in Utrecht in 1446, with many more to follow. Willmann points out how regulations and protective measures by the municipalities changed the game. ‘In 1515, a lottery was held in Brussels with the peculiar feature that out-of-town participants who came to Brussels for the lottery were guaranteed safe-conduct. The profits of these lotteries were intended for specific purposes, such as fortifications, churches or simply the coffers of a municipality’ (Willmann, 1999: 5).  England also has a long history of experimenting with raffles and similar games of chance, but the first recorded official lottery was chartered in

377

378

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

1566 by Queen Elizabeth I. Lots were finally drawn in 1569. The lottery was set up to raise money for the ‘reparation of the havens and strength of the Realme, and towardes such other publique good workes’ (Ashton, 1893). Each ticket holder won a prize, and the total value of the prizes equalled the money raised.  Lotteries of this kind are usually called 50/50 lotteries. Different to the French Royal lottery in 1539, the English lotteries attracted gamblers from all social groups and offered a wide range of ticket prices.

Eighteenth-century gambling: the gaming craze On a large scale the popularization of chance processes for financial benefits took place during the eighteenth century. This was when state entrepreneurs and commercial investors set up lottery organizations and when kings and queens granted authorization. The first Austrian Lottery, called ‘Lotto di Genova’, started in 1751 with the permission of Empress Maria Theresia. Her son Joseph II, a reformer, later withdrew his mother’s concessions and prohibited gaming wherever he could. Some twenty years after Maria Theresia’s permission of lotto, Duke Karl I installed a lottery in the German city of Braunschweig, but his son Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand stopped the project due to alleged ‘moral problems’ and also in order ‘to protect his citizens’. In 1757 Louis XV initiated a legal lottery in France to fund his École Militaire. In Italy lotteries have been set up in Piemont, Venice, Milan, Naples and even in the pontifical state. It was, however, not a straight way for the Roman Church to accept gambling and lotteries. In the year of 1728 Pope Benedict XIII still threatened excommunication for those who participate in the game of lotto. Three years later Pope Clement XII readmitted lotto if the benefits were given to unmarried women as dowry. Since 1785 under Pius VI, the profits were put into a depositeria general, at the free disposal of the pope who, at his discretion, spent it on works of piety or of public use, such as the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes. One might well say that the period from 1751 to 1789 was the Golden Age of legal gambling. In 1751 Daniel Bernoulli tried to catch the zeitgeist of his century by saying: ‘The century that we live in could be subsumed in

Eighteenth-Century Lotteries

the history books as: Free Spirits’ Journal and the Century of Play’ (Bauer, 2006: 377).1 Bernoulli expressed an observation about the gamification of lifestyle that was based on observations in Vienna, but it was certainly also valid for other main European capitals like Paris, Rome, London, Den Haag, Rome and Naples. This gaming culture was a pan-European phenomenon based on widely distributed types of games and game rules. L’Hombre, Pharo, Brusquembille, Mariáš, Brìšcula and many more originated in different regions, but they were soon to be played all over European countries with minor local variations and sometimes with varying titles.2 Lotteries could be found everywhere and became a source of income for some and a serious economic problem for others. Hazardous games or jeux de contrepartie, such as the Pharo game or Hasard, were temporarily banned and forbidden to be played. It was however not only the legal status of the lotteries that changed gambling in the eighteenth century. There was also a new way of dealing with randomness and uncertainty. Throwing the die is obviously a performance controlled by chance. If no one cheats, the winner is determined by chance and chance only. In the case of the lotteries the complexity of the drawing system adds a new component to the perception of the gaming results. For many players the impression of computability of the results turned uncertainty into partial predictability. Statistical methods became popular in the eighteenth century, and there have been many players then who developed gambling systems allegedly accomplishing to surpass randomness and take advantage of statistical computations. The mathematical theory of probability had its roots in attempts to analyse games of chance. Following the correspondence of Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal, statistics became well-established financial and governmental tools and were also discussed in the salons and in popular books. Daniel Bernoulli, author of the bonmot ‘Century of Play’, did not only write about play as a social activity, but analysed

Translation by the author, German original: ‘Das gegenwärtige Jahrhundert könnte man in den Geschichtsbüchern nicht besser, als unter dem Titel: Das Freygeister=Journal und Spielsaeculum nennen.’ 2 In Spain the game was called ‘Juego del tresillo’, and there was the Spanish set of cards used lacking the eights and nines. 1

379

380

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

games of chance with mathematical methods. We would nowadays say that these texts belong to completely different disciplines and scientific discourses – those of sociology and of mathematical probability theory. Nevertheless the articles have been published in the very same book: ‘Types of Games of the higher Social States, particularly in Vienna, with an Appendix on the New Game Lotto di Genova’.3 The latter text mentioned here is a mathematical treatise on the statistics of lotto. Superstition, numerology and quasi-mathematical reasoning about the chances to win with various lotto systems resulted in a large number of speculations and publications about winning-systems. Giacomo Casanova was one of the ‘inventors’ of such systems, and he cleverly advertised his systems to other gamblers in order to create popularity and influence (Rosenthal and Goetzmann, 2010). One of the betting systems Casanova and other ‘calculateurs’4 used and probably believed to be a safe way to profit-making was the martingale. Martingales are betting strategies in which a gambler wins the stake if a coin comes up heads and loses it if the coin comes up tails. The player is asked to double the bet after every loss, so that the first win will recover all previous losses and additionally win a profit equal to the original stake. The martingale strategy has been used for different games including roulette,  and it can be used for certain kinds of lotteries. Since a gambler with infinite wealth will eventually flip heads, Casanova and those who employed it saw the martingale as a promising and reliable strategy. Probability theory demonstrates that the martingale is in the long run a losing strategy and not a winning strategy. But probability calculations had not been widely accepted, and they were sometimes done in an amateurish way. The before mentioned Daniel Bernoulli, resident of the eponymous Russian city, published his arguments against strategies like the martingale in the ‘Commentaries’ of the Imperial Academy of Science of Saint Petersburg (Bernoulli, 1954 [1738]). The so-called ‘Saint

This is a short translation by the author. The German original title is ‘Die Kunst die Welt erlaubt mitzunehmen in den verschiedenen Arten der Spiele, so in Gesellschaften höheren Standes, besonders in der Kayserlich-Königlichen Stadt Wien üblich sind: Nebst einem Anhang von dem neuen Spiel Lotto di Genova.’ 4 This is how d’Alembert, Condorcet, Casanova and other gamblers with mathematical ambitions and rational strategy were called (Legay, 2014). 3

Eighteenth-Century Lotteries

Petersburg paradox’ is relevant for probability and decision theory in economics. It is based on a particular lottery game that leads to a random variable with infinite expected value. Bernoulli proved why a naive decision criterion taking only the expected value into account predicts a course of action that ultimately leads to loss. Using mathematics to improve the chances to win turned the uncertainty of random processes into a new experience of control. In ‘Uncertainty in Games’ Greg Costikyan describes how randomness can be one of the possible sources of uncertainty. But this randomness turns into the illusion of a control of chance when players, play ‘games that allow them to feel that (a) winning is accomplished through superior strategy and (b) any random elements are peripheral and unlikely to affect outcomes strongly.’ (Costikyan, 2013: 82). That was exactly how many gamblers viewed the lotteries in the eighteenth century. The ‘superior strategy’ was trusted to be able to charm randomness via a completely transparent and seemingly predictable system. Public announcements reinforced the trust in the transactions of the lotto system. A poster for the State Lottery in 1761 states that there are exactly 11,945 prizes to be won and demonstrates how the money received from ticket sales will be distributed among the winners (cf. Figure 20.2). This was a big improvement in regard to transparency when we compare it to fraudulent lotteries of the seventeenth century – like the wedding scam of King Louis XIV from 1659, where probably no one except the King himself knew how the lots were drawn. Transparency became an issue under enlightened social conditions, and Marie-Laure Legay tells us that ‘The lottery [was] incompatible with the secret of finance, still defended by doctrines absolutism of power. Its success necessarily rests on gazettes, advertising, transparency, both of the wheel of fortune hoisted on a platform, and accounts, because any suspicion of fraud must be dismissed’5 (Legay, 2014). Once more we see twenty-first-century phenomena peeking through the surface of eighteenth-century practices. Today’s lotteries resemble their early predecessors in regard to fetishizing numbers. Numerical information on

Transl. Fuchs, orig.: ‘La loterie est incompatible avec le secret de la finance, encore défendu par les doctrines absolutismes du pouvoir. Son succès s’appuie nécessairement sur les gazettes, la publicité, la transparence, tant de la roue de la fortune hissée sur une estrade, que des comptes, car tout soupçon de fraude doit être écarté.’ 5

381

382

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Figure 20.2 Public announcement of a state lottery in Fleet Street/ London.

the founding year (ten years ago), the number of lots being said to win 10 € (90,000) and the probability for a gambler to win a million € (1: 250,000) distract from the profits made by the state and the average loss the participants will make (cf. Figure 20.3). Also still in fashion is the promise of being able to win by illustrations of complicated formulas. In Figure 20.4 a chalkboard is displayed with formulas for basic geometrical and arithmetic problems. These formulas will not help in forecasting the lotto results, but they add an undertone of scientific seriousness to gambling.

Eighteenth-Century Lotteries

Figure 20.3  Contemporary advertisement for a state lottery drawing in Baden-Würtemberg/Germany.

Figure 20.4  Detail from another advertisement in Hessen/Germany.

The eighteenth century was also the time when Appartements pour les Jeux,6 dedicated play rooms, were introduced in the houses of the aristocracy as well as in houses of the bourgeoisie. Special furniture to

See Salomon Kleiners ‘Apartement pour le Jeu’ (orthography as in the original) from the first half of eighteenth century (Lachmayer, 2006: 94). 6

383

384

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

display well-designed games or to hide such games from being visible all the time were designed, produced and sold Europe-wide. A masterpiece of European ancien régime cabinetmaking is a gaming table by David Roentgen that has hidden levers and drawers and can in an instance be changed into a gaming table, a writing desk, a poudreuse (make-up compartment), a bookrest, a lectern and a hiding place for love letters or pornographic depictions (Koeppe, 2012). The table legs could be unmounted and the cabinet could be folded and safely transported for journeys or voyages (Figure 20.5).  David Roentgen (1743–1807) and his father Abraham were extraordinarily successful cabinet makers, and they were not only

Figure 20.5 Mechanical gaming table, c. 1780–83 by David Roentgen, produced in Neuwied/ Germany. Partially stained oak, mahogany, maple, and fruitwood, felt, partially tooled and gilded leather, iron and steel fittings, brass (78.5 cm) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Eighteenth-Century Lotteries

designers and producers of eighteenth-century game furniture, but also inventors of mechanically sophisticated and playful furniture that has surprising conceptual analogies to contemporary laptop computers and to gamified multi-functional systems for handheld and mobile devices. Made in the family workshop in Neuwied, the pieces are finely crafted both inside and out. The gaming table consists of drawers for cards and chess with a concealed spring-driven backgammon. It was the outstanding design and the unique gadget features of the Roentgen furniture that made them so attractive for a rich Rococo clientele. A bizarre mix of ingenious high-tech features and the mystery of hidden, yet undiscovered possibilities created demand for these early multimedia stations. Mobile gaming was a feature of the mechanical gaming table. One purpose for being foldable and portable was of course to use the piece of furniture on journeys. Another purpose was to turn it into a networking device that would communicate playfulness, technical excellence and an open, panEuropean spirit to courts and individuals abroad. Even though the tables of the Roentgens are usually referred to as ‘gaming tables’, I suspect that they have been gambling tables as well. At a time when it was still risky or at least unfashionable under certain circumstances to play for money, the possibility to hide board and cash money if needed might have come handy for the aristocratic owners.

‘Europeanization’ of gambling What we call globalization today would have been called ‘Europeanization’ in the second half of the eighteenth century. Games became one of the most important media in Rococo times, and together with literature, opera and theatre formed the backbone of cultural communication from the Ural to the Atlantic. The aforementioned gamified furniture of the Roentgens, for example, was not a regional curiosity; it was a commodity, a cultural object and a high-tech gadget that was equally cherished by Katharina II from Russia, King Frederick William II of Prussia, Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI for whom he became ‘Ebeniste Mecanicien du Roi et de la Reine’ (the Royal cabinet maker for mechanical furniture). The way gamification changed peoples’ lifestyle in the mid-eighteenth century happened via increased availability of games, trans-European

385

386

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Figure 20.6  Lotto in the streets of Berlin.

distribution channels and an acceptance for playfulness that transcended class and social group. It is for this reason that Bernoulli’s proposition to call the eighteenth century the ‘Century of Play’ makes a lot of sense. Having said so, Bernoulli was of course not able to see how forthcoming centuries would copy his self-assessment of a ‘Century of Play’ (cf. Figure 20.6). A wave of play technologies, new games and gamification are about to change our century: the twenty-first century is about to repeat the games craze of the eighteenth century. Today we see ubiquitous availability of digital games, trans-planetary distribution channels and an acceptance of computer games that transcends class and social group – games do not any longer belong to an age group, ethnicity, gender or subculture. Gambling became in the eighteenth century a casual business. Playing in the lotteries was from that point in time a practice for everyone and it still is. It is only in exceptional cases that lotteries take place in

Eighteenth-Century Lotteries

luxurious settings, such as in Monaco or at the Casino Royal of James Bond and the ‘social elite’. In most cases, the lotteries nowadays take place in the streets, small shops and on the internet. 

From plague to godliness: Legal changes, religious and ethical reappraisal The practice of gaming and the ethics of playfulness have been debated throughout history. In the Middle Ages, in the years of the French Revolution and during modernity gambling was often considered a ‘pestilence’, ‘roguery’, a ‘cruel game’, a ‘plague invented by despotism’ or a ‘tax on fools’. The eighteenth century – particularly the second half of the century – brought forth a clear break with traditional Christian values. The lotteries became what Malaby calls ‘socially legitimate arenas for contingency’ (Malaby, 2007: 86). Following Malaby’s understanding of contingency as ‘that which could have been otherwise’ (Malaby, 2007: 106), we must assume that a conservative organization like the Catholic Church would have to be afraid of the ‘otherwise’. God’s master plan, the creation, and the stability of the Holy Church do not go together very well with chance and rapid change. The only way to integrate a concept of chance was therefore to find an explanation of why aleatoric play could be agreeable to God. Eighteenth-century moral philosophers no longer strictly rejected gambling. Scholars and sermonists tried to develop theories of whether playing games was in God’s favour or not. Zedler’s Great and Complete Encyclopedia of all Sciences and Arts questions whether ‘God’s government and precaution has anything in common with the lotteries’ (Zedler, 1732, Vol. 18, S. 563)7. In the end, however, the answers to these questions remained speculative,8 and it was rather for economic and pragmatic

Transl. Fuchs, orig. in German: ‘ob Gottes Vorsicht und Regierung mit Lotterien zu thun habe’. A theory presented in Zedler’s encyclopaedia was that ‘when the chances for good luck in the lotteries were set, god would not a give the best lot to one and an inferior lot to the other player; but rather guide the hands of the individual players so that he could take care of the outcome of 7 8

387

388

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

reasons that amendments in the regulations had to be made. Gamification craze and ‘counter-gamification’ attempts (Dragona, 2014) or even antigamification (Fuchs, 2011) strategies changed in quick succession. Ten years after Maria Theresia’s permission to play the lotteries in the Habsburg empire, a gambling craze caught the population of Vienna and Salzburg. The craze was called ‘Spielpest’, which meant a gambling plague (Bauer, 2006: 386). Yet in 1770, Schrattenbach, the archbishop of Salzburg, had to close down all lotteries due to a corruption scandal. The gambling community immediately moved to Vienna or Mannheim in Germany to continue playing. Similarly, permission and prohibition of lotteries in Braunschweig (1771 and 1768) did not influence European gambling activities as a whole; they just redirected players to other places. In our decade we encounter a similar phenomenon. However strict anti-gambling laws are and however well supervised they might be, those who want to gamble can do so: at home, on the internet, and in states with different legal regulations. It looks as if not very much has changed since the days of Rococo. Doris Lessing found fitting words for the parallels in regard to greed, hypocrisy and reckless profit-making. She talks about the UK when she says: ‘This country becomes every day more like the eighteenth century, full of thieves and adventurers, rogues and a robust, hypocritical savagery side-by-side with people lecturing others on morality’ (Fielding, 1992: 762). The stepwise development of papal concessions in regard to lotteries is characteristic for changes in ideology and its accompanying legal regulations. Pope Benedict XIII threatened lotto players with excommunication (c. 1730), then the lotto-friendly politics of Pope Clement XII installed lotteries in Rome, and finally Pius VI used lottery drawings for commercial purposes with no moral hesitations at all. It took only fifty-five years, from 1730 to 1785 to change the game completely. How was it possible that such a dramatic ethical turnaround could have taken place in such a short period of time? It did not take much more than half a century to perform a striking moral shift from gambling as sinful aberration to gambling as a special form of godliness. Throughout the

the game in the very moment it was played.’ Transl. Fuchs, orig. in German: ‘bey Austheilung des Lotterien-Glücks nicht . . . einem ein gutes, dem andern ein mittelmäßiges, dem dritten ein leer Looß zufällt, vor sich würcken lasse; sondern die Hand mit einer gantz besondern Vorsorge . . . unmittelbar im Spiel habe.’

Eighteenth-Century Lotteries

Middle Ages and still in early enlightenment the assumed actor of gambling was Satan himself: The devil created the game of dice in order to recruit many souls [Der tuivel schouf das würfelspil, dar umbe daz er selen vil da mit gewinnen will] (Wolferz, 1916).

This statement from Reinmar von Zweter, a poet from the thirteenth century, was emblematic of the existent understanding of gambling. ‘Der tuivel’ (medieval German for the Devil) was supposed to be behind it all. This concept of aleatoric processes as basically devilish was long lasting. Even in the seventeenth century the idea was accepted widely. It was thus not an easy task for the cardinals and popes of the subsequent century to incorporate gambling into the Roman Church’s business areas and to reconcile games of chance with pontifical ethics. Yet, the pope’s administrative and financial services would ask for just that. In a first step the old system protects the out-dated paradigmatic imperative (gambling is immoral) by threatening or prohibiting any activities related to the new paradigm (excommunication for gamblers). In a second step attempts are made to create a compromise between incommensurable paradigms. (You may well gamble and be a sinner, but give the money to other sinners at least.) The third step – and this is the stage before the old paradigm is dismissed altogether – is a cynical and pragmatic attempt to take advantage of the situation, no matter whether this was right or wrong. (Let’s take the money and reclaim the Pontine Marshes!) I cannot imagine any profound theological reasoning for such a turnaround in ethics, but it is not hard to understand that economic constraints and financial needs twisted the political superstructure of the Roman Church. What was evil once became acceptable then. The material base determined the ideological superstructure. It would be an idealistic assumption to think that a new ‘liberal spirit’ changed the legislation for public gambling. In France the livelihood crises of the years 1693, 1694 and 1709 paved the way for lotteries and the legal framework to regulate them. In Austria, Empress Maria Theresia prepared for the Seven Years War against Prussia. The Empress’s State Chancellor, Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, conceived the ‘Renversement des alliances’ and knew very well

389

390

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

that enormous amounts of money would be required to fare war against Frederick the Great, the Prussian King (Stollberg-Rilinger, 2019). The authorization of lotteries came handy and just in time to provide the financial support necessary for building up a strong Habsburg military system. It is for these economic and political reasons that the conservative Maria Theresia promoted a liberal legislation towards gambling, and that her son, Joseph II, an enlightened absolutist, reversed his mother’s legalization of public gambling. What I want to propose here is a predominance of the material base over an ethical or religious superstructure. Probably less flexible in regard to political ethics than the Roman Church, the Jacobins, Jean-Paul Marat and other radical proponents of the French Revolution had to cope with the problem of balancing interests of financial benefits with the revolutionary spirit. It took for years to abolish the lottery. Willmann points out how a will to get rid of gambling is in conflict with economic coercion: ‘With the French Revolution commenced a critical debate about the lottery. It was not abolished immediately, however, because of its importance for state finances. But the pay of its directors – mainly proteges of the old regime – was cut in half. Due to public criticisms, the revenue from the lottery fell. On 15 November 1793, after pressure from the Parisian Commune, the National Assembly abolished the lottery’ (Willmann, 1999: 8). The key term in Willmann’s assessment of the legal changes is ‘importance for state finances’. That is exactly the reason why lotteries rise from the ashes however often they are prohibited, denunciated or banished underground. Even without being honestly announced as such, lotteries are crowdfunding mechanisms for the state.

Crowdfunding, big business The most important driver for a change in the appreciation of playfulness is the palpable possibility of huge economic benefits that large scale gaming industries would bring to the respective stakeholders of governments, aristocracy, bourgeoisie and the Church. Such transformations from politics to enterprise and vice versa, from the lottery halls to the senate buildings and back again are exactly what gamification and its dialectic counterpart of ‘dégamification’ (Martin

Eighteenth-Century Lotteries

and Alvarez, 2018) are about. Modern crowdfunding with its openended and playful form can be seen as another example of a gamified financial mode of operation. Crowdfunding was not invented in the twenty-first century. It has predecessors in financing strategies such as the big royal lottery of the King of England, who was faced with the problem of raising a million pound sterling in 1694: ‘When the King was in need of the large sum of money in cash, the parliament spent the whole of January to look for possible funding sources. A member of parliament came up with the idea to set up a lottery with an expected profit of a million Pound Sterling.’9 As it happens today with successful crowdfunding projects, the expectations were exceeded then. The lottery was a success. Commercial lotteries in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Genoa demonstrated that the gamification of the financial sector was a real possibility for future enterprises. The economic development of gambling scenarios was sometimes held back by moral or ethical reservations. In the long run, however, economic reasoning appeared to be stronger. This can be observed not only in the market-friendly environments of Dutch cities or Fleet Street enterprises. The logic of capitalism directs clerical ideology as well. That is why Cardinal Mazarin came up with his lottery for the churches. Even the Roman Church has to follow the dictate of capital: Pope Benedict XIII’s could still threaten lotto players with excommunication (c. 1730), but soon a controversy on gaming practices started with the subsequent lotto-friendly attitude of Pope Clement XII partly reinstalling lotteries in the Rome, and finally Pius VI using lottery drawings for commercial purposes. It took only fifty-five years, from 1730 to 1785, to change the game completely.

Conclusion In the second half of the eighteenth century, a dramatic transformation took place in Central Europe. A society with doubts, fear and hypocritical damnation of gambling changed into a society characterized by an

transl. Fuchs, orig.: ‘denn als der König eine gute Summe baren Geldes eilfertig bedurfte und das Parlament den ganzen Jenner damit zubrachte (zu überlegen), wo solches herzunehmen, gab einer den Vorschlag, eine Lotterie von einer Million Pfund Sterling anzurichten.’ 9

391

392

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

enthusiasm for financial speculation and public lotteries. Aleatoric processes were accepted to determine failure and success of individuals and a games craze resulted in new gambling styles, gambling regulations and gambling tools. Gaming furniture and play-houses provide the material basis for extended gambling. The royal, governmental and clerical actions taken by Queen Maria Theresia of Austria in 1751, Duke Frederik II of Kassel (1771), the municipalities of Amsterdam, Utrecht und Amersfoort, but also the popes Clement XII and Pius VI (1785) materialized in the installation of lottery drawings in central European cities. The legalization of lotteries was key to audience building and the establishment of a new playing public that became acquainted with gaming practices and the idea that success, wealth, happiness or personal ruin could be the result of aleatory ludic processes.

References Ashton, J. 1893. A History of English Lotteries: Now for the First Time Witten. London: The Leadenhall Press; New York: C. Scribner's Sons. Bernoulli, D. 1954 [1738]. Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk (Trans. from the Latin original by Dr. Louise Sommer, 1954). Econometrica, 22(1): 22–36.  Bauer, G. 2006. ‘Mozart, Kavalier und Spieler’. In Herbert Lachmayer (ed.), Mozart. Experiment Aufklärung, 377–88. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Costikyan, G. 2013. Uncertainty in Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Darracq, J.-B. 2005. L’État et le jeu. Étude de droit français. Thèse sous la direction de Claude Journes, soutenue à l’université de Lyon 2. Dragona, D. 2014. ‘Counter-Gamification: Emerging Tactics and Practices Against the Rule of Numbers’. In Mathias Fuchs, Sonia Fizek, Paolo Ruffino and Niklas Schrape (eds), Rethinking Gamification, 227–50. Lüneburg: Meson Press. Fielding, H. 1992. Tom Jones. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics. Fuchs, M. 2011. Ludification. Ursachen, Formen und Auswirkungen der ‘Ludification’. Potsdam: Arbeitsberichte der Europäischen Medienwissenschaften an der Universität Potsdam. Guilbert, J.-C. and Descotils, G. 1993. Le grand livre des loteries. Paris: L'Archipel. Huizinga, J. 1949 [1938]. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Koeppe, W. 2012. Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens. New York, New Haven. Catalogue published in conjunction

Eighteenth-Century Lotteries

with the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 30 October 2012, through 27 January 2013. Legay, M.-L. 2014. Les Loteries Royales dans l'Europe des lumières. Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion. Lachmayer, H. 2006. Mozart. Aufklärung im Wien des Ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Malaby, T. M. 2007. ‘Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games’. Games and Culture, 2(2): 95–113. Martin, L. and Alvarez, J. 2018. ‘De la dégamification au ‚serious serious‘: étude d’un dispositif dédié à la formation de cadres’’. In Emmanuelle Savignac, Yanita Andonova, Pierre Lénel, Anne Monjaret and Aude Seurrat (Hrsg.), Le travail de la gamification. Bern: Peter Lang. Rosenthal, J. and Goetzmann, W. N. 2010. ‘Voltaire, Casanova, and 18thCentury Lotteries’. In Yale SOM Case 10–030, 5 August 2010. Stollberg-Rilinger, B. 2019. Maria Theresia: Die Kaiserin in ihrer Zeit. München: C.H.Beck. Willmann, G. 1999. ‘The History of Lotteries’. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University, California, USA. Wolferz, L. E. 1916. The Rime Technique in the Poems of Reinmar von Zweter. PhD diss., Cornell University. Zedler, J. H. 1732. Universal-Lexicon aller Künste und Wissenschaften, 1732, Vol. 18.

393

394

Part VI Cinema, art, literature and culture 21 ‘Whiskey, women, and loaded dice’: The images and places of gambling in popular music 22 From parasite to anti-hero: Shifting depictions of the card sharp 23 Gambling ladies: The games that Barbara Stanwyck plays

396

21 ‘Whiskey, women, and loaded dice’ The images and places of gambling in popular music Matias Karekallas

Chapter Outline Introduction398 Perspectives and theoretical concepts 400 Methodology401 Narratives and themes of gambling songs 403 Scale and spatial characteristics 407 Places of transgression and addiction 409 Places of superstition and myth 411 Places of resolution 413 Discussion415 Acknowledgements418 Music records 421

398

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

Introduction Let us start with an impressive (and exhaustingly lengthy) list of universally acclaimed music artists: Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Eagles, Madonna, AC/ DC, Leonard Cohen, The Rolling Stones, Eminem, Neil Young, Bon Jovi, Ray Charles, Lady Gaga, Bruce Springsteen, Grateful Dead, B.B. King, The Who, Woody Guthrie, The Hollies, Mark Knopfler, The Clash, Sting, Robbie Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, The Pogues, Frank Sinatra, Santana and Tom Waits. And the list could go even further. What do they all have in common? They are among the best-selling music artists of all time. Almost all of them are members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the few that are not, someday probably will be. And most importantly for this chapter, they have all released a song related to gambling. What makes gambling so compelling that all these influential, canonized pop icons, folk giants and rock dinosaurs have wanted to sing about it? Essentially because gambling is associated with some powerful and ambivalent images such as life-changing wins or losses, heroic or erratic risk-taking, excruciating addiction, ferocious transgressions and dazzling glamour. These images are extremely useful because they provoke dramatic narratives and arouse powerful emotions to which the audience can relate. Besides popular music, these images have been commonly utilized in other forms of popular culture as well, and they are focal in the exchange of ideas about gambling. Therefore, it is critical to understand how these images of gambling ‘work’ and aim to discover what their ambiguity actually ‘means’, to learn and decipher the equation of how gamblers can be understood and represented as a motley crew of glamorous risk takers, sinners, criminals and mentally ill. Some scholars have focused on the images of gambling in media and popular culture, most notably advertisements, fiction, movies and editorial cartoons (e.g. Dement, 1999; Turner, Fritz and Zangeneh, 2007; Raento, 2011, 2017; Raento and Meuronen, 2011; Egerer and Rantala, 2015; Rantala, 2016). But music has been largely overlooked, even if it is an eloquent tool for self-expression and identification, and it appeals to individual’s most fundamental emotions and needs (Smith, 1997). The few studies combining gambling and music have focused on the influence of music, or soundscapes, on gambling behaviour, or even on the treatment

‘ Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice’

of gambling addiction (e.g. Stuart, 1974; Erkkilä, 2003; Griffiths and Parke, 2003; Bramley, Dibben and Rowe, 2014; but as an exception, see Feeney, 2009). Some of their findings are intriguing, like Griffiths’ and Parke’s (2003: 280) suggestion that popular music is perhaps the most effective type of background music in stimulating the impulse to gamble. This opinion is shared by Bramley, Dibben and Rowe (2014: 3) as they note that popular music ‘may provide a better fit with gambling, priming thoughts congruent with fun, thereby resulting in less time and attention being allocated to gambling decisions, relative to classical music’. However, there is a lack of studies focusing on music itself, and specifically the images of gambling that music mediates. On occasion, gambling images are closely connected to some specific places. For example, the narrative of a movie, a book, or a song can be so tightly attached to a certain place that it would not be the same narrative if the place was changed to some other. In a way, the place defines the whole story (see Hausladen, 2000). Some gambling studies have recently focused on how these place-related images are constructed, mediated and recreated in popular culture, for example in fiction and movies (e.g. Kant, 1990; Spanier, 1995; Gragg, 2011, 2013; Raento, 2011, 2017), but once again, music has not been subjected to academic inquiry. Hence, the first purpose of this study is to strengthen the position of popular music in the contemporary discussion of cultural images of gambling. This study is based upon the assumption that the experiences associated with gambling may be approached by studying the musicallyrical images, and that they may even reveal information not accessible by studying textual information only. I suggest that by focusing on the images of gambling in popular music it is possible to obtain valuable information about the nature and construction of gambling cultures. The second purpose of this study is to support the role of geographical theories of place (and space) in gambling studies. Therefore, I will explicitly focus on the musical-lyrical constructions of certain places of gambling in popular music, and address the following research questions: 1. What are the places of gambling in popular music? How are they portrayed in the lyrics? 2. What kind of images, narratives and themes are attached to these places?

399

400

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

3. What is the role of these images and places in the construction of subjective and collective identities, and through them, particular gambling cultures?

Perspectives and theoretical concepts I approach gambling from a cultural perspective. The cultures that develop around gambling practices are often associated with intensive images and experiences. Images are societal understandings that are subjectively experienced and intersubjectively shared, and through them ‘we tell the story of ourselves’ and build a connection between ourselves, our actions and the social environment (e.g. Deleuze, 1995; Sulkunen, 2007; Karekallas and Oksanen, 2013). Popular culture in its many forms produces influential images that strengthen or recreate our perceptions of different phenomena. The connection between these images and the surrounding culture is interactive, in a sense that they actively mould each other. In other words, images influence the culture that they are representing, and that culture simultaneously produces new images and moulds the existing ones. Individuals rely on these images and use them as tools of identification. The other theoretical concept that this study relies on is space. Space is an abstract concept that is used in many social sciences. It is often understood more specifically as a particular location, place, region or landscape (see Couclelis, 1992; Tuan, 2006). Humans are spatial creatures, and we experience space through our thoughts and senses: visual perception, touch, movement, sound and scent. Following the ideas of spatial theorist Yi-Fu Tuan (2006: 6), space becomes a place when an individual attaches personal experiences, meanings and values to it. The cultural meanings of places are influenced by social circumstances and practices of different individuals and groups. Places are shaped through political, cultural and economic processes and events, on a scale that ranges from global to local. Through these interactions, unique places and place-identities are created when they become attached with particular images, stereotypes, experiences and emotions. Place-images can also change over time, or new layers of images

‘Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice

can be constructed on top of the old ones, in a continuous process that is never completed (as an excellent example of this process in Las Vegas, see Gragg, 2011, 2013). Based on the aforementioned, I suggest that through the lenses of image and space it is possible to have a clearer view of the intricacies of gambling and acquire a more detailed understanding of what makes it so appealing.

Methodology Academic research on popular music was for a long time considered a trivial endeavour, mainly for the sake of Theodor Adorno and his minions at the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Even though some of Adorno’s critical notions (e.g. Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947; Adorno, 1990) on the ‘culture industry’ that manipulates population through mass culture is still somewhat relevant today – maybe even more relevant in this age of internet? – his critique of popular music, on the other hand, feels awkwardly outdated and elitist. Adorno’s views on popular music essentially having less value than ‘serious music’ or ‘high arts’ and being even dangerous for turning masses into passive, docile and content consumers had a strong influence on the sluggish start of popular music studies (see e.g. Middleton, 1990). To some extent, the echoes of Adorno’s perspective can still be heard. Occasionally, popular music scholars still need to justify their choices of research topics to the scholars of ‘serious topics’. This study emphasizes that popular music is more than ‘just entertainment for the masses’. It produces powerful images through metaphors, generalizations and stereotypes. It reaches a vast audience and is available for everyone since there are few restrictions or age limits for enjoying it. Since Adorno’s days, we have learned plenty about popular music’s influence on identification processes, and on the formation of vivid subcultures (see Cohen, 1991; Shank, 1994; Frith, 1996; Hall and du Gay, 1996). That evidence suggests that at least as often as the consumption of mass culture causes passivity (which it might do in some cases), it also results in increasing cultural activity. The practices of identifying oneself to some subculture built around some certain genre of popular music are

401

402

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

problematic to interpret as passive behaviour. And when considering, for example, the subculture of punk rock at the end of the 1970s, it is just as problematic to view those punks being very ‘docile and content’. Hence, I find Simon Frith’s (1996: 110) approach to studying popular music much more beneficial when he notes that ‘the question we should be asking is not what does popular music reveal about the people who play and use it but how does it create them as a people, as a web of identities?’, and adds that music ‘seems to be a key to identity because it offers, so intensely, a sense of both self and others, of the subjective in the collective’. So, the experience of popular music is actually an experience of identity, and through songs people ‘are drawn, haphazardly, into emotional alliances with the performers and with the performers’ other fans’ (Frith, 1996: 121). These notions are fundamental in my approach to popular music in this study. At the time of writing this, my research data consists of 288 gambling-related songs primarily with English lyrics. The release dates of the songs range from the 1920s to this day, although some of them are originally traditional folk songs that can be traced back to earlier centuries. Songs represent a wide variety of different genres. I started collecting these songs in 2010, at first by doing queries on web search engines, music and lyric databases, and YouTube, and by probing my own record collection. As keywords, in addition to the obvious ‘gambling’ and ‘gambler’, I used names of all the gambling games I came up with (poker, roulette, blackjack, dice, betting, etc.) and some of the distinct gambling places like casino, race track, riverboat, Las Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City and so on. Since then, I occasionally have stumbled upon some new songs even without explicitly searching for them and have constantly kept updating my list. This sample of gambling songs is of course not complete, and I am certain that there are still numerous songs out there to be discovered. But it is a representative sample, and large enough to draw some conclusions. By analysing these songs, I wanted to investigate and illustrate the ambivalent images attached to gambling, and the places of gambling where these images are manifested. In the initial analysis, I utilized basic content and discourse analyses (see e.g. Cresswell and Miller, 2000; Rose, 2007) which I have successfully used in my earlier research as well (e.g. Karekallas and Oksanen, 2013; Karekallas, Raento and Renkonen, 2014). After preliminary qualification, in which I discarded songs where the references to gambling were too

‘Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice

random or vague, I ended up with 288 songs as my final sample. In the final analysis, the lyrical expressions were close-read in respect of (1) the main narrative types, (2) core themes used in the construction of these narratives and (3) the spatial characteristics and representations of gambling places. During the analysis, I followed some basic guidelines of studying popular culture (see e.g. Grossberg, 1992; Frith, 1996). Firstly, I kept in mind that popular music is connected to other forms of popular culture, and researcher needs to understand the intertextual cross-references embedded in popular culture to fully comprehend the meanings of popular music. Secondly, even though the narrative of the song is primarily mediated through lyrics, it is also critical to acknowledge the accompanying sound elements that might offer additional or contradictory clues for interpreting the song’s message. And finally, I recognized the importance of distinguishing the conventions of different music genres and subcultures, and the cultural histories behind them. Next, I will present my findings through an assortment of quotes from the lyrics. I will start with some overall notions of the narratives and themes of gambling songs, then proceed to the scales and spatial characteristics and then present three ideal types of gambling places in popular music.

Narratives and themes of gambling songs The underlying ‘messages’ of the songs are usually built in, and mediated through, the narratives of the lyrics. The narratives of gambling songs can be categorized as two opposite types that reflect the ambivalent nature of gambling. Positive narratives represent gambling as glorious and exciting, and the places of gambling as places where ‘dreams come true’ and where people can freely indulge in transgressive behaviour. Negative narratives, on the other hand, represent gambling as sinful, pathological, dangerous and miserable, and the places of gambling as places where ‘dreams fall apart’ and transgressions transform into addiction. Good description of these two narratives is found on the inner sleeve of High Rollers (2005), a compilation album of vintage gambling songs:

403

404

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

Tales of death and ruin chart the unforeseeable path of the gambler, who might still on the way manage to have some fun; hedonists like Joe Liggins and the Mississippi Sheiks are outnumbered, however, by storytellers issuing bleak warnings of broken lives and dangerous habits. (...) this collection shows both sides of the coin – and you can bet which one wins.

So essentially, the messages that the songs are mediating through the narratives are either encouraging or discouraging the listener to participate in gambling behaviour. The listener must decide who to (blindly!) trust, Blind Blake (1929), when he celebrates his gambling lifestyle: I love to gamble, gamblin’s all I do I love to gamble, gamblin’s all I do And when I lose, it never makes me blue I gambled away my money, I gambled away my shack I gambled away my money, I gambled away my shack Same way I lost it, same way I get it back

Or Blind Willie McTell (1949) warning us about the consequences of excessive gambling: Jesse was a wild reckless gambler Won a gang of change Altho’ a many gambler’s heart he led in pain Began to spend a-loose his money Began to be blue, sad and all alone His heart had even turned to stone.

This same dichotomy can also be found in the themes through which the narratives and places are constructed. I have identified some core themes that are commonly used in gambling songs. These themes include the following: 1. The agency of the main protagonist 2. Gambling behaviour 3. Transgressive behaviour 4. Superstitions 5. Symbolic metaphors Depending on the tone of the narrative (glorifying or cautionary) and the song’s message (encouraging or discouraging), these themes are represented accordingly. For example, the theme of agency reflects how the protagonists of the songs are portrayed. The main protagonists in the positive narratives

‘Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice

are usually depicted as competent individuals that have strong agency. They are in control of their actions and might be described as heroic and courageous. They are called ‘high rollers’, ‘winners’, ‘crapshooters’, ‘card sharks’, ‘rounders’ and so on. They succeed in their goals even through adversities, like country singer Buck Owens (1969): ‘But my momma told me I was wrong / And she begged me to stay at home / But my will was strong / And I had to make it big in Vegas’. The negative narratives characterize the main protagonist in a completely opposite way: as an incompetent individual with weak agency, desperate, selfish, dishonest, even criminal. These ‘losers’, ‘fools’ ‘crooks’, ‘hustlers’ and ‘poor boys’ struggle to survive with their destructive gambling (and often other bad) habits, but usually fail miserably. This notion of agency as a recurring theme in gambling songs is similar to the findings that has been made in studies about gambling in movies, where self-control and competence are commonly used themes and seen as ‘being central to gambling’s appeal’ (Egerer and Rantala, 2015; see also Raento, 2017). This also reflects the general (media) images about addictions that portray individuals being active agents or passive victims (see e.g. Giddens, 1992; Hellman, 2010). Second theme, which is in many ways connected to the previous one, is gambling behaviour. Some of the songs include detailed, sometimes quite neutral, descriptions of a particular game and its outcome. But often there is the same binary division in describing the gambling behaviour either recreational or pathological. Recreational (or ‘normal’) gambling often includes dreams of a better life and getting rich, like in The Allman Brothers Band’s (1990) song: ‘Well, tonight I hit the jackpot, I was shining like a diamond ring / Lady luck was smiling, and the old snake charmer was doing his thing’. In contrast, the descriptions of pathological gambling include depictions of the pain of losing everything, and causing harm to gambler himself/herself or to others. Like in Guttermouth’s (1996) song: ‘I used to feel so lost, no gambling in my life / Now there’s no turning back, I even bet my wife’, or to quote AC/DC’s (1978) portrayal of addiction: ‘I got a burning feeling deep inside of me / It’s yearning, but I’m going to set it free’. In some cases, the pain and anxiety are replaced with numbness, a typical feature of pathological gambling. The outcome of the game is not significant anymore, and even the thrill and excitement of playing is missing. One of the most obvious and often-used themes in gambling songs is transgressive behaviour. Gambling, especially in North America, has been traditionally linked to other vices, such as drinking alcohol, smoking

405

406

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

cigarettes, using drugs, having reckless sex and so on (see Burnham, 1993). These vices appear frequently in gambling songs. Songs often include portrayals of people freely indulging in transgressive behaviour, enjoying the excitement, fun and freedom that exceeding the limits of normality and everyday life offers. This kind of do-as-you-please attitude is especially inherent in songs situated in Las Vegas. Like Larry Gragg (2013: 226) has noted: ‘The normal restraints of family, neighborhood, church, and workplace disappeared when one landed at the airport and entered the city that offered visitors “a montage of the things you have always wanted to do”.’’ Or to quote Chumbawamba’s (2000) song: ‘You’ll love this joint, we’ll stop off, we’ll buy some booze / And you’ll bring it in and it’s just incredible, the girls will be all over you.’ Some of these transgression descriptions are particularly explicit and graphic, especially in rap genre. But then of course, there’s the other side of the coin. The darker and sinister side of transgressive behaviour that John Burnham (1993: 147) refers to as he writes: ‘Over many generations, then, Americans continued to connect betting with bad character.’ In the negative narratives, people suffer from depression, anxiety and alienation, and the fun and enjoyment of transgressions have been substituted for addictions and an immoral way of living. Protagonists have no hope left, and they just continue emotionless with their destructive behaviour. To quote country singer Gram Parsons (1974): ‘Every time I hit your crystal city / You know you’re gonna make a wreck out of me / Well, the first time I lose I drink whiskey / Second time I lose I drink gin / Third time I lose I drink anything / ’cause I think I’m gonna win’. Fourth theme I want to highlight is the superstitions of the protagonists – including often-used religious metaphors. The tendency to resort to superstitions is a common feature of gambling culture, especially for pathological or compulsive gamblers. Players often utilize superstitions to create an illusion of control and to somehow influence the random events of the games, or to find excuses for their losses. Descriptions of these are recurrently found in the lyrics. The main protagonist is often portrayed as being, or wanting to be, in favour of the Lord or Lady Luck, and supported by celestial angels. On the other hand, sometimes the gambler is cursed, has bad karma or is mistreated by the devil and demons. There are also several other supernatural entities that are derived from the games the gamblers are playing. The songs are filled with characters like ‘Jack of Diamonds’, ‘Queen of Hearts’, ‘King of Spades’ and ‘Joker’ – and also

‘Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice

mystical combinations of cards or dice with hidden meanings, like ‘Dead Man’s Hand’, ‘Snake Eyes’ and ‘Ace of Spades.’ They serve as especially meaningful tools for identification for the individuals ‘inside’ the gambling cultures, because through them they can differentiate themselves from the ‘outsiders’ who might consider these references incomprehensible. Finally, there is the theme of symbolic metaphors. Some of the songs have a narrative that is using gambling as a metaphor for something else. Gambling is most commonly compared to life, love or sex. These songs may not be explicitly about gambling, but they are extremely enlightening when trying to track down the common images of gambling. By ‘transferring’ these images, through metaphors, to some other purpose, they somehow become more visible and easier to grasp. This might partly be explained by the ‘conceptual metaphor theory’ that suggests ‘human conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003: 3). If humans essentially think ‘through metaphors’ maybe the message is more understandable and relatable when it is also expressed through metaphors – when thinking and metaphors are perfectly aligned. The Thrills’ (2003) song Your Love Is Like Las Vegas is an example of using symbolic metaphors, of using gambling and Las Vegas as a metaphor for love: ‘Your love is like a city I visited / Your love is like a city that burnt me good / Oh Las Vegas, I could only afford one weekend’. As the song titles reveal, Big Joe Turner’s Life Is Like a Card Game (1950) and T-Bone Walker’s You’re My Best Poker Hand (1954) serve as other self-explanatory examples.

Scale and spatial characteristics In addition to narratives and themes of the songs, the spatial descriptions are of critical importance for the analysis. They can be understood as the ‘milieu of the songs’. Like fiction, music also ‘puts into words the spirit, atmosphere and experiences of gambling venues, connecting them to the social and spiritual atmosphere of the time, in an often metaphoric way’ (Karekallas and Raento, 2014: 112). When analysing the spatial features of gambling, first thing to consider is the scale that ranges from global to specific micro-locations.

407

408

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

The global or continental scales are not very interesting in this case, although there are numerous mentions of ‘world’ in the lyrics but not used specifically as a location. The narratives of the songs are essentially manifested at smaller scales. When focusing on the national scale, songs offer some descriptions of gambling places, but nothing very noteworthy. There are, for example, some references to ‘America’, ‘country’, ‘this land’, Mexico, Cuba, Spain and so on. Considering that majority of the songs are from (Anglo-)American artists, the next appropriate scale is the state level, and this is where the place-images start to get more fascinating: the spatial characteristics are more distinctive, the images more specific and the ‘feel’ of the places more powerful. Notable mentions of states include Nevada, Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, California, Mississippi, Georgia, Wyoming and Colorado, just to mention some. Next scale to consider is the city (or county) level. In popular music, there are vast amounts of song narratives that are situated in cities. I consider this the most intriguing scale when analysing popular music because cities are perfect nodes through which to examine the intricate connections between places, identities and music (see e.g. Cohen, 1991; Shank, 1994; Krims, 2007). Not very surprisingly, the most often mentioned city in gambling songs is Las Vegas. Around eighty songs include either an explicit reference to Las Vegas or ‘Sin City’, or at least some recognizable feature that indicates the location is indeed Las Vegas. Examples of other cities that are mentioned by name are Reno, New Orleans, Santa Fe, Denver, El Paso, Atlantic City, Dallas, Memphis, Los Angeles, New York, Galway and Monte Carlo (also as Monaco). In addition to these big cities, there are some smaller towns (or locations) that can be included in this scale. For example, an old miner town with a distinct gambling history (and present), Cripple Creek in the Rocky Mountains, is mentioned a few times. But it is also interesting to note what is missing: the present ‘gambling capital of the world’, Macau, was not even once mentioned in the lyrics. Sometimes the scale is even smaller. There are mentions of specific localities of cities, even street names, like Boogie Street, The Strip, Downtown, Bourbon Street and Fremont Street. This scale also includes the many landmarks of the cities, like famous casinos in Las Vegas (e.g. Caesars Palace, Sands, Flamingo and Mandalay Bay). All the unnamed places of gambling can also be included in this scale, most notably casinos, race tracks, bars, gambling rooms, riverboats, honkytonks and even homes. In addition to explicit gambling sites, other frequently mentioned

‘Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice

localities include, for example, jails, prisons, motels, hotels, deserts, wastelands and rodeos. In some cases, it can be convenient to go even further, and consider the micro-locations or spatial organizations of these places. Good example of this is the ‘table’ that occurs quite often in gambling songs: lot of things tend to happen at and around the (card or dice) table in gambling narratives. This is similar to what Pauliina Raento (2017: 54) found in her analysis of gambling in James Bond movies: ‘Throughout the franchise, the card table is a key site in the narrative rather than a meaningless backdrop. . . . This is where the main players are identified, ranked, and characterized. This is where the viewer learns who is who in the story, what kind of players the villains are, and what can be expected from them outside this microcosm.’ Finally, worth mentioning as a spatial feature, is the several depictions of movement in the lyrics. People are ‘coming’, ‘going’ and ‘leaving’ a lot in gambling songs. In part this is explained by the general notion of rock music often including references of ‘being on the road’ (see e.g. Jarvis, 1985). What is interesting is the frequent, yet slightly enigmatic, connection between gambling and trains. Ranging from the explicitly named Uncle Dave Macon’s song Railroadin’ and Gamblin’ (1938) to Spanish Train by Chris de Burgh (1975), in between lies numerous references to trains, railroads and boxcars. It would appear like gambling was a regular habit of old-time railroad men and ‘hobos’, and that the rambling and roving of all the ‘rambler gamblers’ and ‘roving gamblers’ was often done by trains. Grounded on the narratives, themes and spatial characteristics presented earlier, I will illustrate the ‘ideal types’ of gambling places in popular music. I will present three places where the most typical gambling narratives occur, and the most common images of gambling are made visible: places of transgression and addiction, places of superstition and myth, and places of resolution.

Places of transgression and addiction As a first typical gambling place in popular music, I will illustrate the ‘place of transgression and addiction’. It manifests some of the common narratives and themes of gambling and paints an ambivalent picture of

409

410

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

gambling with two opposing perspectives to the same cultural practice. Let us start with Las Vegas as an obvious example. Positive narratives praise Las Vegas as a place of transgressions, hedonism, luxury and style. Like Larry Gragg (2013: 202) has noted, ‘the impression of Las Vegas as a premier luxury destination had become fixed in the popular images of the city by the early twenty-first century.’ Las Vegas is, like AC/DC (1978) describes it, filled with ‘Lamborghinis, caviar, dry martinis – Shangri-La’. These narratives portray Las Vegas as an exhilarating place, a destination almost mandatory to visit, glorifying its carefree atmosphere and unique nature as an (adult) ‘entertainment oasis in the middle of the desert.’ In Gragg’s (2013: xi) words, the ultimate appeal of Las Vegas is ‘that it represents an escape from the mundane, everyday cares facing all people. It is a place to evade the normal and to experience uninhibited fun, at least for a few days’. Like Barry Manilow (2006) sings: ‘There’s no place anywhere like this heaven’ and ‘Here’s to Las Vegas / It’s one of a kind / Here’s to smiles all around’. But ‘in the eyes of some’, to quote Gragg (2013: 205), ‘Las Vegas was best understood as a place of despair and self-destruction. (...) Compulsive gambling and the other available vices made Las Vegas a depraved place, not a destination for any self-respecting person’. Echoing this, in the negative narratives the story acts more as a moralizing or a cautionary tale that warns listeners of the dangers, crimes and moral decay of Las Vegas: it is called a ‘town of pain’ and an ‘old town filled with sin,’ or like Mark Knopfler (2000) sings: ‘In a wasteland of cut-glass, my dreams have all crumbled / And I’ve paid with whatever I had left for a soul’. This ambivalence is one of the most central elements of the place image of Las Vegas – and other places of gambling as well. To quote Raento (2011: 176): ‘The quality of being “wonderful and awful simultaneously” is . . . the key to the fundamentally contradictory “beauty of this beast.” Las Vegas is beautiful and bestial, unique and universal, exciting and numbing, dangerous and safe.’ Sometimes the line between transgression and addiction is almost indistinguishable. The ‘bright lights’ and ‘flashing neonlights’ (Presley, 1964), and a sense of timelessness or a distorted cycle of night and day are often mentioned in the lyrics. This ‘atemporality’, the freedom from the conventional understanding of time, is at the same time liberating and addictive, like rock band April Wine (1978), who are ‘gambling night and day’, or The Alan Parsons Project (1980), who describe Las Vegas as a

‘Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice

place ‘where you can’t tell the night from the sunrise’. And of course, Elvis has famously sang: ‘How I wish that there were more than 24 hours in the day / Cause even if there were forty more, I wouldn’t sleep a minute away’, and later in the song adds: ‘Turning day into nighttime, turning night into daytime’ (Presley, 1964). One of the most intriguing aspects of these images is their similarities with the images of rock and roll culture. Both gambling and rock share many values like the emphasizing of individuality, freedom, danger, omnipotence, masculinity and transgressions. Considering this, it is really no surprise that gambling is a regular topic of rock songs. It is so common actually that perhaps gambling ought to be added to the holy trinity of rock, ‘sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll’. In relation to this, it could also be worth considering Edmund Bergler’s (1957) psychoanalytic arguments of gambling as rebellion against logic, rationality and moderation. This is evident in the lyrics, as is also a certain kind of masochism where gamblers actually want to lose to achieve ‘guilt-relief ’. I will not pursue this thread further in this study, but these kinds of tendencies appear in the lyrics frequently and could provide interesting results when analysed properly.

Places of superstition and myth Another typical place of gambling in popular music is the ‘place of superstition and myth’. It reflects the plethora of mythological characters, creatures and paraphernalia that are commonly attached to gambling. These places are constructed through superstitious beliefs, every so often based on biblical fables. If we continue using Las Vegas as an example, on the one hand, Las Vegas is portrayed in the lyrics as ‘heaven’, ‘holy land’ and ‘God’s Kingdom,’ or like the punk band Guttermouth (1996) puts it graphically: ‘Halfway there I saw the glare, this place is fuckin’ heaven.’ According to Chumbawamba (2000), even Jesus himself is occasionally ‘in Vegas taking care of business’. On the other hand, Las Vegas is a ‘Sin City’, ‘hell on earth’, where ‘Satan is waiting his turn’. But Las Vegas is not the only sinful place, another one is represented in the traditional song The House of the Rising Sun that is perhaps best known as The Animals’ (1964) version. It is a place somewhere in New Orleans where one can indulge in different sinful endeavours and vices until sunrise:

411

412

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

Now the only thing a gambler needs, Is a suitcase and trunk, And the only time he’s satisfied, Is when he’s on a drunk. Oh mother tell your children, Not to do what I have done To spend your lives in sin and misery, In the House of the Rising Sun.

But biblical metaphors are not the only superstitions in gambling songs. There are lots of myths and characters that are derived from the games gamblers play. During the analysis, I kept track on which gambling forms were mentioned, and the list ended up being quite complete. There were mentions of poker in its many incarnations, other card games such as blackjack and gin, roulette (also Russian), slot machines, betting on sports and horses, dice, craps, lottery, keno, and even wheel of fortune and bingo. These games have their distinct mythologies and places. Some of the games are played primarily in casinos, some in race tracks, but some of them have several sites for playing. For example, poker games are situated in casinos, poker clubs, bars, gambling rooms and homes. An understanding of individual games’ characteristics, and the features of the places where they are played, give intrinsic information on how the narrative should be interpreted. To quote Pauliina Raento’s study of gambling in Bond films (2017: 64): ‘Not only people and gambling but also individual games have agency in these films in a sense that they co-produce particular outcomes in a jointly evolving, hybrid manner, together with the players and surrounding settings.’ Every game has its own myths and superstitions. For example, card games (specifically poker) are often connected to the well-known mythologies of cowboys, ‘frontier mentality’ and ‘wild west.’ Card games, alcohol, masculinity, risk-taking and violence are frequently portrayed in the imageries of ‘western films’, and they appear in popular music as well. Bars and saloons are common places where card games resulting in violent incidents occur. One example is the traditional song The Roving Gambler that has been recorded by numerous artists (the following quote is from a recent version by Armstrong and Jones, 2013). It tells a typical story of a card game that ends up in a fatal confrontation, reinforcing the old myths of Wild West: I left her here in El Paso and I wound up in Maine I met up with the gambling man Got in a poker game Got in a poker game, got in a poker game We put our money in the pot and dealt the cards around

‘Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice

I saw him deal from the bottom of the deck Shot that gambler down Shot that gambler down, shot that gambler down.

In some songs mythologies of card games and religious elements are combined. A perfect example of this is Chris de Burgh’s (1975) Spanish Train, which tells a story of the Lord and the Devil playing a game of poker where at stake is the souls of all the train passengers: But I think I’ll give you one more chance said the Devil with a smile. So throw away that stupid lance, it’s really not your style. Joker is the name, poker is the game, we’ll play right here on this bed. And then we’ll bet for the biggest stakes yet, the souls of the dead.

The Devil cheats, of course, and wins, and at the end of the song they switch to chess and continue playing for more souls. These are just some examples of the superstitious beliefs that are used in the construction of these ‘places of superstition and myth’. In addition, there are supernatural beings like Lady Luck, ghosts and spirits that convey their own imageries and mythologies that are used explicitly or metaphorically in creating these kinds of places.

Places of resolution Third example of a typical place of gambling in popular music is the ‘place of resolution’. It is a place where some life-changing event occurs, where the narrative arrives to its closure, and the main protagonist reaches resolution. Depending on the tone of the narrative, these are the venues where ‘dreams come true’ or ‘dreams crumble’. They are often places where people travel to with a hope of changing their lives for the better. Once again, Las Vegas is the usual suspect. Bobby and Jeannie Bare (1977) and Sara Bareilles (2007) have formulated this hope in an illustrative (and bare!) fashion in their plainly named songs Vegas, respectively: ‘Baby, we’re gonna go to Vegas Win more money than you’ve ever seen Borrow this pickup truck and forty-eight bucks a payday Baby, we’re gonna chase that dream, Goin’ to Vegas, turn our money green.’

413

414

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

‘Gonna sell my car and go to Vegas Cause somebody told me That’s where dreams would be.’

But there are other places as well, at least Monte Carlo (or Monaco), Atlantic City and Reno are portrayed as destinations to go if you plan on ‘getting rich quickly’. In ABBA’s (1976) song Money, Money, Money the female protagonist wants to live ‘in a rich man’s world’, and if she cannot find a rich man, the alternative is: ‘So I must leave, I’ll have to go / to Las Vegas or Monaco/ Win a fortune in a game / My life will never be the same’. Same mentality is presented in Bruce Springsteen’s Atlantic City (1982), where the protagonist is struggling with financial troubles and tries to solve them by heading to the casinos of Atlantic City: Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty and meet me tonight in Atlantic City Well I got a job and tried to put my money away But I got debts that no honest man can pay So I drew what I had from the Central Trust And I bought us two tickets on that Coast City bus.

Reno is also presented as a place of resolution in Merle Haggard’s (1975) Kentucky Gambler. It is a typical cautionary narrative about a miner who yearns ‘more from life than four kids and a wife, a 20-acre farm with a shackey house and barn’. So, he decides to leave Kentucky in search of a better life but ends up losing everything: But at gambling, I was lucky, and so I left Kentucky And left behind my woman and my kids Into the gay casinos, of Nevada’s town of Reno This Kentucky Gambler planned to get rich quick (…) Kentucky gambler, there ain’t nobody waiting in Kentucky When I ran out, somebody else walked in Kentucky gambler, looks like you ain’t really very lucky And it seems to me a gambler loses much more than he wins

Worth noting is that in many of these narratives the actual resolution is not the most significant element. In some cases, the outcome of the journey is not even revealed. It is the possibility of change that matters, and this is where selecting the appropriate location for the narrative helps. Situating the song in these kinds of well-known gambling destinations, such as Las

‘Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice

Vegas, Reno, Monte Carlo and Atlantic City, sets up a distinct atmosphere, authenticity, and a ‘feel’ for the narrative. Like in the aforementioned examples, these ‘places of resolution’ immediately stir up, and reinforce, the images of life-changing events and getting rich that are typically attached to gambling. In a sense, the narratives would be different if the destinations were changed to some places not associated with gambling (see Hausladen, 2000). In other words, it is perhaps not as exciting what happens, but where it happens.

Discussion To conclude, images play an important role in the exchange of ideas about gambling, and in some cases these images are anchored firmly to particular places. Images are constructed through emotions: a place might feel attractive or charming, but it might also evoke feelings of fear and disgust. The places of gambling portrayed in popular music illustrate effectively the most common images attached to gambling. The songs are filled with transgressive, hedonistic and excessive behaviour, gambling addiction, superstitions, escape from the mundane, distorted cycles of day and night, disconnectedness from the ‘real world’ and so on. The most prominent feature of these images is their ambivalence. It is essential for a ‘true’ gambling experience, because an integral part of the excitement of winning is the simultaneous fear of losing. This ambivalence is reflected in the song narratives, which either glorify or condemn gambling and contribute to the definitions of acceptable gambling behaviour. Distinguishing the boundaries of ‘normal’ and ‘excessive’ is essentially a moral question. In the American context, which is where most of the songs are situated, this ambivalent attitude towards gambling is reflected in the sense that gambling has been ‘denounced, but accepted’ (Burnham, 1993: 148–9). In this study, I have illustrated through numerous examples the common images, themes, narratives and places of gambling songs. But what do they actually do? Firstly, they serve a purpose for identification. They have a prominent role in the construction of subjective and collective identities, and essentially in creating and maintaining gambling culture(s). They help to distinguish the ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, and build collective identities among gamblers through shared interpretations of meanings.

415

416

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

The congenial individuals can rely on, and relate to, these images that offer a chance of belonging in a group, in a society that is otherwise comprised of individuals alien to one another. In their own culture, they can define their behaviour according to their own standards. In the case of gambling, for example, the boundaries between ‘dedication’ and addiction might be construed differently within the gambling culture. For the outsiders, some behaviour might resemble addiction, but for the insiders it might be seen as acceptable. Popular music is effective in this process as it ‘constructs our sense of identity through the direct experiences it offers of the body, time and sociability, experiences which enable us to place ourselves in imaginative cultural narratives’ (Frith, 1996: 124). The songs about gambling convey more than a narrative; they also include the values and meanings of the artists – and also the audience’s – because the texts of popular music are constructed in a community that includes both the artists and the audience. These shared values and meanings induce solidarity and loyalty among the members of a specific culture (e.g. Hall and du Gay, 1996). These texts also include portrayals of spaces that reflect these shared understandings of gambling. Following Tuan (2006: 178) as he writes, ‘Human places become vividly real through dramatization. Identity of place is achieved by dramatizing the aspirations, needs, and functional rhythms of personal and group life’, the identifications of individuals are connected to the identities of places. In other words, places of gambling influence the identities of gamblers and the construction of gambling cultures, in addition to serving narrative purposes. Considering the findings of this study, it should be noted that many of the categorizations were made essentially for analytical and illustrative purposes, to make an ambiguous material more comprehensible. That required some enlightened generalizing and simplifying. Although it makes sense to paint everything black and white to emphasize some arguments, it is also useful to acknowledge the vaguer reality of things. To accept, in Raento’s (2017: 64) words, that ‘various, simultaneous, and overlapping shades of grey exist between “responsible” and “irresponsible” or “positive” and “negative” representations. The shades can be entertaining, intellectually provoking, cool, and disturbing without being “ambivalent” or dichotomized’. Following this, the findings of this study could have been grouped differently, and there could have been other themes added, or the existing ones adjusted. Also,

‘Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice

I decided to use a more general approach, even though it could have been simpler to narrow the scope, maybe focusing on fewer themes or certain genre of popular music. Some of the aspects that were scarcely examined in this study include, for example, the themes of gender and class. At first glance, the lyrics of gambling songs seemed to just reflect the typical masculinity of gambling (and rock music) that includes representing women as objects or ‘decorative elements’. But a deeper inspection revealed more intricate layers and some contradictory elements as well. There are several songs where the gender roles are reversed, or the main protagonist is a female with strong agency (e.g. Memphis Minnie, 1930; April Wine, 1978; The B-52’s, 1983; Lady Gaga, 2008), and not to forget the mystical powers of female entities like ‘Lady Luck’ and ‘Queen of Hearts’. Basically, this theme demands a study of its own; it is too multifaceted and complex to unravel in the limited space of this study. Same applies to the theme of class. In short, there are features of both the working-class and the upper-class mentalities present in gambling songs. Gambling is both a leisure activity of the working class and ‘Americans imitating English aristocrats’ “conspicuous consumption”’ (Burnham, 1993: 148–9). And finally, worth noting is the Anglo-American orientation of this study. With a couple of exceptions, all the lyrics are in English, and the majority of the artists are originated either from the United States or from the United Kingdom. This is mainly explained by the fact that the history of Western popular music is essentially Anglo-American, and as a Finnish scholar accustomed to this cultural sphere, it is more familiar to me than some other spheres. It would be impossible for me to effectively examine, for example, Asian popular music because of the language (and the cultural) barrier. Yet, it is still fascinating to trace the gambling images within one cultural sphere: the similarities (and differences) of the images, and how they are adopted and embraced in parallel ways in countries that vary culturally in some other ways. But as a cultural geographer, and a scholar of gambling and popular music, I would be more than intrigued to see some scholars acquainted with Asian cultures analyse Asian popular music and illustrate the images of gambling in that certain cultural sphere. Is gambling even a common topic in Asian popular music? Is Las Vegas used as a milieu in Asian gambling songs, or is it perhaps substituted to Macau? In the meantime, we must settle for these ‘western images’ of gambling that I have examined in this study. Like the images of ‘whiskey,

417

418

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

women, and loaded dice’ that Joe Liggins and His Honeydrippers (1954) sings about: Well, I must confess Yes, I must confess Boys you better take my advice Whiskey and women and loaded dice Will get you in a mess.

Acknowledgements I want to thank The Finnish Foundation for Gaming Research and The Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Studies for their support during different stages of my research. I also want to express my gratitude to The Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for granting me the William R. Eadington Two-week Visiting Fellowship. A huge part of this study was outlined and designed during this enjoyable twoweek residency at UNLV Special Collections.

References Adorno, T. 1990. ‘On popular music’. In S. Frith and A. Goodwin (eds), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, 301–14. London: Routledge. Bergler, E. 1957. The Psychology of Gambling. New York: Hill & Wang. Bramley, S., Dibben, N. and Rowe, R. 2014. ‘The influence of background music tempo and genre on virtual Roulette’. Journal of Gambling Issues, 29: 1–12. Burnham, J. C. 1993. Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior and Swearing in American History. New York: New York University Press. Cohen, S. 1991. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Couclelis, H. 1992. ‘Location, place, region, and space’. In R. Abler, M. Marcus and J. Olson (eds), Geography’s Inner Worlds: Pervasive Themes in Contemporary American Geography, 215–33. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

‘Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice

Cresswell, J. and Miller, D. 2000. ‘Determining validity in qualitative inquiry’. Theory into Practice, 39: 124–31. Deleuze, G. 1995. Negotiations, 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press. Dement, J. W. 1999. Going for Broke: The Depiction of Compulsive Gambling in Film. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press. Egerer, M. and Rantala, V. 2015. ‘What makes gambling cool? images of agency and self- control in fiction films’. Substance Use & Misuse, 50(4): 468–83. Erkkilä, J. 2003. ‘Music therapy methods in the treatment of gambling addiction’. Music Therapy Today, IV(3): 1–19. Feeney, D. 2009. ‘Gambling in American traditional and popular music’. Luncheon keynote speech, 14th International Conference on Gambling & Risk-Taking, Stateline, Nevada, USA, May 25–29, 2009. Frith, S. 1996. ‘Music and identity’. In S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, 108–27. London: SAGE. Giddens, A. 1992. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Gragg, L. 2011. ‘The risk in using gambling to create “America’s Playground”: Las Vegas, 1905–60’. In P. Raento and D. G. Schwartz (eds), Gambling, Space, and Time: Shifting Boundaries and Cultures, 145–63. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Gragg, L. 2013. Bright Light City: Las Vegas in Popular Culture. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Griffiths, M. D. and Parke, J. 2003. ‘The environmental psychology of gambling’. In G. Reith (ed.), Gambling: Who Wins? Who Loses? 277–92. New York: Prometheus Books. Grossberg, L. 1992. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge. Hall, S. and du Gay, P. 1996. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: SAGE. Hausladen, G. 2000. Places for Dead Bodies. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hellman, M. 2010. Construing and Defining the Out of Control: Addiction in the Media 1968–2008. SSKH Skifter 28. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. 1947. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Amsterdam: Querido Verlag. Jarvis, B. 1985. ‘The truth is only known by Guttersnipes’. In J. Burgess and J. Gold (eds), Geography, the Media and Popular Culture, 96–122. London: Croom Helm. Kant, C. C. 1990. ‘City of dreams: Las Vegas in the cinema, 1980–1989’. Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, 33(1): 1–12.

419

420

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

Karekallas, M. and Oksanen, A. 2013. ‘Addiktion paikka populaarimusiikissa: Kalliosta Berliiniin’. In T. Tammi and P. Raento (eds), Addiktioyhteiskunta: Riippuvuus aikamme ilmiönä, 125–46. Helsinki: Gaudeamus. Karekallas, M. and Raento, P. 2014. ‘Combining gambling-focused interviews and media data’. In P. Raento (ed.), Gambling in Finland, 106–24. Helsinki: Gaudeamus. Karekallas, M., Raento, P. and Renkonen, T. 2014. ‘Diffusion and learning: Twenty years of sports betting culture in Finland’. UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal, 18(1): 25–50. Krims, A. 2007. Music and Urban Geography. New York: Routledge. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Middleton, R. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Raento, P. 2011. ‘The power of place: Experiencing Las Vegas through popular writing and fiction’. In P. Raento and D. G. Schwartz (eds), Gambling, Space, and Time: Shifting Boundaries and Cultures, 164–81. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Raento, P. 2017. ‘All in - and More! gambling in the James Bond films’. UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal, 21(1): 49–68. Raento, P. and Meuronen, M. 2011. ‘Virtues of visualisation: Gambling in finnish editorial cartoons’. International Gambling Studies, 11(1): 107–20. Rantala, V. 2016. ‘Secular possession: Cinematic iconography of addiction’. In Annales Universitatis Turkuensisi, B 418. Turku: University of Turku. Rose, G. 2007. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: SAGE. Shank, B. 1994. Dissonant Identities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Hanover: Wesleyan University. Smith, S. J. 1997. ‘Beyond geography’s visible worlds: A cultural politics of music’. Progress in Human Geography, 21(4): 502–29. Spanier, D. 1995. ‘Art & craft: Creative fiction and Las Vegas’. Journal of Gambling Studies, 11(1): 77–90. Stuart, W. B. 1974. ‘Coast Salish gambling music’. Canadian Folk Music Journal, 2(1): 3–12. Sulkunen, P. 2007. ‘Images of addiction: Representations of addictions in films’. Addiction Research & Theory, 15(6): 543–59. Tuan, Y. 2006. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Turner, N., Fritz, B. and Zangeneh, M. 2007. ‘Images of gambling in film’. Journal of Gambling Issues, 20(1): 117–44.

‘Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice

Music records ABBA. 1976. ‘Money Money Money’. From the album Arrival. Atlantic Records. AC/DC. 1978. ‘Sin City’. From the album Powerage. Atlantic Records. Alan Parsons Project, The. 1980. ‘The Turn of a Friendly Card.’ From the album The Turn of a Friendly Card. Arista Records. Allman Brothers Band, The. 1990. ‘Loaded Dice’. From the album Seven Turns. Epic Records. Animals, The. 1964. ‘The House of the Rising Sun’. From the album The Animals. MGM Records. April Wine. 1978. ‘Roller’. From the album First Glance. Capitol Records. Armstrong, Billie Joe and Jones, Norah. 2013. ‘The Roving Gambler’. From the album Foreverly. Reprise Records. B-52’s, The. 1983. ‘Queen of Las Vegas’. From the album Whammy!. Warner Bros. Records. Bare, Bobby and Bare, Jeanne. 1977. ‘Vegas’. From the single Vegas. RCA Records. Bareilles, Sara. 2007. ‘Vegas.’ From the album Little Voice. Epic Records. Blake, Blind. 1929. ‘Poker Woman Blues’. From the single Doing a Stretch/Poker Woman Blues. Paramount Card. Arista Records. Chumbawamba. 2000. ‘Jesus in Vegas’. From the album WYSIWYG. Electrola Records. de Burgh, Chris. 1975. ‘Spanish Train.’ From the album Spanish Train and Other Stories. A&M Records. Gaga, Lady. 2008. ‘Poker Face’. From the album The Fame. Interscope Records. Guttermouth. 1996. ‘God’s Kingdom’. From the album Teri Yakimoto. Nitro Records. Haggard, Merle. 1975. ‘Kentucky Gambler’. From the album Keep Movin’ On. Capitol Records. High Rollers. 2005. Compilation album High Rollers: Vintage Gambling Songs, 1920–1952. Buzzola Records. Knopfler, Mark. 2000. ‘Sands of Nevada’. From the album Sailing to Philadelphia. Mercury Records. Liggins, Joe and His Honeydrippers. 1954. ‘Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice’. From the single Whiskey, Women, and Loaded Dice/Do You Love Me Pretty Baby. Specialty Records. Macon, Uncle Dave. 1938. ‘Railroadin' and Gamblin'’. From the single Give Me Back My Five Dollars/Railroadin' and Gamblin'. Bluebird.

421

422

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader 

Manilow, Barry. 2006. ‘Here’s to Las Vegas’. From the DVD Music and Passion Live from Las Vegas. Rhino/WEA. McTell, Blind Willie. 1949. ‘Dyin’ Crapshooter Blues’. From the album Atlanta Twelve String. Atlantic Records. Minnie, Memphis. 1930. ‘Georgia Skin’. From the single Georgia Skin. Victor. Owens, Buck. 1969. ‘Big in Vegas.’ From the album The Buck Owens Show Big in Vegas. Capitol Records. Parsons, Gram. 1974. ‘Ooh Las Vegas’. From the album Grievous Angel. Reprise Records. Presley, Elvis. 1964. ‘Viva Las Vegas’. From the single What’d I Say/Viva Las Vegas. RCA Records. Springsteen, Bruce. 1982. ‘Atlantic City’. From the album Nebraska. Columbia Records. Thrills, The. 2003. ‘Your Love Is Like Las Vegas’. From the album So Much for the City. Virgin Records. Turner, Big Joe. 1950. ‘Life Is Like a Card Game’. From the single Just a Travelin’ Man/Life Is Like a Card Game. Freedom Recording Co. Walker, T-Bone. 1954. ‘You’re My Best Poker Hand’. From the album Classics in Jazz. Capitol Records.

22 From parasite to anti-hero Shifting depictions of the card sharp James Banks

Chapter Outline Introduction423 Representations of the card sharp 425 The rehabilitation of gambling 430 Safe spaces and the card sharp 432 Conclusion437

Introduction Acts of deception and fraud are irrevocably tied to games of chance. In particular, card games are synonymous with trickery, cheating schemes and methods of sleight of hand. The card sharp, a manipulator of the deck who deals in devilishness and deceit, is a recognizable figure in gambling folk lore, literature, popular culture and mass media. From the work of Italian Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio to Marvel superhero Gambit, this chapter charts the fictional and factual depiction

424

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

of the card sharp. In turn, it illustrates how images of the card sharp have been reinterpreted in response to the rehabilitation of gambling across much of the Western world. As games of chance have transitioned from activities of dubious morality into mainstream leisure pursuits, so too has the card sharp been recast. No longer a predatory figure operating on the margins of society, in contemporary imaginings, the card sharp is depicted as an anti-hero. The chapter argues that this mythic image of the card sharp taps in to the moral complexity of late modern life, romanticizing card games that are increasingly securitized and sanitized by a corporatecontrolled global casino industry. The term ‘card sharp’ has various synonyms including rook, sharp, sharper, black-leg, Greek, gripe or card shark (Steinmetz, 1870), and has, to a certain extent, been superseded by the latter expression, particularly in North America. The prevailing etymological supposition is that ‘shark’ derives from shirk which follows the German schurke meaning rascal, rogue, scoundrel or villain. As a noun, shirk was used to refer to a dishonest person who preys on others, a parasite or scoundrel: A worthless and impecunious person who gains a precarious living by sponging on others, by executing disreputable commissions, cheating at play, and petty swindling; a parasite; a sharper. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2018)

Like shark, sharp and later sharpie also derive from shirk, although it is less clear if they stem from the word ‘schurke’. Whether card shark is a recent corruption of card sharp or an independent coinage is unclear, but it has certainly emerged as an alternative or interchangeable expression for those who engage in deceitful practices in games of chance. Linguistic battles aside, historically, card sharps or sharks are synonymous with individuals who ply their trade cheating at poker or card games. In more recent incarnations, however, the terms have been extended to include not only those who cheat, but also individuals who use skill in order to win or take advantage of lesser players, as well as other forms of non-gambling specific sleight of hand or ‘magic’. This broader interpretation reflects, in part, the ambiguous or dualistic nature of contemporary imaginings of the card sharp, which are often positive and/or negative in connotation. This chapter explores the reconfiguration of the card sharp. By way of introduction, the chapter details the evolution of factual and fictional representations of the card sharp, before turning to consider how gambling

From Parasite to Anti-Hero

has transitioned from an act of that undermines social and economic morality into a highly popular leisure activity. Discussion develops to illustrate how the commercialization of gambling has necessitated the development of ‘safe’ carding environments and concentrated efforts by industry to remove card sharping practices. Most significantly, sophisticated technological surveillance systems now structure on- and offline gambling, as operators seek to prevents incidents of fraud, cheating and collusion. It is against this mutating gambling milieu that a more complex characterization of the card sharp has emerged. It is suggested that contemporary understandings and interpretations of the card sharp provide valuable insight into society’s complex relationship with card games that are increasingly the preserve of big business.

Representations of the card sharp The card sharp is an often marginal, sometimes central, but always instantly recognizable character that appears in art, literature and other forms of popular culture. The celebrated and often copied representation of three card players by Italian Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio represents one of the earliest known depictions of the card sharp. As Hibbard (1983: 24) notes: ‘There had been scenes of card playing in art before Caravaggio, especially in the North, but there are no models for his large and focused treatment of a scene of cheating.’ Painted circa 1594 and now identifiable by the title The Cardsharps, the oil on canvas depicts a welldressed, innocent young man playing cards with another young man. Unbeknownst to his victim the second young man, a card sharp, has a five of hearts tucked into his belt behind his back, while a sinister middleaged man steals a glimpse of the victim’s cards at the same time signalling to his accomplice. As Goldstein (2011: 1201) recognizes: The tension and drama are heightened by details such as the split glove that allows the older man to easily feel the marked cards, the black hat of the innocent boy that hides the peering right eye of the older man, and the older man’s left hand that seems to come out of nowhere to rest close to the younger cardsharp’s dagger.

Capturing the rise in interest in card playing as a popular form of entertainment across Italy and France in the 1300s, The Cardsharps

425

426

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

reflects the profusion of card cheats and crooked gamblers, and the dangers inherent in dabbling in games of chance (Goldstein, 2011: 1201). As Wind’s (1989: 16) symbolic reading of Caravaggio’s painting suggests, ‘the cards held by the cheating bravo promise victory, but the unhappy combination of the ace and the four on the table adumbrates the unhappy upshot of gambling’. Inspiring a host of imitations, The Cardsharps represents one of, if not, the most significant gambling themed painting to be produced. The perils of playing cards are reworked in Georges de La Tour’s The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (circa 1630s) a portrayal of ‘a trio of conniving cheats’. (Goldstein, 2011: 1201). Here, plunging necklines, hidden cards and glasses of wine underscore the dangers of alcohol, women and gambling. Elsewhere, works such as Theodoor Rombots’ Card and Backgammon Players. Fight over Cards and Gerard van Honthorst’s nowlost Card Cheats capture the passions and foolish behaviour that abound in such deceitful and morally corrupt ‘night sports’. While depictions of the card sharp are often employed to stress the follies of gambling, they are also frequently used in works of fiction to illustrate the unsavoury nature of an individual character in a plot line. For example, the card sharp makes an appearance in one of the most powerful books of the musical theatre, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel. In one scene, lead Billy Bigelow plays blackjack with Jigger Craigin, a character who preys on Billy’s weaknesses. Jigger’s penchant for gambling and ability to draw twenty- one every-time, cheating Billy of his share of the money they would make in a planned robbery, illustrates his disreputable character. Gambling-based literary bad seeds abound, cropping up in numerous works of fiction. Notably, Mark Twain’s short story The Professor’s Yarn focuses on out-cheating the cheaters, with card sharp John Backus loudly proclaiming, ‘I’m a professional gambler’ after ‘beating’ an opponent at poker aboard a nineteenth-century steamboat. Cheating at poker also forms the backdrop to American Buffalo by David Mahmet, while Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance follows a drifter and a grafter whose ‘sure thing’ of a poker game against two gullible old millionaires sees them lose everything to a couple freshly tutored by a Las Vegas card sharp. By contrast, and in distinctive fashion, Terry Pratchett subverts the archetypal character of the parasitic card sharp, portraying Discworld character Moist von Lipwig’s alter ego as an inept con man who fumbles and clumsily

From Parasite to Anti-Hero

misses opportunities to cheat his opponent. Infamously, von Lipwig attempts to fleece a pathetic charlatan only to find that the few (fake) coins he has won amount to little when compared to the watches and wallets he and his comrades have lost. Cheating at cards has also appeared in the plot lines of numerous television series and cinematic releases, such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Boardwalk Empire, Sneaky Pete, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Downton Abbey and the Ocean’s trilogy, to name but a few. In such portrayals, the card sharp is no longer limited to just the role of villain. Rather he takes on a more complex hue, appearing as an individual who engages in immoral actions for a variety of different motivations. For example, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, android Data uses his ability to process and calculate information rapidly to count cards and hustle other card sharps, when trapped in nineteenth-century San Francisco and in need of money. By highlighting the role of computing resources in gaining advantage in games of chance, such a portrayal may be seen to have pre-empted the digitization of card sharping, whereby some online poker players employ ‘bots’1 in order to profit. Elsewhere, anti-heroes, such as criminal Marius in crime drama Sneaky Pete, are morally ambiguous characters who utilize their card skills and duplicitousness for both good and bad across often elaborate and complex storylines that incorporate mistaken identity, family drama as well as a host of cons and crimes. Casinos and their odious owners receiving their comeuppance through cons and crimes has become commonplace in cinematic representations of gambling (Banks and Waugh, 2018). Exemplified by Ocean’s Eleven, director Steven Soderbergh’s caper comedy follows a motley crew of con artists intent on committing the most elaborate casino heist in history. The crime is masterminded by protagonists Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan a hustler, who teaches callow movie stars how to play poker in one of the film’s most amusing scenes. A game of cards underpins another cult crime comedy, Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, in which Eddy and his three friends are duped by Hatchet Harry, who employs cameras

An electronic bot is a computer programme that does automated tasks. In online games of poker, bots make mathematical calculations with a view to ensuring the player is profitable over the long term. 1

427

428

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

to see his opponent’s cards. The foursome are left with a week to pay back Harry £500,000 or lose Eddy’s dad’s pub, leading to a series of violent and bloody escapades in an effort to generate the cash. The card sharp even makes an appearance in the genteel world of Downtown Abbey. In one episode, Mr Terence Sampson visits for a big house party, wherein he uses his cunning at poker to cheat Lord Grantham, Michael Gregson and other guests out of substantial amounts of money. Uncovering the ruse, Gregson harnesses his youth employing the same modus operandi to win back from Sampson not merely his losses but also those of the other guests, promptly returning the funds to the respective players. Boardwalk Empire inhabits a more familiar gambling terrain. Based on Nelson Johnson’s book Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City, and set in the Prohibition era of the 1920s, the story follows Atlantic County treasurer Enoch ‘Nucky’ Thompson. Across five seasons, Thompson seeks to expand his bootlegging and racketeering empire, navigating a plot line that is littered with morally complex characters, many of whom are based upon real-life villains, scoundrels and rogues. Notably, New York mobster, Albert Rothstein, brilliantly acted by Michael Stuhlbarg, is a character both sinister and suave. Nicknamed ‘the brain’ because of his mathematical and card sharping abilities, Rothstein was a renowned philanthropist who gained notoriety for fixing the 1919 World Series in baseball, although he was never convicted. More recent mutations of the card sharp have appeared in comic books, cinema and computer games. The card sharp entered Marvel’s X-Men universe in the early 1990s, in the form of Remy LeBeau, aka Gambit, the quintessential anti-hero, who skirts the divide between good and evil. A master card shark and gambler, whose weapon of choice is his trusty pack of cards, Gambit is both charming and stealthy. Embodying stereotypes of the archetypal card sharp, alongside his mutant ability to transfer latent power into kinetic energy, Gambit has charm and a smooth southern, Louisiana drawl that makes him a master manipulator. As comic book aficionados have highlighted: The playing card angle certainly makes sense . . . his name alone is a tribute to his ability to weigh up the potential risks of any given situation, in a way similar to card games of skill such as blackjack, where a player has to decide whether to hit or stand based on the probabilities to reach a hand total of

From Parasite to Anti-Hero

21, or even poker, where players are called to ‘read’ their opponent in addition to calculating odds. (Heroic Staff, 2017)

In virtual worlds, individuals are also given the opportunity to embody the card sharp. In computer game Red Dead Redemption, game players control former outlaw John Marston, who can participate in the serious parlour game of blackjack while endeavouring to avoid violent disputes. When wearing the ‘Elegant Suit’, Marston is empowered with the ability to pocket a single card and utilize it whenever he is dealing. However, if he is caught cheating, Marston will be required to duel and potentially face his death. Marston represents one of many protagonists created by video game publisher Rockstar Games, who has the capacity for good and bad, based largely upon the decision-making of individual players. A morally neutral character with a sense of honour, Marston’s popularity is derived from his relatability and empathic nature. So while he demonstrates a respect for women and a refusal to commit adultery, he is also quick to anger and shows little guilt or remorse for those who have died as a consequence of his actions (Fandom, 2019). As Marston himself notes: ‘I am always honest . . . maybe not always good . . . but I’m always honest.’ Similarly, in online battle arena video game League of Legends, playercharacter Twisted Fate embodies the trope of a card sharp. Earning his enmity through games of chance in cities’ high parlours and low dens, Twisted Fate’s back story highlights how he has battled through adversity, with gambling being his salvation: ‘Although born to poor gypsy parents, the champion known as Twisted Fate was able to gamble his way to prosperity as a card shark in the seedy underground gambling circuits of Demacia and Noxus’ (Anon, 2014). Gambling imbues Twisted Fate’s skills, with ‘loaded dice’, ‘wild card’ and ‘pick a card’ moves enabling him to defend himself and/ or attack his enemies. Thus, like the card sharp, more broadly, Twisted Fate’s future always lies within the cards. The seductive appeal of the card sharp as anti-hero, is encapsulated in characters such as Marius, Gambit, John Marston and Twisted Fate, who represent flawed, but, ultimately, redeemable characters in the narratives they inhabit. Thus, the card sharp may be understood as but one of a host of morally complex characters that litter the contemporary entertainment media landscape. However, the card sharp’s subtle shift in status from a pariah to anti-hero may also hint at societies’ mutating relationship with and understandings of gamblers and gambling. The next section charts

429

430

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

the rehabilitation of gambling in Europe and North America, which provides a backdrop to this reconfiguration of the card sharp.

The rehabilitation of gambling Condemnation of gambling is as ubiquitous as gambling itself (Reith, 2007). Throughout history, gambling has been cast as a vice, a deviant, criminal or criminogenic activity. As Morse and Goss (2007: 1) note, societies’ acceptance of gambling has waxed and waned over time: ‘At various points in history, gambling has been despised and criminalized, tolerated, and embraced – often at the same time.’ This reflects, in part, the changing legal status of gambling in different jurisdictions of the world. Throughout Europe, gambling has historically been the target of both condemnation and stringent control: [U]ntil recently gambling has been subjected to considerable political and intellectual disapproval with strong moral overtones. There has been a long history of British and European states submitting gambling to a variety of regulations under the guise of preventing exploitation, public nuisance controls and the eradication of ‘vice’. (McMillen, 1996: 7)

Indeed, cards first appeared in historical records when they or specific types of card game were outlawed. For example, in Spain in the fourteenth century card games were forbidden by Royal decree, while, in England, Edward VII endeavoured to prohibit the import of cards (Munting, 1996). By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, middle-class moralists and the political elite had raised concerns that gambling encouraged malingering, fecklessness and improvidence among the proletariat. Government policies were directed at limiting working-class gambling that could threaten the sober, efficient and docile work discipline that industrial capitalism required. Card games, while widely enjoyed by the privileged, represented an activity of concern when played by their workers, with the likes of English economist and social scientist J.A. Hobson (1905: 15) asserting that: ‘cheating is inseparably associated with most actual modes of gambling.’ Thus the ‘selective prohibition’ (Dixon, 1991: 38) of gambling was predicated, in part, on a need to protect citizens from exploitation by an ‘army of social parasites’ (Rowntree, 1905: vii) such as bookmakers, touts and card sharps.

From Parasite to Anti-Hero

Throughout the same period, gambling in North America was confined to illegal urban gambling halls and the saloons and parlours of the Western frontier (Schwartz, 2006). Card games represented popular activities with labourers, immigrants and others, with the lure of financial gain encouraging many to gamble daily. In such environments, the card sharp represented one of a number of commonplace unsavoury demi-monde looking to deceive the naïve or unsuspecting gambler. The malevolent nature of such individuals is neatly captured by Steinmetz (1870: 32), who notes how: As profit, not pleasure, was the aim of these knights of darkness, they lay concealed under all shapes and disguises, and followed up their game with all wariness and discretion. Like wise traders, they made it the business of their lives to excel in their calling. For this end they studied the secret mysteries of their art by night and by day; they improved on the scientific schemes of their profound master, Hoyle, and on his deep doctrines and calculations of chances. They became skilful without a rival where skill was necessary, and fraudulent without conscience where fraud was safe and advantageous; and while fortune or chance appeared to direct everything, they practised numberless devices by which they insured her ultimate favours to themselves. Of these none were more efficacious, because none are more ensnaring, than bribing their young and artless dupes to future play by suffering them to win at their first onsets. By rising a winner the dupe imbibed a confidence in his own gambling abilities, or deemed himself a favourite of fortune. He engaged again, and was again successful – which increased his exultation and confirmed his future confidence; and thus did the simple gudgeon swallow their bait, till it became at last fast hooked.

Yet the threat posed by the card sharp isn’t just targeted at the credulous gambler but extends to the gambling establishment whose reputation and, in turn profits, may be placed in jeopardy by hosting such problematic clientele. Significantly, the need to limit the harms caused by card sharps rose to prominence, as legal casinos began to appear across North America and Europe. Gambling, although widely available, had remained illegal in America until 1931 when Nevada legalized casinos in an attempt to stimulate the economy of the state (Hsu, 1999). Casinos were later to appear in Britain, expedited by the Betting and Gaming Act in 1960, which, although focused on legalizing bingo halls and off-course cash betting, inadvertently permitted casino gambling. Card games, most notably

431

432

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

blackjack, were mainstays in legal casinos, as owners recognized their popularity among players who desired modes of gambling predicated on skill and judgement rather than simply ‘luck’. In turn, casinos in the United States and the United Kingdom became magnets for the ‘professional’ gambler looking to exercise their carding expertise. In an effort to mitigate losses to players adept at card counting, casinos started to ban blackjack players who consistently skewed the house’s statistical certainty or ‘edge’. More recently, opportunities for card sharps to ply their ‘trade’ have dwindled further, as gambling has developed into a mainstream leisure activity. The latter decades of the twentieth century witnessed the increased availability of gambling products and services that generate significant profits for both private operators and states. From the 1970s onwards, the pursuit of neoliberal economic policies by many states expedited the deregulation and liberalization of gambling (Banks, 2017). Buttressed by the steady intensification of consumerism, increased ease of access to credit and growing prosperity in many regions, commercial gambling is now a global enterprise (Reith, 2007). Thus, technological innovation, market liberalization and broader political and fiscal policies have enabled commercial gambling to propagate, with high-potency continuous forms of gambling becoming a distinctive feature of the gambling landscape (Adams and Rossen, 2012). In short, the neoliberal era has expedited gambling’s transformation into a global ‘site of intensified consumption’ (Reith, 2013: 718) in which there is no place for individuals, such as the card sharp, who may undermine gambling’s ‘economic morality’.

Safe spaces and the card sharp The liberalization and commercialization of gambling has led to a host of card games becoming readily available to, and widely consumed by, citizenry. Concentrated in Genting casinos, gambling resorts and virtual environments, card games have successfully migrated from the backstreet to side street to main street and, finally, to e-street (Jones, Clarke-Hill and Hillier, 2000). The development of online card games is particularly pronounced. In little over three decades, online gambling sites have become the principal space in which citizens engage in card games. The first internet poker site, Planet Poker, was launched in 1998 but quickly

From Parasite to Anti-Hero

buckled, beset by technical problems and an inability to meet the demand of a growing consumer base (Banks 2014). Usurped by Paradise Poker as the principal poker site for online gamblers, by the turn of the twentieth century PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Party Poker had emerged as leading brands of online poker, while card games were also offered across online casino platforms. The widespread consumer appeal of card games such as poker was cemented in 2003 when ‘everyman’ Chris Moneymaker won the televised World Series of Poker after entering the tournament by winning an online satellite event hosted by PokerStars (Grohman, 2006). Today, a global audience is catered for by in excess of 500 online poker rooms (Casino City, 2018), while digital technology has enabled simulated versions of blackjack and poker, alongside livestreamed card games, to be enjoyed by the gambler from a multitude of different locations. Unsurprisingly, the digitization of card games has, in turn, led to the digitization of card sharping. Yet, while casinos have trained attention on actors external to their organizations who may disrupt ‘fair’ gambling, ironically two of the most high-profile cheating scandals at the height of the online poker boom involved gambling insiders. Such acts, nevertheless, served to raise awareness of and concerns about how technological advancement presents new opportunities for deceptive practices. The superuser scandals involving Absolute Poker and UltimateBet – then two of the largest online poker providers – caused outrage among the card players. Involving a former executive and unnamed former consultant, the Absolute Poker scandal, which took place in 2007, saw high roller players defrauded of in excess of US$800,000 over forty-day period (Palmer, 2007; Levitt, 2007). A ‘superuser’ account enabled the consultant to see in real time the hole cards of every player at the poker table, with information relayed to the executive controlling a player account with the alias ‘PotRipper’. The ruse was uncovered when defeated competitor ‘CrazyMarcos’ lost a US$1,000 buy-in tournament and suspecting unfair play requested a copy of the game’s hand history. Possibly in error, CrazyMarcos received a record of all the cards held by players, their IP and email addresses, alongside hand histories. Evidencing what many players have suspected, the data demonstrated suspicious betting patterns and improbable winning hands. Leading to an investigation by Kahnawake Gaming Commission, seven accounts were identified as having compromised Absolutes Poker’ systems, and although the company was fined US$500,000 and guilty parties removed from playing ‘any role in

433

434

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

[Absolute Poker’s] ‘mind or management’’, the individuals went unnamed and the company retained its operating licence (Kahnawake Gaming Commission, 2009a: 1–2). The UltimateBet scandal, which followed less than a year later once again identified suspicious betting patterns and abnormally high winning statistics for suspects accounts (Gaul, 2008; Ware, 2008). An investigation by players centred on an account operated by ‘NioNio’, who had won in excess US$300,000 in just 300 hands across thirteen of fourteen winning sessions. Equivalent to ‘winning the Powerball jackpot three days in a row’, the win rate of NioNio was achieved through a ‘God mode’ programme which could be used to see all the cards of all the players. Once again, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission failed to revoke the offenders operating licence, although they did fine UltimateBet US$1.5 million and compelled them to refund all players affected by the cheating (Kahnawake Gaming Commission, 2009b). Despite the most significant cases of fraud having involved industry insiders, online poker players typically raise concerns regarding cheating by other players. For example, Wood and Griffiths’ (2008: 90) study of online poker players reported: There was a lot of suspicion amongst the professional players that sometimes they were playing against computer programs (bots), particularly when they lost. Similarly, there was fear amongst some that certain computer viruses could be used by another player that would allow them to see other players’ cards. Talking to other players using the chat facility was one way that a player could be sure that they were in fact playing with real people.

Indeed, incidents of collusion between poker players at the same table (e.g. several players may be in the same room using separate computers and accounts), the use of computer programmes (poker bots) to optimize play against other players and ‘forced disconnections’ of opponents at crucial moments in poker games have all proved problematic for operators (Brunker, 2004; Jones, 2013). Alongside, the opportunities to engage in card sharping practices in online environments, such practices continue apace in physical locations but may involve less technological and more subtle means of trickery and deception. For example, studies (Abarbanel and Bernhard, 2012; Wolkomir, 2012) have illustrated how female poker players navigate

From Parasite to Anti-Hero

typically male-dominated and, at times, misogynistic gambling environments with significant sharping successes. Abarbanel and Bernhard’s (2012: 380) qualitative examination of the lived experience of poker illustrates how female sharpers are able to take ‘advantage of their ability to mix feminine and masculine behaviours and traits in their play’. Thus, flirting and provocative outfits are utilized alongside an ability to make a timely calculation of odds or read an opponent’s tells in the pursuit of card-playing success and profit. Likewise, Wolkomir (2012) suggests that women sharpers employ a number of different strategies to manipulate and deceive male players, achieving great satisfaction in the process. Yet, for Wolkomir (2012: 423) such sharping techniques ‘fit into, rather than subvert, gender hierarchy’, representing acts of ‘compromising conformity’ that rely on female players’ careful maintenance of male gamblers’ gendered (mis)perceptions of women’s play. Nevertheless, such subtle sharping techniques rarely merit the scrutiny of poker panopticans that are targeted at identifying card counting, card marking, shuffle tracking and other forms of advantage play that are deemed far more unsavoury in nature. In response to such threats, most poker companies have developed sophisticated approaches to combatting fraud, cheating and collusion with a view to ensuring the safety and, in turn, maintaining the confidence, of their clientele . Thus, the success of card games as a mainstream leisure activity is premised, in part, on the ability of gambling operators to provide a safe and secure entertainment experience for players. Thus, card games typically take place in ‘safe spaces’ that are governed by technologized surveillance systems tasked with minimizing error and unscrupulous acts by players and employers. Faceto-face supervision, CCTV surveillance, computer-based performance monitoring, computer simulations, game testing, Know Your Customer processes, due diligence measures and other forms of in-game regulation and surveillance coalesce to form a ‘surveillant assemblage’ (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000). Through a multiplicity of nodes, distributed across an array of technologies and social practices, human bodies are abstracted into discrete ‘flows’ of information which are reconfigured as ‘data doubles’ of individual players. Player information may then be sifted, sorted and audited by gambling operators, with ‘problematic play’ identified and ‘problematic players’ suspended, barred or banished from games. As Austrin and West (2005: 317–18) note, such surveillance is an integral

435

436

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

component of a legitimate and legal commercial gambling environment that is able to generate significant profits for states and private enterprises: Legalization, particularly legal access for a mass (as distinct from elite) clientele, requires an extensive form of surveillance in order to minimize risks of criminal activity, including collusion with employees, but also to provide a public record of activities. . . . It is this development that makes possible the diffusion of gaming beyond a limited number of zoned or licensed sites into multiple leisure complexes and in turn is also the condition for the establishment and legalization of virtual gaming sites.

Alongside this assemblage, gambling organizations mobilize discourses of security and cheating to protect their businesses and delegitimize acts of card sharping (by individuals external to their organizations) that may undermine their commercial objectives (Johnson, 2017; 2018). For example, McMullan and Kervin’s (2012) examination of the features of online poker sites recorded that seventy of seventy-one operators in the study detailed measures to guarantee account safety, while 85 per cent of operators outlined how they protect against fraud, cheating and collusion. Such discursive practices are exemplified in PokerStar’s response to a suspected bot ring operating out of Russia and Kazakhstan who fraudulently won in the region of US$1.5 million at $0.50/$1 and $1/$2 pot-limit Omaha tables: We work very hard to stay ahead of people who attempt to violate our rules and invest significant resources (human and software) in detection and mitigation of violations, including the use of prohibited software, such as bots. In such cases, over 95% of offenders are detected proactively by PokerStars, with less than 5% identified by players. We always welcome the assistance of players in enforcing the rules of our games, because it can add focused insight that complements the methods used by our own systems. At the same time, we continually upgrade our detection capabilities in attempt to stay ahead of the bad guys. (Glatzer, 2015)

Collectively, such practices ensure that there is little place for the card sharp in the commercially organized gambling environment. Thus, as Smith (1996: 94) notes: ‘[T]he mythic archetype of a rugged individualistic gambler – whether card sharp, pool hustler or horse-player – involved in a specific ritual of play is an endangered species, likely to become a thing of the past.’

From Parasite to Anti-Hero

It is against this backdrop that a ‘softening’ of cultural representations of the card sharp has occurred. In contemporary imaginings, the malevolent sharper has been largely replaced by morally complex individuals who cheat, con and hustle for myriad reasons both good and bad. Flawed but redemptive characters litter the modern mediascape, and this new found recognition, indeed even admiration, for the card sharp could be reflective of and responsive to greater societal interest and acceptance of lives lived on the margins of mainstream society. Moreover, in corporately governed gambling environments, card games, although marketed as thrilling and life-changing experiences, now take place in insipid spaces both virtual and real. Recent depictions of the card sharp in film, gaming and literature appear to be reactive to this bland gambling terrain nostalgically yearning for a time when gambling was a ‘pariah enterprise of shady glamour’ (1996: 94). Such representations may also be interpreted as a reaction to gambling organizations’ security strategies and accompanying rhetoric, which has sought to prevent individual gamblers gaining any advantage over the ‘house’ through card sharping practices. So while the response to incidents of cheating undertaken by operators, insiders and celebrity endorsers are typically met with much vitriol, the reaction to card sharping by unknown individuals is more muted. Tapping into the morally ambiguous nature of modern life, the allure of the card sharp may well rest in their ability to exercise agency, and skew chance and the house edge. This agency is not simply a foil for stochastic process, such as those found in many games of chance and associated marketing materials, but authentic agency that empowers the individual to control their gambling destiny.

Conclusion This chapter has illustrated the shifting construction of the card sharp from a somewhat one-dimensional villainous charlatan to a more complex character who inhabits worlds both virtual and real. While the card sharp has traditionally been portrayed as a marginal, yet recognizable, malevolent character in the gambling milieu, in contemporary imaginings, the card sharp has also been constructed as a gnomic anti-hero. This shift in image is cast against a backdrop of digitization, commercialization and

437

438

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

corporatization of card games and gambling, more broadly. Gambling has mutated from an activity constructed as sinful, deviant and criminogenic, partaken in by the feckless, weak and undesirable few, into a mainstream leisure and entertainment pursuit that is widely consumed by citizenry. In turn, this transformation has curtailed opportunities for the card sharp to ply his – and sometimes her – trade. Today, card games typically take place in safe spaces provided by a global gambling industry that is able to exercise its surveillant assemblage in the pursuit of governance, security and profit. In these secure and sanitized environments, the card sharp finds himself an outcast with little room to operate. While changing depictions of the card sharp are undoubtedly reflective of and responsive to changing social, cultural and moral mores, the image of a misfit who seeks to survive on the margins of society may well also tap into the blandness of contemporary card games and citizens’ desires for devilment and an authenticity that only previous incarnations of card games can provide.

References Abarbanel, B. L. and Bernhard, B. J. 2012. ‘Chicks with Decks: The female lived experience in poker’. International Gambling Studies, 12(3): 367–85. Adams, P. J. and Rossen, F. 2012. ‘A tale of missed opportunities: Pursuit of a public health approach to gambling in New Zealand’. Addiction, 107(6): 1051–6. Anon. 2014. Story of League of Legends. Antinon Books. Austrin, T. and West, J. 2005. ‘Skills and surveillance in casino gaming work’. Work, Employment and Society, 19(2): 305–26. Banks, J. 2014. Online Gambling and Crime: Causes, Controls and Consequences. Farnham: Ashgate. Banks, J. 2017. Gambling, Crime And Society. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Banks, J. and Waugh, D. 2019. ‘A taxonomy of gambling-related crime’, International Gambling Studies, 19(2): 339–57. Brunker, M. 2004. ‘Are poker “Bots” raking online pots?’ nbcnews​.co​m, [online] 21 September. Available at http:​/​/www​​.nbcn​​ews​.c​​om​/id​​/6002​​298​ /n​​s​/tec​​hnolo​​gy​​_an​​d​_sci​​ence-​ inter​net_r​oulet​te/t/​are-p​oker-​bots-​rakin​ g-onl​ine-p​ots/#​.XC4V​cPZ2t​PY (accessed 21 December 2018). Bybee, S. 1999. ‘History, development, and legalisation of Las Vegas casino gaming’. In C. H. Hsu (ed.), Legalised Casino Gaming in the United States: The Economic and Social Impact, 3–24. London: Routledge.

From Parasite to Anti-Hero

Casino City. 2018. ‘Online casino city’. Available at http://online​.casinocity​ .com/ (accessed 21 December 2018). Dixon, D. 1991. From Prohibition to Regulation: Bookmaking, Anti-Gambling and the Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fandom. 2019. ‘John Marston. ‘Available at https​:/​/re​​ddead​​.fand​​om​.co​​m​/wik​​ i​/Joh​​​n​_Mar​​ston (accessed 8 February 2019). Gaul, G. M. 2008. ‘Cheating scandals raise new questions about honesty, security of Internet gambling’. The Washington Post, [online] 30 November. http://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/wp- dyn/c​onten​t/ art​icle/​2008/​11/20​19/AR​​20081​​12901​​679​.​h​​tml (accessed 8 February 2019). Glatzer, J. 2015. ‘PokerStars and players react to pot-limit Omaha bot scandal’. Pokernews, [online] 18 June. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pok​​ernew​​s​.com​​/news​​ /2015​​/06​/p​​okers​​tars-​​and​-p​​lay​er​​s​-rea​​ct​-to​- the​-bot​-scandal​-21935​​.htm (accessed 8 February 2019). Goldstein, J. L. 2011. ‘The card players of Caravaggio, Cezanne and Mark Twain: Tips for getting lucky in high-stakes research’. Nature Medicine, 17(10): 1201–5. Grohman, C. 2006. ‘Reconsidering regulation: A historical overview of the legality of internet poker and discussion of the internet gambling ban of 2006’. Journal of Legal Technology Risk Management, 1(1): 34–74. Haggerty, K. and Ericson, R. 2000. ‘The surveillant assemblage’. British Journal of Sociology, 51(4): 605–22. Heroic Staff. 2017. ‘Gambit 101 – Everything you wanted to know about Marvel’s next big star’. [online] Available at https​:/​/he​​roich​​ollyw​​ood​.c​​om​/ ev​​eryth​​ing​-n​​eed​-k​​​now​-m​​arvel​- gambit/ (accessed 1 October 2018). Hibbard, H. 1983. Caravaggio. London: Harper & Row. Hobson, J. A. 1905. ‘The ethics of gambling’. In B. S. Rowntree (ed.), Betting and Gambling: A National Evil, vii–ix. London: MacMillan. Johnson, M. R. 2017. ‘Comparing the professionalization of pro gamblers and pro video game players’. Center for Gaming Research Occasional Paper Series, 40. Las Vegas: UNLV University Libraries. Johnson, M. R. 2018. ‘The biggest legal battle in UK casino history: Processes and politics of “cheating” in sociotechnical networks’. Social Studies of Science, 48(2): 304–27. Jones, N. 2013. The rising concern of forced disconnection attacks’. Pokerfuse [online] 18 April. http:​/​/pok​​erfus​​e​.com​​/feat​​ures/​​speci​​al​-fe​​ature​​/the-​​risin​​g​ -con​​c​ern-​​of​-fo​​rced-​ disconnection-attacks-18-04/ (accessed 3 December 2018). Jones, P., Clarke-Hill, C. M. and Hillier, D. 2000. ‘Viewpoint: Back street to side street to high street to e-street: Sporting betting on the Internet’.

439

440

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, 28(6): 222–7. Kahnawake Gaming Commission. 2009a. ‘In the matter of Absolute Poker: Investigation regarding complaints of cheating’. Kahnawake Mohawk Territory: Kahnawake Gaming Commission. Kahnawake Gaming Commission. 2009b. ‘In the matter of Tokwiro Enterprises ENRG, carrying on business as UltimateBet: Investigation regarding complaints of cheating’. Kahnawake Mohawk Territory: Kahnawake Gaming Commission. Levitt, S. D. 2007. ‘The absolute poker cheating scandal blown wide open’. http:​/​/fre​​akono​​mics.​​com​/2​​007​/1​​0​/17/​​the​-a​​bsolu​​te​-po​​ker​-c​​heati​​ng​-sc​​ andal​​​-blow​​n​-wid​​e​-ope​​n/ (accessed 8 February 2019). McMillen, J. 1996. ‘Understanding gambling: History, concepts and theories’. In J. McMillen (ed.), Gambling Cultures, 6–39. London: Routledge. McMullan, J. L. and Kervin, M. 2012. ‘Selling Internet gambling: Advertising, new media and the content of poker promotion’. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 7(4): 541–54. Morse, E. A. and Goss, E. P. 2007. Governing Fortune: Casino Gambling in America. Michigan: University of Michigan. Munting, R. 1996. An Economic and Social History of Gambling in Britain and the USA. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Oxford English Dictionary. 2018. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Palmer, M. 2007. ‘Absolute pokers PotRipper cheating scandal’. Global Gaming News, [online] 22 October. http:​/​/www​​.glob​​algam​​ingne​​ws​.co​​ m​/ind​​ex​.ph​​p​?opt​​ion​=c​​om​_co​​ntent​​&t​ask​​=view​​&id​=1​​180 (accessed 8 February 2019). Reith, G. 2007. ‘Gambling and the contradictions of consumption: A genealogy of the “pathological” subject’. American Behavioural Scientist, 51(1): 33–55. Reith, G. 2013. ‘Techno economic systems and excessive consumption: a political economy of “pathological” gambling’. The British Journal of Sociology, 64(4): 717–38. Rowntree, B. S. 1905. ‘Preface’. In B. S Rowntree (ed.), Betting and Gambling: A National Evil, vii–ix. London: MacMillan. Schwartz, D. G. 2006. Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling. New York: Gotham Books. Smith, J. F. 1996. ‘When it’s bad it’s better: Conflicting images of gambling in American culture’. In J. McMillen (ed.), Gambling Cultures, 101–15. London: Routledge. Steinmetz, A. 1870. The Gaming Table Its Votaries and Victims, in All Times and Countries, Especially in England and in France. London: Tinsley Bros.

From Parasite to Anti-Hero

Ware, S. 2008. ‘ULTIMATE BET silent about insider cheating allegations’. http:​/​/for​​umser​​ver​.t​​woplu​​stwo.​​com​/1​​9​/hig​​h​-sta​​kes​-p​​l​-nl/​​ultim​​ate​-b​​et​-si​​​ lent-​​about​​-insi​​der- cheat​ing-a​llega​tions​-mill​ions-​suspe​cted-​stole​n-992​ 47/ (accessed 8 February 2019). Wind, B. 1989. ‘A note on card symbolism in Caravaggio and his followers’. Paragone, 40: 15–18. Wolkomir, M. 2012. ‘“You fold like a little Girl:” (Hetero)Gender framing and competitive strategies of men and women in no limit Texas hold em poker games’. Qualitative Sociology, 35(4): 407–26. Wood, R. T. and Griffiths, M. D. 2008. ‘Why Swedish people play online poker and factors that can increase or decrease trust in poker websites: A qualitative investigation’. Journal of Gambling Issues, 21: 80–97.

441

23 Gambling ladies The games that Barbara Stanwyck plays Catherine Russell

Chapter Outline Western women 445 California: Gold rush culture 447 Gambling Lady: Gold-digging 449 The Lady Eve: The long con 451 The Lady Gambles: The lady loses 456 Conclusion459

Gambling is said to be a metaphor for the American Dream because it offers the opportunity for anyone to succeed, regardless of pedigree (Duncan, 2015). At the same time, there is little doubt that gambling is a male domain, which makes it less than a level-playing field for all Americans. A poker player in Barbara Stanwyck’s 1949 film The Lady Gambles tells her flatly that ‘women and gambling don’t mix’. Aaron M. Duncan cites one of the few professional women poker players as saying that the sexism endemic to the game can actually help her as men doubt

Gambling Ladies

her skill (Duncan, 2015: 41). And yet, women have never been entirely absent from the ‘scene’ of poker and have long played a critical role, especially in films about gambling, in which they never simply blend into the scenery. Because gambling is a male domain, the women tend to stand out, as either players, dealers or entertainment, or even as a game master, as with the most recent iteration, Molly’s Game (Sorkin, 2018), in which Molly (Jessica Chastain) runs private high-stakes poker games in Los Angeles and New York. The following analysis of women in gambling movies takes the concept of play in its widest sense to look at the conjunction of performance and gambling. Following Walter Benjamin’s understanding of play as a critical engagement with technology, such an analysis is necessarily historical. Using the films of Barbara Stanwyck as a case study, we shall see how for the New Woman of the 1930s, and for some women in the frontier myth, gambling offers women in American cinema opportunities for social mobility within a highly gendered social institution. This potential, however, is radically curtailed in the post-war period – and it may in fact be only in the conjunction of cinema and modernity in the first part of the twentieth century that gambling can be seen to have served women well. Barbara Stanwyck acted in eighty-four feature films from 1930 to 1964, plus dozens of TV episodes through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. She is arguably one of the most stalwart, recognizable and long-lasting figures of Hollywood history. Early in her career, Stanwyck gained a reputation for being independent-minded, both for the roles she chose and for the way she managed her career. Roles such as Lily in Baby Face (1933), the title characters in Annie Oakley (1935) and Stella Dallas (1937) and an ambitious reporter in Meet John Doe (1941), established her credentials as a woman who stands up to men and frequently outsmarts them. Stanwyck’s particular affinity for the role of the gambler pertains, I will argue, to the duplicity of her acting style. Bluffing is a key strategy in poker, and Michelle Wolkomir has determined through ethnographic research that women rely enormously on deception as a means of remaining competitive in this hyper-masculine arena. She found that women were able to exploit the heteronormative framework by acting dumb, submissive, sexualized and passive in order to deceive male players about their cards (Wolkomir, 2012). Tracking the role of women gamblers in Hollywood entails a recognition of the affinities of acting and poker.

443

444

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Doubleness and duplicity takes on many forms in the different genres and different phases of Stanwyck’s career, as her talent as a performer is to ‘put on’ an honest face; and her characters frequently outwit men. Over the course of her career, she made two movies in which she is specifically identified as a gambler: Gambling Lady (Archie Mayo, 1934) and The Lady Gambles (Michael Gordon, 1949), which I will discuss here, along with two other films in which she plays gamblers: The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) and California (John Farrow, 1947). Stanwyck’s characters are very frequently ‘playing’ their leading men, posing as something they are not and taking advantage of gender expectations and codes of behaviour. Stanwyck’s career runs for several decades, and we shall see how the latent potential of women gambling in film dissipates over the middle decades of the twentieth century: nevertheless, Stanwyck’s body remains as the stake in a multitude of social games, of which gambling is only the most reflexive. If Stanwyck’s performances can be considered to be duplicitous, we could further describe her acting in these roles as a form of play. She is always Stanwyck and her fictional character, and those characters are furthermore frequently doubled once again, which serves to highlight the playfulness of her performances. In playing these parts, or by thinking of her performances in these terms, the notion of play can be linked to gambling or the Spiel that is a central concept for Walter Benjamin. Miriam Hansen has convincingly unpacked this conceptual theme in Benjamin’s work, to claim that the term Spiel, with its linked connotations of performing and gambling, ‘allows Benjamin to imagine an alternate mode of aesthetics that could counteract, at the level of sense perception, the political consequences of the failed . . . reception of technology’ (Hansen, 2012: 183).1 Film thus comes to serve a crucial function of a possible site for the recovery of experience in technological modernity. The gambler is a critical figure for Benjamin in that he sustains an archaic mode of experience within modernity: living for the moment, experiencing the ‘innervation’ of chance, a heightened receptivity and a ‘bodily presence of mind’ (Hansen, 2012: 185).2

An earlier version of Hansen’s essay was entitled: ‘Room-for-play: Benjamin’s gamble with cinema.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring, 2004): 2–27. 2 Benjamin’s remarks on gambling are found principally in The Arcades Project ([1936] 1999) and ‘Notes on a theory of Gambling.’ ([1930] 1999). 1

Gambling Ladies

Western women Stanwyck may be exceptional in her career and in her acting style, but at the same time, her roles and characters are nevertheless symptomatic or at least indicative of patterns in Classic Hollywood. Her gambling characters are, in other words, necessarily associated with many other women’s roles which I will outline before looking more closely at Stanwyck’s own gambling pictures. The saloon girl is of course a mainstay of the Western genre, serving as counterpart to the moralistic Eastern women who bear the ‘civilizing’ mandate of domesticity, religion and family in frontier culture. In his analysis of poker and the Frontier myth in My Darling Clementine (1946), Aaron Duncan claims that ‘the empowered feminine motif does not fit the requirements of the Frontier myth’ (Duncan, 2015: 75). He claims that the few strong female characters are ‘not true women’, and that all women are either good and virginal, or bad and sexual. In fact, I would argue that the frontier myth and the Western genre provide fertile ground for the emergence of women who successfully challenge these stereotypes. Even within My Darling Clementine, the saloon girl Chihuahua played by Linda Darnell, is not entirely an unsympathetic character, even if she cheats and lies. The prostitute with a heart of gold in the West is also a woman making it on her own, through card playing, performing and often owning and/or running a saloon in extraordinarily harsh and violent conditions, radically challenging the conventions of Victorian morality and ladylike behaviour. Perhaps the most notorious saloon-keeper in Hollywood history is Vienna (Joan Crawford) in Johnny Guitar (Nick Ray, 1954). A shrewd businesswoman with a loyal staff of dealers and barmen, and a spacious casino full of green felted tables, Vienna herself plays piano rather than cards. She loses it all in a violent confrontation with a gang of vigilantes led by another woman, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) thinly disguised as the wrath of Eugene McCarthy and the Hollywood blacklist. In Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939), Marlene Dietrich gives an impressive performance as Frenchy, the resident singer and house poker player in the only saloon in Bottleneck USA. Frenchy is introduced to the film, like Chihuahua in My Darling Clementine, as cheating at cards. She spills coffee on her accomplice’s opponent, allowing him to switch up his hand. In a subsequent scene, she literally seduces her opponent to the

445

446

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

point where he loses his cool and throws the game. Frenchy’s style in Destry Rides Again is highly performative, like Vienna and her frequent costume changes in Johnny Guitar. Indeed, one of the roles of women in frontier gambling culture is to lure men to the tables. They dress in luxurious gowns and jewellery, offering men the hope of additional pleasure should they strike it rich. Miriam Hopkins plays Mary ‘Swan’ Routledge in Barbary Coast (1935) loaded down with feathers, furs, jewels and silk in a San Francisco casino during the gold rush. The rest of the town is muddy, rainy and full of lecherous men. Her arrival in San Francisco, searching for a long-lost fiancé, is widely heralded by the desperate men as a ‘white lady’ in town. Mary runs the roulette wheels with great style, cheating on behalf of her tyrannical boss played by Edward G. Robinson. Women are clearly commodities themselves in Frontier culture, and unlike frontier wives, they are virtually communal property (Baker and Zuvela, 2014: 4), provoking conflict among sex-starved men. Once behind the roulette wheel, or the blackjack deck, though, they gain a certain power over men in the other world of the saloon. Typically in the Western narrative, the women are well protected by owners and staff who value their enticing presence. In stories of the Old West, most of the legendary gambling women are themselves heavily armed (Enss, 2008). Mary Routledge in Barbary Coast ends up finally cheating the boss to enable her lover Joel McCrea to win back the gold he lost at her table, and the two of them ultimately escape back to New York. Using her womanly ways, she ends up striking gold in California without ever leaving the saloon. One final example from the 1960s is Joanne Woodward in A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966) in which she and her husband Meredith (Henry Fonda) manage to infiltrate a big poker game in a small town. Fonda is a gambling addict, and manages to get into the game mainly because one of the other players has eyes for his wife, but Fonda quickly gets in over his head. He has a heart attack while holding a poker hand, and begs his wife – a moralistic naysayer – to take over his hand. Mary (Woodward) claims not to know the game, so she takes the hand over to the local banker who agrees to stake her. She quickly cleans out the five richest men in town, raising the stakes so high that she never has to show the hand. Finally, in the epilogue, we learn that the banker, the town doctor and even the couple’s little boy were in on the scam.

Gambling Ladies

Woodward drops her goody-goody demeanour and plays poker like a pro.3 The close alignment between poker and frontier culture would suggest that the West was settled by virtue of risky behaviour – which is the mythology that Duncan identifies in My Darling Clementine. But equally important to this myth is the presence of women posing as commodities, challenging conventions of gendered behaviour and giving men a run for their money. In many frontier narratives, gamblers risk everything on a turn of a card or turn of the wheel – ranches, saloons, hard-earned gold dust – and it is this contingency that opens space for new subjectivities to emerge.

California: Gold rush culture Shot in glorious technicolour with a sweeping prologue of choral music and lush landscapes, California (John Farrow, 1947) is an epic story about the founding of the state in which the greed and selfishness of the gold rush is pitted against the values of hard work and statecraft. As Duncan has argued, one of the internal contradictions of the ‘American Dream’ is between the ethics of hard work and individualistic greed, and gambling serves to reinforce the latter sense of everyone out for themselves (Duncan, 2015: 36). The California gold rush is introduced in California as a wholesale interruption of a wagon train heading west. Men and women flee to the coast, leaving their wagons and worldly possessions in the dust, in the hope of instant, easy, wealth. Two men choose not to take this gamble: Michael Fabian (Barry Fitzgerald), a viticulturalist who has carried his ‘twigs’ or seedlings with him on the journey; and Ray Milland, who plays Trumbo, an army deserter who had been hired to lead the wagon train (Figure 23.1). Stanwyck plays Lily Bishop and is first introduced being kicked out of a small Western town for her allegedly ‘wicked’ ways by a bunch of matronly ladies. She hitches a ride with the wagon train, is snubbed by

3 Woodward’s double-role performance is not unlike her Oscar-winning turn in The Three Faces of Eve (1957) in which she plays a browbeaten housewife, a party girl and finally – with the help of a psychoanalyst – a happy well-balanced woman.

447

448

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Figure 23.1  Barbara Stanwyck in California (John Farrow, 1947).

the women in the group, but beats the men in a poker game under the stars. In her first scene alone with Trumbo, she says, ‘I’m smart, too smart. A woman gets tired knowing so much. Sometimes she wants to be surprised.’ He risks a kiss, but she berates him for his condescending attitude towards her. He slaps her, and she vows to destroy him and ‘drag him down to the muck’. Lily leaves with the gold rush dreamers but meets up with Trumbo a few years later in Pharaoh City, named after former slaver Coffin Pharaoh (George Coulouris), another tyrannical power broker who ‘owns’ the town as Edward G. Robinson ‘owns’ San Francisco in Barbary Coast. Pharaoh may also refer to the popular Western card game faro, which is the game favoured in Lily’s saloon. Trumbo gets lucky and manages to beat her on his first visit. With a huge pot in front of him, they cut the cards for the establishment itself. Trumbo wins with a four of diamonds and Lily slinks off to live with Pharaoh because that’s where the best money is. After Fabian the good farmer is later killed by Pharaoh’s men, Trumbo confronts Pharaoh, but Stanwyck emerges from the shadows to kill her erstwhile fiancé in cold blood. She and Trumbo end up at Fabian’s pastoral vineyard, not to live happily ever after, but promising to reunite after Trumbo serves his time for deserting the Army. The games of poker and faro serve in this film to underscore the narrative as a zero-sum game. History in this mythic version of frontier culture has clearly defined winners and losers, although Lily’s character, unlike the men, is not so

Gambling Ladies

clear-cut. As a card shark, she is not to be trusted, and yet her mannerisms, her star power and her costuming – bright and colourful – contradict that verdict. She offers ‘burying money’ to Trumbo when she first beats him at cards, as her father told her never to leave a man penniless. Cards bring the two together, and drive them apart, even if it is the non-card-playing Fabian and his vineyard that finally unites them. As an instrument of ideology, the card game is banished from the agrarian state-loving ending, although it is a valuable narrative tool for imagining a society beyond the scope of the family. Lily is a commodity exchanged between men, and may even be something of a symbol for the state itself, but if so, she is also a figure of the independent desires and ambitions of gold rush culture.

Gambling Lady: Gold-digging Women gamblers in any Hollywood genre are unusual in that they tend to play both sides of the morality game. Frowned on by some elements of society, they are nevertheless flamboyant and smart, and thus seductive as spectacles and as characters, challenging the easy division between good girls and bad girls. In the pre-code era, before the Hays code was rigidly enforced, everyone got away with a lot more in Hollywood movies than after 1934.4 One of Stanwyck’s last pre-code movies from this period is called Gambling Lady (1934) in which gambling serves as an ideal mechanism for social climbing. As in The Lady Eve, made a few years later, ‘love’ is the alibi for social mobility; so while the women in each film are accused of gold-digging, the narrative conflates love with honesty in a culture of deceit. The Busby Berkeley musical Gold Diggers of 1933 was part of a longer cycle of films and Broadway shows of that name; and the pejorative term was widely used in other films of the period that featured working-class women snagging men with money (Figure 23.2). Stanwyck plays Lady Lee in Gambling Lady, the daughter of a professional poker player. He suicides in the face of his debts, and she tries to clear his name with the syndicate, but she insists on playing straight.

Gambling Lady was released in March 1934. The Hays code was established in 1930, but not enforced until 1 July 1934 with the institutionalization of the Production Code Administration. Therefore, this is one of the last of the ‘pre-code’ movies of the period. 4

449

450

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Figure 23.2  Barbara Stanwyck in Gambling Lady (Archie Mayo, 1934).

The deal is that she attracts big-stakes gamblers, but beats them through sheer smarts, although she eventually gets caught up in a sting operation when it is revealed that the ‘body guard’ provided by the syndicate is rigged with cheating devices hidden in his clothes. In the process of the arrest, she falls in love with wealthy playboy Garry Madison (Joel McCrea), who is so innocent and naïve that he accidentally exposes the gambling den to the cops. Madison’s father tries to buy Lady Lee off, but they cut cards for him and she wins. After their honeymoon, Madison’s jilted exfiancé Sheila challenges Lady Lee to a game of 21 during a bridge party, and Lady Lee wins a big heap of jewellery stripped from Sheila’s body – and Lady refuses to return it. There follows a complicated series of events in which Lady’s loyalty to her old racketeer friends conflicts with her husband’s social graces. Gillian Beer has argued that fiction-making is itself a form of gambling in which predictable results are consistently altered and diverted by aleatory events (Beer, 99). She further suggests that the scene of gambling in fiction includes the activities of the reader reading (105). In cinema, the close-up detail of the cards being played or the roulette wheel being spun likewise solicits the viewer’s attention to the sign of the character’s fortunes. The dialectics of prediction and chance are furthermore complicated in cinema by the unreliability and fluidity of visual information. The bluff, so essential to the game of poker, extends to any gambling scene on film in which the wheel may be weighted or the deck may be stacked.

Gambling Ladies

Lady is warned that ‘Society is only a game, and a racket’, and her every move is tracked by newspaper headlines as reporters constantly swarm her. She finally manages to get her husband back, but not without a few well-played bluffs along with some trademark card plays: ‘When in doubt, lead with your ace.’ Lady’s success at cards can only be attributed to her self-confidence, skill and ability to dress the part and intimidate her opponents, and of course, luck (although this apparently runs out, which is why the syndicate sends in the loaded body guard). Her hands in the game of 21 are shown to be consistently perfect: two faces and ace-face. Lady’s role in the syndicate is primarily to look good and attract men to the table. She is thus part of the scene, and the storyline follows her ability to secure a place in this social scene, which is to say, her ability to gamble her way up the social ladder. Lady’s status as spectacle is not incidental to this achievement. From the moment she starts working for the syndicate, and throughout her society marriage, Lady is adorned with stylish gowns designed by Orry Kelly. Gambling Lady thus exemplifies the social mobility of the New Woman characteristic of pre-code Hollywood (Pravadelli, 2015: 27). Images of women were absolutely central to the modern visual style of this period, including erotic spectacles of dancers and showgirls, and showy silky dresses that highlighted a lady’s curves (in Gambling Lady, Stanwyck adds a strong wiggle to her step in a slinky floor-length gown). Against a critique of objectification, it is also true that many of these films were emblematic narratives of female emancipation. The exciting movement of modernity on display in Classical Hollywood films of the early 1930s found its most expressive form in New Women breaking out of the repressive norms of Victorian culture. Women gamblers in pre-war Hollywood managed to exploit the scene of luxurious spectacle – the phantasmagoria – to move up the social ladder, and this is true of characters such as Lady, as well as women such as Stanwyck. However, the price of glamour is of course privacy, so for movie stars, it is not a zero-sum game after all.

The Lady Eve: The long con Of all the gambling movies in Stanwyck’s filmography, The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941) stands out as the most cinematically accomplished,

451

452

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

and the most well-known. Stanwyck plays Jean Harrington, who, with her father, played by Charles Coburn, are con artists travelling on a cruise boat. Both Jean and her father are master card sharks and show off their tricks to the camera in the privacy of their cabin. Coburn says to his daughter early on: ‘Let us be crooked, but never common’, indicating their aristocratic pretentions as well as the terms of the farce, or as it has been labelled by film critics, ‘screwball comedy’. Jean lures ‘Hopsy’ (Henry Fonda), an extraordinarily naïve beer-empire millionaire, into a poker game with her father. But Jean falls in love with the mark and vice versa. During the second night of poker, Jean and her father play a wonderful game of cheating each other as he tries to beat Hopsy by sliding cards out of his pockets, and as the dealer, she keeps exchanging his hands for weaker ones. The sleight of hand is completely lost on Fonda, whose innocence and ignorance is as exaggerated as the Harrington’s conniving. When Jean steps away from the table, her father quickly drives up Hopsy’s debt to $32,000. When Hopsy is alerted to the con by the ship’s purser the next day, he confronts Jean, and she gives an earnest speech about ‘bad girls’ not always being so bad. Hopsy doesn’t buy it and reneges on his offer of marriage (Figure 23.3). The second half of The Lady Eve features one of the most remarkable performances in Classical Hollywood. Stanwyck comes back into Hopsy’s world as a completely different woman: Eve Sidwich, the supposed niece of one of Hopsy’s high-brow neighbours in Connecticut (who is actually

Figure 23.3  Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941).

Gambling Ladies

another con artist fleecing the neighbourhood at bridge). Hopsy does not recognize her, although his buddy Muggsy does. No cards are played in this half of the film, but when Eve has successfully married Hopsy, then told him a yarn about her many previous sexual relationships and then received a generous settlement offer from Hopsy’s father, her own father notes that she is holding a royal flush. She refuses to play it though, and holds out for love. She and her father resume their previous roles on a cruise ship where they intercept Hopsy again – who is happy to see her after his ordeal with Eve, and they rush to her cabin, presumably to consummate the marriage. Preston Sturges manages to pull off this charade in part through the casting of Stanwyck and in part through the film’s clever visual style and storytelling techniques. From the opening scenes, Stanwyck is directing the action from within the film, exactly like a dealer in a rigged card game. Voice-over narration is used only sparingly, but strategically, as when she scans the ship’s dining room in her compact mirror, and describes all the ladies lusting over the single bachelor – Fonda – who she then casually trips and captures. The trick with the foot is repeated in the final scene when she re-encounters Hopsy on the boat. The central conceit of Stanwyck’s doubled performance depends on the viewer’s belief in Fonda’s ignorance, which he also performs with aplomb, but we are easily persuaded by Stanwyck’s sheer bravado. As Robin Wood notes about The Lady Eve, the film draws on ‘certain more or less permanent aspects of [Stanwyck’s] persona: toughness, worldliness, lower-classness, a resilience by no means incompatible with vulnerability, possible unscrupulousness, even brutality’ (Wood, 2001: 17). This is not the only Hollywood film to feature a double performance, but it is significant in its use of the gambling theme. The woman is still the commodity, the prize to be won and the object to be exchanged between men. Jean’s part in her father’s con game is largely to seduce men to the table, not unlike the saloon girls in the Western genre. However, she also manages to upstage her own game by her control of the narrative, and by owning her body as Stanwyck the actress, because the spectator is not duped as Hopsy is. We marvel instead at the actor’s masquerade and her talents at deception, which in The Lady Eve are dedicated to the goal not only of marriage but of sex. The erotics of gambling are central to Walter Benjamin’s analysis in his study of nineteenth-century Paris. One Convolute of The Arcades Project

453

454

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

(or chapter, containing a collection of notes and quotations) combines Prostitution and Gambling as critical phenomena of the phantasmagoria. ‘In the gambling hall and bordello, it is the same supremely sinful delight: to challenge fate in pleasure’ (Benjamin, [1936] 1999: 489). For Benjamin of course the gambler is always male, as the women associated with the casino are always prostitutes, and in his analysis of modernity the prostitute is the apotheosis of empathy with the commodity. For the gambler, luck is tied to the look of the woman: ‘from the bodies of all the women, [luck] winks at him as the chimera of sexuality: as his type’ (489). Gambling itself interests Benjamin because of its temporalities. Benjamin’s gambler lives for the moment, and places his bet at the last moment, staking his luck in a last chance. He lives, says Benjamin, in intermittence, which is also ‘the measure of time in film’ (843). Thinking perhaps mainly of roulette, Benjamin’s gambler embodies the ‘lightningquick process of stimulation’ at the moment of danger, and thereby embraces the utopian potential of technological modernity. He also says that the experience of winning is like satisfying a woman, linking the game, and the sudden turn of fate to orgasm and erotic life. Finally and, in fact, must centrally, he says in the prologue to The Arcades Project (the 1935 Exposé) that gambling converts time into a narcotic (Benjamin, 1999: 12). The phantasmagorias of time in the arcades are like the timelessness of the heterotopic casino, saloon or cruise ship, where money has become abstract and the future has been indefinitely deferred. With these remarks in mind, we could say that film viewing is like gambling, when we give ourselves over to a fiction which has an energy that Beer describes as coming from ‘there being a number of different sets of rules which may all be in play at once’ (Beer, 1990: 112). In Classical Hollywood, one set of rules is the likelihood of somebody cheating or bluffing, or putting on some kind of performance that the audience may or may not be ‘in on’. For example, A Big Hand for the Little Lady seduces the viewer into the elaborate con job, whereas in The Lady Eve the viewer is in on the joke. Even so, we are in the hands of the director and cast who control the fate of the characters, and ours as viewers (the first time around in any case). Other rules of genre, ideology and star system expectations will also be in play, along with the surprising idiosyncrasies of writing. We gamble that a movie will be entertaining, and we also gamble on its artistic and cultural merits.

Gambling Ladies

The many levels of comedy and reflexivity within The Lady Eve are perhaps why critics have called it a ‘perfect film’ (Wood, 2001: 19). Sturges’s script uses the gambling motif as a commentary on film viewing, and might be described as a parody of the gold-digging theme that was so pervasive in pre-code Hollywood, including many of Stanwyck’s own films such as Ladies of Leisure (1930), Forbidden (1932), Baby Face (1933), The Lady Gambles (1934) and even Stella Dallas, which is about the challenges of social mobility, if not ‘gold digging’ per se. Stanwyck’s own biographical legend, widely reported in fan magazines of the time, situated her as having pulled herself out of poverty, not through marriage, but through hard work and talent. In The Lady Eve, she outsmarts, outplays and hoodwinks poor Henry Fonda, and owns her own social mobility, despite the two fathers who try to stand in her way. In turn, the risks associated with poker are enlisted precisely to tear apart the predictable narrative. In The Lady Eve, this generic story is not only one of marriage, but of social mobility. Certainly the sexual innuendo of snakes and the theme of virginity are prominent in the film. But is Eve’s charade not one also of class? Cavell notes that in the end Hopsy, in his ‘trance’, takes ‘the good without the bad, the lady without the woman, the ideal without the reality, the richer without the poorer. He will be punished for this’ (Cavell, 61). Jean Harrington, however, gets it all, and Stanwyck gets even more: she lands the millionaire without sacrificing that working-class toughness with which she is identified. The final infamous line of the film, spoken by Hopsy’s insightful buddy and valet Muggsy, is, ‘Definitely the same dame’. Thus, the woman’s role in the scene of poker – as the lure and the bait – is transformed here from sexual object to the game master extraordinaire. Stanwyck is dressed in The Lady Eve by Edith Head in their first collaboration of many. Her outfits, both as Jean and as Eve, are consistently striking, if somewhat excessive. Even when Jean is supposedly ‘dressed down’ on the boat, she wears a striped stocking hat. As Eve, she is likewise feathered, furred and sparkling. The Lady Eve is a wonderful example of how gambling in Classical Hollywood opens up a space for women characters to outsmart men and win over entranced lovers (and audiences) by owning the spectacle (through the performance of class) and identifying precisely with the ‘gold’ they end up winning. Thus, one has to wonder whether the comedy of remarriage is simply about the shifting sands of

455

456

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

the social institution of marriage, or if it is not also about the threat of women who desire to run the show and balance the scales of an inherently patriarchal institution. Cavell suspects that all the films in his ‘comedy of remarriage’ category are ultimately about the ‘real women’ who consistently rise above their fictional characters, including actresses Irene Dunne, Katherine Hepburn and Claudette Colbert, in addition to Stanwyck (64). Is this perhaps not only due to their star status, but also their off-screen notoriety as wealthy and independent-minded women, and their accumulated roles playing such women? The Lady Eve is an especially powerful example of this threat as Sturges bets on his leading lady to upset the social order along with the patriarchy.

The Lady Gambles: The lady loses In 1949, Stanwyck played a very different gambling lady in the ‘social problem’ film The Lady Gambles (dir. Michael Gordon). The cycle of films that became known as such were promoted as serious ‘prestige’ films tackling contemporary social issues. Well-known titles such as The Lost Weekend (1945, about alcoholism) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1955, about heroin addiction), and even On the Waterfront (1954, about labour unions) and Pinky (1949, about racism), are counted among the many social problem films that emerged in the post-war period. As Chris Cagle has pointed out, the rise of this cycle closely coincided with the rise of sociology as an academic discipline (Cagle, 2017: 46). While many such films adopted a functionalist-sociological approach (51), shifting the focus from the individual to the society at large, many also incorporated a psychoanalytic approach in which the ‘sick’ person is cured through a narrative analysis, and their pathology is ‘explained’ by family drama (Figure 23.4). The Lady Gambles starts out with a sociological framework, but concludes with a psychoanalytic explanation for Joan Boothe (Stanwyck’s) gambling addiction. The film is structured through flashbacks narrated and strung together by Joan’s husband Dave (Robert Preston) while she lies comatose in a police hospital ward. She has been beaten up in an alleyway over a crap game with loaded dice – the scene that opens the film. Dave tells his story of her descent to a doctor, starting with an

Gambling Ladies

Figure 23.4  Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Gambles (Michael Gordon, 1949).

introduction to the glittery city of Los Vegas. He had taken her there as he had journalistic work to do at the Hoover Dam, a monument of New Deal infrastructure, of which we see several grand stock shots. It is precisely this positivist, large-hearted scientism that sociology and psychoanalysis promised in post-war America, and which Hollywood adopted as a means of elevating the industry beyond mere entertainment. Shortly after arriving in Los Vegas, Joan meets a Casino boss named Corrigan, who gives her some house chips to use while she takes ‘candid’ photos of gamblers while her husband is off doing his research. Her amateur journalism is quickly abandoned when she starts to win, and Corrigan hires her as a shill until she starts working at poker games in addition to the house games such as roulette and dice. She dips into the family money in the casino safe, loses it, wins it back, and from there on seems to be addicted. Joan’s ups and downs include poker and dice, and also horse racing when Corrigan hires her to pose as a ractrack owner for his syndicate. However, she foolishly bets on their carefully planned long-shot horse, the bookies notice, the odds drop, and Corrigan finally kicks her out. In The Lady Gambles, Corrigan and his syndicate of thugs represent the evils of gambling, and they are much more malevolent than the syndicate in Stanwyck’s 1934 film in which the syndicate operated almost like a

457

458

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

corporate board, implicitly linking capitalism to corruption, which was a popular theme in the 1930s. Stanwyck is dressed in this film once again by Orry Kelly, and she becomes more elegantly attired as she becomes more immersed in the casino ‘scene’, Corrigan wants her to ‘dress up’ the games in his poker den, but her role in the film, and in the game, is less as a lure than as a troubled specimen of the dangers of gambling. The ‘doubling’ that takes place in The Lady Gambles is between Stanwyck’s housewife persona that really does not sit well with her, and the trance-like state she assumes when she becomes energized at the crap table. In several instances, her eyes light up as she is asked by a gentleman to ‘kiss ‘em baby’ before she winds up to throw the dice. Her passion with the dice far surpasses any passion with her husband or with Corrigan, who she spurns repeatedly. At one point during a brief hiatus, the Boothe couple retreat to a cottage in Mexico so he can write, but when he leaves for a research trip, she is left alone with her housework and her demons. She restlessly folds laundry until she cracks open the box with their life savings, suggesting that part of her problem is simply with being a housewife. Despite Corrigan’s declared attraction to Joan, theirs is less a love affair than another masochistic act on her part as he is clearly using her for his own ends. As an object of desire, she is strangely abject and unsexy. At the age of forty-three, Stanwyck was still getting regular parts, although she was also transitioning into middle-aged roles (into which she was frequently able to inject some passion and sexuality), but here her sexuality is only evident at the bottom of her fall, when she may be turning tricks in the small towns where she is finally found in a coma by her husband. When she is consorting with Corrigan and gambling behind her husband’s back, men comment on her poor manicure and hair, not because she looks especially bad, but because she uses hair and manicure appointments as alibis for her gambling. (Ironically, when she is finally down and out, her hair has become blonde.) Joan’s real problem, as determined by the doctor to whom Dave tells the whole sordid story, is with her sister Ruth, who from the outset comes between Joan and Dave. Ruth seems like an overbearing mother, constantly nagging and overseeing Joan, until it is finally revealed that Ruth has accused Joan of killing their mother who died during Joan’s birth. Thus, the pathology of Joan’s habit is explained as her self-loathing and selfpunishment, a masochistic addiction to losing. However, this explanation

Gambling Ladies

does not entirely explain the web of gazes that have her so caught up, starting with the surveillance in the casino that quickly caught her trying to take her own photos. The Lady Gambles is not only a social problem picture, it is also a woman’s film – of the variant categorized by Mary Ann Doane as the ‘medical discourse’ in which a male doctor paternalistically treats a woman’s psychic suffering through narrative explanation (Doane, 1987).5 The medical discourse in The Lady Gambles is overlaid with the investigative journalism of her husband, which is in turn conjoined with the documentary voice-over of the sociological film narrator, whose discourse lifts her individual problem onto the level of society at large. Montages of cityscapes accompany Dave’s tales of her travels through the small towns and gambling halls of America. Clearly, by this point we have come a long way from the utopian aspirations and triumphs of the gambling ladies of the 1930s into new ideas of both personal and societal responsibility.

Conclusion Of all the films under consideration here, The Lady Gambles echoes Benjamin’s remarks on gambling most closely, and is suggestive of the contradictory and conflicting effects of feminizing the gambling subject. After a long night of poker, the professional gambler Horace Corrigan offers a short treatise to Joan on the pleasures of gambling. Against her objection, in the presence of her sister, that gambling is ‘noisy, confusing, and just a little dirty’. Corrigan assures her that it is really about the scene and the room itself (dressed up with her presence): ‘the game, the fight, the fear, and the peace that comes with licking that fear, even when you lose’. She reluctantly agrees, after which he adds: ‘I’m right about a lot of things’, joining the ranks of the paternalistic voices in the film. Stanwyck’s

That the implicit potential of gambling for women has been completely stripped away is made apparent in Molly’s Game. Despite her dynamic rise to power, explicitly using her body to all of its advantages, Molly’s crushing defeat returns us to the psychoanalytic containment that is on display in The Lady Gambles. Her brilliant career as a high-stakes poker game runner is ultimately pathologized by her own father in a quick analysis in the film’s penultimate scene. He convinces her that she sought to have power over men due to his own bad behaviour as a father: she was unconsciously seeking vengeance and instead punishes herself. 5

459

460

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

performance at the crap table invokes the kind of intoxication that Benjamin embraces, and in the context of this rather abject film, a point of resistance. Benjamin links gambling to rites of passage and thresholds, of which he notes that there are few in modern life: ‘We have become very poor in threshold experiences’ (1999: 494). The ‘heroic’ component of gambling for Benjamin is in the reflexive, instinctual behaviour that defies reason and speculation (512, 514). The reliance on chance may make gambling a parodic critique of capitalism (Bjerg, 2011), but here it can be read as a critique of post-war rationalized society and its subjectification of women as pathological. In this sense, Stanwyck’s curious regaining of her sexuality at the bottom of the pit of her social addiction is also a sign of life in an otherwise dead world. The fire in her eyes at the roll of the dice signals a spark of resistance and a regaining of her gaze after the instigating loss of her camera. She is at a threshold that decades later we can perhaps help her cross. Stanwyck’s gambling films may not be representative of all the lady gamblers in Classical Hollywood, but they are certainly indicative of the ways that gambling intersects with the genres, cycles and styles of films of the 1930s and 1940s. Once the woman crosses over from being solely aligned with the spectacle that lures the gambler to the table and becomes a gambler herself, the terms are going to be slightly inverted. She not only becomes a player, but she owns the scene as well. Classical Hollywood is deeply invested in the image of woman, but in the 1930s female characters had extraordinary latitude in what they could accomplish, especially in the pre-code period when their sexuality could be flaunted. At the end of that era, and at the cusp of the more ‘contained’ and controlled films of the 1940s, The Lady Eve uses gambling as a particularly subversive social critique, precisely through the playful use of performance. By the late 1940s, only a subversive reading can salvage the sociological discourse that blames women for all the sins of the world.

References Baker, D. and Zuvela, D. 2014. ‘Mann and woman: The function of the feminine in the “Noir Westerns” of Anthony Mann’. Transformations, 24. http:​/​/www​​.tran​​sform​​ation​​sjour​​nal​.o​​rg​/i​s​​sue​-2​​4/

Gambling Ladies

Beer, G. 1990. ‘The Reader’s Wager: Lots, sorts, and futures’. Essays in Criticism, 40(2): 99–123. Benjamin, W. 1999[1930]. ‘Notes on a theory of gambling’. In M. J. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds), Selected Writings Vol. 2: 1927–1934, trans. Jonathan Linvingstone and others, 297–8. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. 1999[1936]. ‘The arcades project’, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bjerg, O. 2011. Poker: The Parody of Capitalism. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Cagle, C. 2017. Sociology on Film: Postwar Hollywood’s Prestige Commodity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Cavell, S. 1981. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Doane, M. A. 1987. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Duncan, A. M. 2015. Gambling with the Myth of the American Dream. New York: Routledge. Enss, C. 2008. The Lady was a Gambler: True Stories of Notorious Women of the Old West. Helena: Twodot/Globe Pequot Press. Hansen, M. B. 2012. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodore W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pravadelli, V. 2015. Classic Hollywood: Lifestyles and Film Styles of American Cinema: 1930–1960, trans. M. T. Meadows. Urbana: Illinois University Press. Wolkomir, M. 2012. ‘“You fold like a little girl:” (Hetero)gender framing and competitive strategies of men and women in no limit Texas Hold Em Poker games’. Qualitative Sociology, 35: 407–26. Wood, R. 2001. ‘Screwball comedy: Screwball and the masquerade: “The Lady Eve” and “Two- Faced Woman”’. Cineaction!, 12–19.

461

462

Part VII Insiders 24 The poker economy: The skill gap problem and the lifecycle of PvP games

464

24 The poker economy The skill gap problem and the lifecycle of PvP games Jeffrey Hwang

The Law of Demand: All else being equal, as price increases (decreases), the quantity demanded decreases (increases). Player-versus-player (PvP) gambling games – such as poker, daily fantasy sports (DFS) – cannot be expected to grow unto perpetuity. Rather, such games operate in the context of a game-specific economy; moreover, the state of that economy is subject to the limits of economics. This concept is important for every stakeholder to understand, whether you are a player, an operator or an investor – that is, it may or may not be a good idea to quit your job to play a hot new game professionally, while operators and investors should be prepared for the likelihood that revenues driven by that hot new game are likely to hit a wall, and likely sooner than later. Back in 2012, I introduced the skill gap problem and discussed its impact on poker’s weakening economy (Hwang, 2012). While many onlookers would be quick to attribute the bursting of the poker boom/ bubble first to the impact of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA of 2006, which made it illegal for banks and credit card companies from US customers to online gambling sites, and chased all but a handful of online gambling sites from the US market) (Hwang, 2006) and later Black Friday in April 2011 – when the US Department of Justice

466

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

issued an indictment against PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker, thus chasing the largest remaining online poker operators from the United States – the reality is that the poker boom was always going to hit a wall regardless. The skill gap problem goes something like this: 1. In order for a professional (or winning) player to continue playing in significant volume, the player must have an edge over the opposition that is greater than the size of the rake. 2. Over time, the skill level of the regular players rises, as do the number of players with professional-level skills. 3. As fish get wiped out and exit the game, games become tougher; the threshold for a professional player rises, and the marginal pros also exit the game as they can no longer beat the rake. 4. As the games get tougher, more fish get wiped out, thus further raising the threshold for a professional player. 5. As players get wiped out, rake (revenue) drops and liquidity suffers, and – as we will observe in a minute – poker rooms close. In effect, what happens is that when the existing player pool gets tougher, the house advantage – the price of gambling, all else being equal – against new (or casual) players increases, and new and weaker players get wiped out faster and faster. And when players get wiped out faster than new players are added to the player pool, the player pool shrinks. Fish: A player who can be expected to lose over the long run. Liquidity: The market for a given game as a function of the player pool. Rake: A commission fee a poker room takes for operating a game; the professional player must have an expected edge bigger than the size of this commission in order to play at an expected profit.

As I later noted in 2014 (Hwang, 2014), PartyGaming – a network on online gambling sites – observed the new player retention rate fall and thus the attrition rate of new players rise from the very beginning of the poker boom all the way to the end of its existence. By 2010, the six-month attrition rate had climbed steadily to 79 per cent from 67 per cent in 2005

The Poker Economy

(Table 24.1); the twelve-month attrition rate reached 84 per cent, meaning that 84 per cent of new players were wiped out from the site within a year. Note that the 2006 figures are non-United States due to the impact of UIGEA of 2006, which forced PartyGaming from the US market in 2006. In the brick-and-mortar space, the state of Nevada tells this story. Perhaps by way of coincidence, the poker economy in Nevada hit rock bottom in 2002 – just before the start of the poker boom. As of 13 December 2002, there were only 57 poker rooms and 386 poker tables in the state of Nevada, generating only $57.8 million in revenue that year. Poker hit peak revenue in 2007, generating $167.9 million in revenue, with 907 tables in 113 poker rooms operating in the state as of 13 December 2007. However, it has been all downhill from there, with many poker rooms closing since then. By 13 December 2018, there were only 599 poker tables in operation in 62 rooms in the state, generating only $120.0 million in revenue in 2018 (Table 24.2). That the game has gotten tougher over time is common knowledge; that game conditions have worsened over time is probably the best explanation for weakening market for poker. The skill gap problem is not unique to poker, and is more likely a general condition of PvP skill gambling games, from poker to DFS to Golden Tee competitions – games get tougher over time, and the markets for these games can be expected to hit a wall as games become solved. The advantage that poker has had is that Hold’em (by far the most popular poker game) in particular is both easy to pick up yet strategically complex. As noted poker commentator and player Mike Sexton put it: ‘It takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master.’ Games which are harder to pick Table 24.1  PartyGaming: New Player Attrition Rates (2005–10) Year

Six-Month Attrition Rate (%)

Twelve-Month Attrition Rate (%)

Note

2005

67

71

2006

73

76

All non-United States

2007

73

79

Real money

2008

76

81

Real money

2009

77

83

Real money

2010

79

84

Real money

Source: PartyGaming Annual Reports 2005–10.

467

468

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

Table 24.2  Nevada Statewide Poker (1992–2018) Year

Rooms

Tables*

1992

92

564

Revenue $74.7 million

1993

89

571

$70.8 million

1994

93

586

$71.7 million

1995

92

574

$66.5 million

1996

82

539

$64.5 million

1997

77

490

$61.5 million

1998

76

526

$58.9 million

1999

70

546

$63.2 million

2000

68

473

$63.1 million

2001

65

475

$59.7 million

2002

57

386

$57.8 million

2003

58

383

$68.3 million

2004

79

484

$98.9 million

2005

96

701

$140.2 million

2006

106

886

$160.9 million

2007

113

907

$167.9 million

2008

113

913

$155.7 million

2009

114

905

$145.6 million

2010

109

920

$135.2 million

2011

104

872

$131.9 million

2012

99

809

$123.3 million

2013

88

774

$123.9 million

2014

79

736

$119.9 million

2015

76

681

$118.0 million

2016

73

661

$117.8 million

2017

71

615

$118.5 million

2018

62

599

$120.0 million

Source: UNLV Center for Gaming Research. *Tables as of 13 December of the year in question

up (harder to create a market for) or less nuanced (easier to master) will tend to have shorter life spans, particularly as games are solved faster than ever before, as we have a larger knowledge base and more computing power to solve games than ever before. In 2015, I applied these same principles regarding the skill gap problem and attrition rates in discussing

The Poker Economy

DFS, and suggested that DFS would suffer from all the same problems of poker, and that ‘the DFS industry is likely to run into a buzzsaw, and far faster and harder than online poker did (Hwang, 2015a)’. The only real question for the poker economy is whether this trend is reversible. Put differently, do games only continue to get tougher over time until the market for such games evaporates? Or is there a cycle, where perhaps games become softer (easier) for some period, allowing a game to grow again? In other words, are we looking at potentially an economic cycle, or merely a lifespan? If we are to answer this, there are a couple of other considerations worth noting. One is that poker is not merely an all-encompassing ‘poker’ economy, but a collection of economies. Poker games evolve over time – the poker boom of the 2000s was not so much a poker boom as it was a No-Limit Texas Hold’em (NLHE) and tournament poker boom. Since the peak of the Hold’em boom, poker evolved to increasingly create markets for different forms of poker; the fastest-growing form of poker has been pot-limit Omaha (PLO), which – only played for high stakes in the riverboat states of the Midwest and South during the mid2000s – has spread such that PLO is now played in the top poker rooms in virtually every state where poker is played. Mixed games featuring multiple forms of poker have also become popular, while new evolutions of even Hold’em (e.g. short-deck Hold’em removing the small cards – the 2s through the 5s – from the deck) gaining some popularity. As such, we can see that where the market for one form of poker may dry up, another one may emerge. There are also other economic considerations. For example, we expect gambling revenues to rise with income levels. This has not been the case in the past decade, however, because the house advantage in the casino has been on the rise for over two decades (Hwang, 2015b) – the rise in the house advantage has impacted slot wagering volumes since the end of the Great Recession in 2008, in turn impacting slot revenues. Similarly, the increasing skill gap problem in poker has likely stunted poker revenues despite the rise in income levels. On the other hand, untapped markets across the globe may still offer some opportunity for growth, but these aforementioned points show us the many intersecting factors of ‘the poker economy’ which must be taken into account to understand a competitive game of this sort.

469

470

The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader

References Hwang, J. 2006. ‘Did congress kill online poker?’ Fool​.co​m. https​:/​/ww​​w​.foo​​l​ .com​​/inve​​sting​​/smal​​l​-cap​​/2006​​/10​/0​​3​/did​​-cong​​ress-​​kill-​​​onlin​​e​-pok​​er​.as​​px Hwang, J. 2012. ‘Sorry Mr. online poker: Nobody cares about you’. Fool.com. https​:/​/ww​​w​.foo​​l​.com​​/inve​​sting​​/gene​​ral​/2​​012​/1​​0​/22/​​sorry​​-mr​-o​​nline​​ -poke​​r​-nob​​ody​-​c​​ares-​​about​​-you.​​aspx Hwang, J. 2014. G2E ‘2014: Online poker’s fundamental problems’. Fool​.com. https​:/​/ww​​w​.foo​​l​.com​​/inve​​sting​​/gene​​ral​/2​​014​/1​​0​/07/​​g2e​-2​​014​-o​​nline​​ -poke​​rs​-fu​​nda​me​​ntal-​​probl​​ems​.a​​spx Hwang, J. 2015a. ‘DFS and lessons from poker: How bright is the future? And for whom?’ Legalsportsreport​.com​. https​:/​/ww​​w​.leg​​alspo​​rtsre​​port.​​ com​/1​​918​/d​​fs​-fu​​ture-​​and​-​l​​esson​​s​-fro​​m- poker/ Hwang, J. 2015b. ‘The millennial problem: Why we (don’t) gamble’. Fool​.com​. https​:/​/ww​​w​.foo​​l​.com​​/inve​​sting​​/gene​​ral​/2​​015​/0​​9​/19/​​the​-m​​illen​​nial-​​probl​​ em​-wh​​y​​-we-​​dont-​​gambl​​e​.asp​x

Index

Abarbanel, B. L.  435 Absolute Poker scandal  433–4 Ace Denken  307 addictive gambling  315–16, 320–7 Adorno, Theodor  401 Age of Chance, The (Reith)  137 agon (skill)  183 agonistic games  32 alcoholism  323 alea (chance)  183 aleatoric processes  374, 389, 392 Alexander I, Tzar  179 Allais, Alphonse  108 Allen, William  360 All in the Family (1971–79)  89 Altman, Robert  65–6 Alvarez, Al  63–4, 100–1, 106, 112 Amano, Keiji  9 American Buffalo (Mamet)  426 American casinos/gambling  330–47 archipelago  332–6 availability of  335–6 commercial  333 cultural landscape observation and  332 expansion of  331 geographic patterns  333 GIS techniques and  332 Illinois regional casinos  336–40 landscape  345–7 Las Vegas  241, 331, 345–7 licences  333 local infiltration of  340–5

in Nevada  10, 50–1, 242, 331–3, 335–6, 461, 467 normalization  332 population access to  335 revenues  333, 343, 467–8 American Dream  83–4, 101–5 American Gaming Association  333 Ameristar in St Charles, Missouri  338 Amusement Caters Association  156 ancien régime cabinetmaking  384 Andrews, Julie  70 Ankenmann, Jerrod  109 Annie Oakley (1935)  443 anti-gambling legislation  143 Appartements pour les Jeux  383 Arcades Project, The  150, 453–4 Aretino, Pietro  132 aristocratic play ethics  375 Arizona tribes  290 Arndsen, Sven  72 Arnold, Laurie  9 Arnol’di, A. I.  187–8 Atlantic City  333, 336 Austen, Jane  133 Auster, Paul  99, 132 Austrin, T.  435–6 Avedon, Elliott M.  106 Azuma, Hiroki  299 Baby Face (1933)  443, 455 Baccarat  8–9, 134–5, 212, 218, 249–51 gambling machine  253 live  254–5

472

Index no commission  251–3 Bal, Mieke  110 Baldwin, Bobby  68, 71 Ballet Russe (Diaghilev)  215 Balmeford, James  316, 319 Banchi  355–6 Bank, James  11 Bank/Faro game  184–5, 187 banking games  126–9 Baracca-Banque  127 Barbary Coast (1935)  446 bare-knuckle fighting  143 Basset  127 Bean, Lowell  283 ‘Be A Pal’  79–80, 85–9 bear baiting  143 Beck, Ulrich  22, 105–6 Beer, Gillian  450 Behnen, Becky Binion  74 Beim, Aaron  264 Bellhouse, D.  43 Benazet, Jaques  224 Benjamin, Walter  150, 443–4, 453–4 Bergler, Edmund  411 Bernhard, B. J.  435 Bernhardt, Sarah  206 Bernoulli, Daniel  378–80, 386 Bethell, Victor  213 Betting and Gaming Act (1960)  431 Betting Houses Act (1853)  143 Bibliothèque curieuse et instructive (Ménétrier)  125 Big Blind, The (Wener)  99, 101–5, 114 Big Deal (Holden)  101 Biggest Game in Town (Alvarez)  63–4 Big Hand for the Little Lady, A (1966)  446, 454 Billy the Kid Casino  336 bilota (trick-taking game similar to hearts)  161 bingo  282–3, 290, 333–4, 412, 431 Binion, Benny  60–6, 68–70

biribi  200 Bjerg, Ole  29–30, 84, 100, 135–6 blackjack, card game  52 Blake, Blind  404 Blanc, Camille  208 Blanc, François  199–200, 206–8, 225–6 Blanc, Marie  208 Blancin, P.  207 Blankenfeld, Arnold  233 Bluff: A Novel (Kardos)  99, 101, 105, 109–10, 114 bluffing  443 Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City (Johnson)  428 Bogart, Humphrey  70 Bollinger, Henri  61, 70–3 Book on the Games of Chance (Cardano)  318, 320 Borges, Rodrigo  124 Borgoglio, Jorge Mario  351 Bowser, Yvette Lee  92 Braddock, Franny  324 Bramley, S.  399 Brecht, Bertolt  98 Breitenberg, Mark  323, 325 Bright, Timothie  322 Broke: A Poker Novel (Adams)  99 ‘broker’ (sensale)  354 n.5 Brooks, Peter  106 Brunson, Doyle  68, 103 Bubble Cards  131–2 Bulgarin, F. V. (1789–1859)  191–2 bureaucracy  165, 169, 171 Burnham, John  406 Burning Daylight (London)  98 Burns, John  145 Burton, Robert  322, 325 Cabazon tribe  283 Caesars Entertainment  60

Index Cahuilla Indian culture  283 Caillois, Roger  1, 5, 22, 24–5, 28–33, 35, 183 California (1947)  444, 447–9 California Split (Altman)  65 California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians (1987)  282–3 calmness  215–17 Ca’ Noghera  261, 271–3 capitalism  11, 28–30, 100 and gambling play  11, 28–30 poker as soft training for  83–5 Capote, Ruby  101–2 Card and Backgammon Players (Rombots)  426 Cardano, Girolamo  42–4, 47, 318, 320 Card Cheats (van Honthorst)  426 card games  7, 12, 41, 48, 121–37, 432; see also card sharps/sharks accounting and  125–30 culture and  130–2 in England  125–6 in France  125 in Germany  125 history  122–5 Italian decks of playing cards  127 n.5 and money  127 in Northern Europe  125 other cultural connections  132–7 in Russian gambling  179–81 in Stuart England  317–20, 324–5 Cardsharps, The  425–6 card sharps/sharks  423–38 cultural depictions of  11 gambling, rehabilitation of  430–2 overview  423–5 representations of  425–30 safe spaces and  432–7 synonyms  424 techniques  435

women sharpers  435 Carnival of Venice  262 Carousel (Rodgers and Hammerstein)  426 Casanova, Giacomo  380 Casino Capitalism (Strange)  130 casino cities  8–9, 49; see also specific cities Las Vegas  241, 345–7 Macau  8–9, 241–57 Monaco  8, 21, 202, 207–8, 211–12, 215, 221, 223–36 Monte Carlo  200–18, 221–36 Casinò di Venezia  267 Casino Royale (Fleming)  134 casinos  30–1, 31 n.5, 49–52 American  330–47 archipelago  332–6 capitalism  20 as economic tool  20–1 European  49 of hope and despair  140–2 Illinois  336–40 legalization of  50–1 Native American  287–91, 333 online  223 ‘playworld’ space  30–1 ‘pop-up’ casinos  166–7 as social magnets  287 spa  202–3 tourism  8, 260–76 Catfish Bend Casino in Burlington, Iowa  337–8 Ca’ Vendramin Calergi  260–76 vs. Ca’ Noghera  271–3 classic games as tradition  269–71 collective memory  264–5 future research  275–6 heritage  263–4 historic features of  260–3 limitations  275–6 research methods on  265–7

473

474

Index Venice’s tradition of gambling and  260–3 as witness of Venice’s history  267– 9 Cebula, Larry  285 Century of Play  379, 386 Chamberland, Celeste  10 Chania  160–1, 164 Charles Garnier Theatre at Monte Carlo  206–7 Chazkel, Amy  170–1 Cheat with the Ace of Clubs, The (de La Tour)  426 checkers  40–1 Chen, Bill  109 chess  41–4 Chicago  331 China gambling in  41 mercantile gambling in  45–6 Cincinnati  336 Cincinnati Kid, The (Jessup)  98 civic lotteries  353 class geographical-cultural contexts in  7 and money  6–8 cockfighting  41, 143 Codussi, Mario  261 cognitive models of risk  182 collective memory  264–5 Columbia Plateau tribes  284, 287–8, 290 Compleat Gamester, The (Cotton)  49, 316, 326 Complete Guide to Gambling (Scarne)  100 conclave gambling  351–70 Connoisseur, The  321 contemporary casinos  9 contextualist models of risk  182–3

‘Continuous and Discontinuous Person: Two Dimensions of Ethical Life, The’ (Lambek)  167 continuous self  167–70 convenience gaming  335 Coren, Victoria  99 Corral Fishery  131 Cosgrave, Jim  5 Costikyan, Greg  381 Cotai  243 Cotte, June  223, 270 Cotton, Charles  49, 316, 321, 325 Court Gamester (Seymour)  316 Cowboys Full (McManus)  100, 102 Craig, Michael  62 Crane, Stephen  98 Crawford, Henry  133 Crawford, Joan  445 CrazyMarcos  433 criminal gangs  7 Cromwell, Oliver  317 Culin, Stewart  283–5 cultural tourism  260–76 culture card games and  130–2 Fordist  156 gambling  24–7, 83–4 poker in literary  98–101 da Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi  425 Daikoku Denki  307 Dandalos, Nick  62–3 d’Ange, La Comtesse  210, 213 Daniel, Calleón San  124 Dansa, Marco Aurelio  357 Darian-Smith, Eve  284, 287 Darnell, Linda  445 Daston, Lorraine  318 Dead Man’s Hand (Penzler)  98–9 DeCerteau, Michel  166

Index de Gébelin, Court  123–4 de La Tour, Georges  426 DeLillo, Don  99, 101, 105, 110–11, 114 della Torre, Prospero  357 Deloria, Vine  284 Delumeau, Jean  352–3 Democracy in America (de Tocqueville)  99–100 Denshi, Kita  307–8 De Propria Vita Liber (‘The Book of My Life’)  42 Der tuivel  389 Destination Marketing/Management Organization (DMO)  265–6 Destry Rides Again (1939)  445–6 de Vombey, Baron A.  215–16 Dhekaleptos (‘Ten Minutes’)  160 Diaghilev, Sergei  215 Diamond Jo Casino in Dubuque, Iowa  338 Dibben, N.  399 dice gamblers  161 dice play/games  40–4, 46, 54, 71, 128, 143, 161, 164, 315, 317–20, 353 Dietrich, Marlene  445 digital games  2, 12 digital networked technologies  166– 7, 172 discontinuous self  167–70 disinterestedness  375 Divisadero (Ondaatje)  6, 99 dog fighting  143 Don DeLillo’s Falling Man: A Novel  6 Dostoevsky (1821–81)  178 Douglas, Mary  182 Downame, John  323 Downtown Abbey  428 Dreiser, Theodore  221–2, 230 gambling and  222–3 Monte Carlo and  222–3

Drew, Robert  67 Drummond, João Batista Viana  170 duelling  181–2, 186 Duncan, Aaron  83, 442–3, 445 Durkheim, Emile  24–5 Dutrou, Jules-Laurante  231–2 earliest games  40–4 Eco, Umberto  108–9, 114 Education of a Poker Player, The (Yardley)  100 Einhorn, David  107 El Cortez, Las Vegas  262 electronic bot  427 n.1 Elliott, Anthony  105 Elyot, Thomas  319 Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance (Kavanagh)  183 ESPN  6, 59–60, 73–7 esports  2 Etches, Marc W  272 Europe  6–7, 41, 49, 125 cards game  46, 122–30 feudal traditions  184 gaming laws during nineteenth century  200–2 lottery games  45–6 mercantile gambling in  48–50 poker and  101 public gaming, monopoly on  200, 204 spa resorts  203 Eynaud, Adolphe  224 Falling Man (DeLillo)  99, 101, 105, 110–11, 113 fantan  248–9 Faro [Pharaon]  127 Feminine Mystique, The  86 Fight over Cards  426 Fine, Gary Alan  264

475

476

Index Five Card Studs (Faye)  99 Flat Poker  135 Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, The (Ozu)  301 Fleming, Ian  134 Florido, Marco  364 Flowers, Victor  109 Flying Squad  153 Fordism  156 Fordist culture  156 Foundry Town (Urayama)  303–4 ‘Four Men and a Poker Game’ (Brecht)  98 Fowler, Hal  71 Foxwoods Resort-Casino caters  336 France  202–3, 205 Franke, Paul  8 Friedan, Betty  86 Friends  93 Frith, Simon  402 fruit machine  154–7 Frye, Northrop  104 Galaxy casinos, Macau  242–4 gamblers  12, 25, 40; see also online gamblers gambling  5–8, 12, 21–7, 39–40, 241–57; see also working-class gambling on activities  9 addiction  10, 315–16, 320–7 aleatory forms of  32 in American culture  83–4 in America’s neighbourhoods  330–47 atmosphere  8 and capitalism  11, 28–30 in China  41 and cities  8–9 commercialization of  143–5, 333 contemporary  23, 30–5 context(s)  20–1

control  7 cultural context of  7, 9–11 cultural tourism and  260–76 debts  184 deception/fraud  423–37 (see also card sharps/sharks) Dreiser’s relationship to  222–3 during eighteenth century  378–85 for economic purposes  20–1 ecosystems  12 emergence of  5 entertainments  241 environment  20 erotics of  453–4 in Europe  6–7, 41, 49, 125 (see also Europe) ‘Europeanization’ of  385–7 vs. everyday life  24 for financialization  20–1 on fruit machine  156–7 functionalist-sociological formulations of  32 as games of chance/culture  24–7 gangs  153 Goffman’s work on  22–3 in Greece  7, 160–75 high-stakes  7, 187–91 images  398–9 in India  41 Indigenous peoples and  9, 281–91 innovation  9 Italian  10, 352–70 ladies  442–60 legalization of  20, 22–3, 50–1 of Manifest Destiny  11 and market activities  20–1 mercantile, rise of  45–50 monetization of  374 Monte Carlo’s role in  8, 200–18, 221–36 in music  11, 398–418 Native American  281–91

Index and new mathematical models  318 online  21 overview  22–3 pachinko, Japan  9–10, 294–312 plague to godliness  387–90 poker  5–6, 23, 30, 32, 50 politics  10 practical  22–3 real-life  178 rehabilitation of  11 representations of  80–1 responsible  34 role in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Britain  7 Russian  7, 177–94 sacralization  24–5, 28–31, 33–4 and self  7 in seventeenth-century England  10 social  45, 54 social functions of  30–5 songs, narratives/themes of  403–7 status of  5 in Stuart England  314–27 studies  3–4 superstitions and  406–7 technology  9 in United States  10, 330–47 Venice as space for  9, 46, 48–50, 259–76 women gamblers  11, 442–60 gambling chips  31 Gambling Lady (1934)  11, 444, 449–51, 449 n.4 Game of Life, The  85 gameplay  3 games  1–5, 165–6 Bank/Faro  184–5, 187 bilota (trick-taking game similar to hearts)  161 blackjack  52

of calculation  184–5 card  7, 12, 41, 48, 121–37 of chance/culture  2, 12, 24–7, 184–5 of chance vs. skill  40–4, 54 chess  41–4 cockfighting  41 dice  40–4, 46, 54, 71, 128, 143, 161, 164, 315, 317–20, 353 digital  2, 12 earliest  40–4 in early modern London  314–27 fantan  248–9 as form of social encounter  26–7 gambling  3, 6–8, 22–7 (see also gambling; play, gambling) legalization  20, 22–3 money and  2–5, 29–30 nard  42 Nudges  146 pachinko, Japan  9–10, 294–312 Pitch the Scrapper  146 pokher (five-card draw)  161 roulette  8, 200–18 ruff  49 Shaking the Hat  146 skills of  5, 40–55 stick game  284–6 studies  1–5 technology  2 in terms of storytelling  6 types of  43 wagering  2 whist (early form of bridge)  184 zaria  164–5 gamester  316 Gaming Directory Online  333 gaming tables  385 gang wars  153 gender identity  174 Genoa, elections in  353–4 Genoese lotteries  375 gentry ideology  181–2

477

478

Index geographic information systems (GIS)  332 Giddens, Anthony  22 Girls’ Poker Night: A Novel of High Stakes (Davis)  99, 101, 104–5 giuoco del lotto  374 giuoco del seminario  374 Glieber, Frank  69 ‘God mode’ programme  434 Goffman, Erving  22–4, 26–7, 29, 33–5, 185–6 Goggin, Joyce  6–7 Golden Dragon (黃龍)  247 ‘Golden Epistles’ of Guevara  124 Golden Game, The [Güldin Spil] (Ingold)  125 Goldoni, Carlo  263 gold scudi  352 n.3 Goldstein, J. L.  425–6 Good Morning America  66 Goss, E. P.  430 Gowdy, Curt  71 Gragg, Larry  406 Granovsky, T. N.  178 Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, The (Suits)  111–12 Grech, Nikolai Ivanovich  179–81 Greece  7 gambling in  160–75 masculinity conceptions in  174 New Year’s Eve gambling in  164 ‘pop-up’ casinos in  166–7 zaria, dice game  164–5 Grimaldis  225 Guardi, Francesco  263 Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels  427–8 habitual gambling  320–1 Hall Computer  303, 307–9 Hall of Fame  69–70

Hamill, Chad  286 Hanging at Cinder Bottom, A (Taylor)  99 Hansen, Miriam  444 Harrah’s Casino in Joliet  339 Harte, Bret  98 Hayafune, Chiyo  304 Hayles, N. Katherine  166 Helfant, Ian  7–8 He Played for his Wife and Other Stories (Holden and Galustain)  99 heritage  263–5 Ca’ Vendramin Calergi  263–4, 268–9 cultural  263–5 intangible  264, 268–9 tangible  264, 268–9 Herman, Robert  22–3 Hibbard, H.  425 High Rollers (2005)  403 high-stakes gambling  7 history cards  122–5 hivernants  201, 206–13 Hobsbawm, Eric  144 hoca  200 Hollywood Casino in Aurora, Illinois  338 Hombre  132 Homo Ludens (Huizinga)  112 honour  324–5 Hopkins, Miriam  446 horse racing  143 Horseshoe Casino  61–3, 66–8, 70, 74–6 Horseshoe in Hammond, Indiana  337 Hôtel de Paris  231–2 How to Keep the Honeymoon from Ending (Humphreys)  80, 86 Huizinga, Johan  1, 5, 21, 24–5, 28, 112, 183 Hunt, John  10 Hwang, Jeffrey  12

Index Ikiru (Kurosawa)  301 Illinois regional casinos  336–40 I Love Lucy (1951–9)  6, 79, 85–9 Indian gaming; see Native American gambling Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA)  282 indigenous American gambling  9, 281–91 Indigenous peoples  9, 281–91 Indigenous sovereignty  9 inferential walks  108–9 instrumental nonchalance  174 International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM)  264 International Council of Museums (ICOM)  265 Isle Casino Hotel in Bettendorf, Iowa  338–9 Istoria della Citta di Viterbo (1379)  124, 124 n.2 Italy, gambling play of  10, 352–70 civic lotteries in  353 decks of playing cards  127 n.5 false news and  363–6 Genoa, elections in  353–4 market manipulations and  363–6 palii  353 papal election  352–70 players, social profile of  359–63 Renaissance  353–70 Rome vs. Venice vs. Genoa  369– 70 rules of game  353–9 scommesse, end of  366–9 Venice, elections in  353–4 I’ve Got a Secret  66 Jack Casino  336 Jacobi, Homburg Louis  231

Janda, Matthew  109 Japan gambling in  296–7 otaku (fan) culture  299 pachinko  9–10, 294–312 Jessup, Richard  98 jeux de contrepartie  379 jogo do bicho  170 Johnny Guitar (1954)  445, 446 Johnson, Nelson  428 Jones, S. E.  300 Jonson, Ben  318 Journey to the West (西遊記)  247 Juego del tresillo  379 n.2 Jumer’s Hotel and Casino, Rock Island, Illinois  339 Kahnawake Gaming Commission  433–4 Kalispel tribe  290 Kam Pek casino  254 Karamzin, N. M.  181–2 Kardos, Michael  99, 101, 105, 109–10 Karekallas, Matias  11 Kavanagh, Thomas  183–4 Kermode, Frank  106 Kervin, M.  436 Keynesian Welfare State  156 Killer Poker (Johnson)  99 King, Matt  54 Klugman, Jack  66 Knave of Clubs, The (Rowlands)  132 Koster, Raph  106 Kovacs, Ernie  70 ‘kugi-shi’/‘nail doctor’  304 Kupfer, Alex  5–6 Kurbezirk, German casino district  225 La Bottega del Caffè (The Coffee House)  263 labourism  156

479

480

Index labour politics  154–7 La Capra, Dominick  63 ladies gambling  11, 442–60 in California (1947)  444, 447–9 in Gambling Lady (1934)  11, 444, 449–51 in Lady Eve, The (1941)  444, 451–6 in Lady Gambles, The (1947)  11, 442, 444, 456–9, 459 n.5 western women  445–7 Ladies of Leisure (1930)  455 Lady Eve, The (1941)  444, 451–6 Lady Gambles, The (1947)  11, 442, 444, 455–9, 459 n.5 Lambek, Michael  167–71 Landlord’s Game, The  85 Lansquenet [Landesknecht]  127 Larsen, J.  270 Las Vegas  241, 331, 345–7, 411, 413–14 Las Vegas Strip  347 Late Night Poker (Channel 4), in United Kingdom  99 LaTour, K. A.  270 Latour, Kathryn A.  223 Laurent, Caroline  287 Law, John  128, 131 Laws of Chance (Chazkel)  170 League of Legends  429 Lears, Jackson  101 Le carte parlanti (Aretino)  132 Lederer, Howard  98 Lederer, Katy  103 legal gambling  20, 22–3, 50–1 Legay, Marie-Laure  375, 376, 381 Leonardi, Giovanni  357 Lermontov, M. I.  187–8 Lessing, Doris  388 Levine, H. G.  323 Liber de Ludo Aleae (‘The Book on Games of Chance’) (Cardano)  43

Libro de los Juegos (‘Book of Games’) (Alfonso X)  42 Life of a Gambler Described by Himself, or Tricks of the Game Revealed  192–4 Lipsitz, G.  82 LiPuma, Ed  133, 135–6 ‘Little Chicago,’ pitch and toss in  150–4 Liu, Alan  300 live baccarat  9, 254–5 Live multi game  255 Living Single (1993–8)  6, 85, 92–6 Living Single’s ‘Five Card Stud’ (S1E23)  85, 92–6 local numbers games  164 London, Jack  98 loot boxes  223 Los Angeles  331 Loterie Royale  375 lotteries  20, 45–6, 48, 374 Lotto di Genova  378 Louisiana  333–4 Lucas, Theophilius  316–17 Lukacs, John  100 Luxen, Jean-Louis  264 Macau  8–9, 241–57 baccarat in  250–5 casinos  9, 242–57 Galaxy casinos in  242–4 Las Vegas model  242–6 slot machines, failure of  246–50 Wynn resorts  242–3 McCambridge, Mercedes  445 McDonald, Michael  324 McDonald, Ramsey  145 McMullan, J. L.  436 McTell, Willie  404 Madison, Oscar  100 Mad Men (2007–15)  85 Magie, Elizabeth  85

Index Mahmet, David  426 Malaby, Thomas  7, 387 male homosocial poker  6 Mamet, David  102 Manifest Detection of Diceplay, A (Walker)  316 Mansfield Park (Austen)  133 Marcus, Neiman  66 Mark Twain Casino in La Grange, Missouri  337 Marston, Joh  429 martingales  380 Masamura Gauge All 15  295–6 masculinity  315 Matthau, Walter  100 Maubert, Emmanuel  211 Maugham, W. Somerset  98 Mauss, Marcel  166 Maxim, Hiram  209 Maysles Brothers  67 Mazarin, Cardinal  376, 391 media  1–2 Meet John Doe (1941)  443 melancholy  323–7 ‘membri dei Serenissimi Collegi’  374 mercantile gambling  45–50 Merv Griffin Show  66 microtransactions  2 Mike Douglas Show  66 Miller, Robert  8 Miranda, Carmen  79–80 Mizoue, N.  303–4 Molly’s Game (Sorkin)  443, 459 n.5 Monaco  8, 21, 200, 202, 204, 207–8, 211–12, 215, 221, 223–36 casino industry  199–217, 225–9 gambling venture  224–5 monopoly on roulette  216 SBM  200, 206–8, 211–12, 217–18, 225–9 into spa town  224 tourism industry  204–5

money  182 and card games  127 and class  6–8 geographical-cultural contexts in  7 making, business of  50–4 microtransactions  2 and play  2–5, 29–30, 33–4 Money-Commodity-Money (M-C-M) process  31 Moneymaker, Chris  75, 99, 433 Monkey King (猴王游戏) model  247 Monopoly  85 Montana  333 Monte Carlo  200–18, 221–36 casino  200–18, 223–36 atrium  232–4 gambling room  234–6 Charles Garnier Theatre at  206–7 Dreiser’s relationship to  222–3 elite vacationers at  201–2 hivernants  201, 206–13 international reputation  209–10 legal gambling establishments  200 luxury hotels  231–2 planning  225–30 resort  200–18 and roulette  8, 200–18 spa casinos  202–3 tourism industry  204–6 town  223–36 Mooney, George  153 Moore, Sally Falk  166, 171 Morongo tribe  283 Morse, E. A.  430 Moss, Johnny  62–3 Mountain Gods Resort and Casino  336 Mucha, Alphonse  207–8 Mullin, Janet  126 Murray, H. J. R.  42 Musberger, Brent  68

481

482

Index music (popular), gambling in  11, 398–418 Adorno’s views on  401–2 behaviour  405–6 cultural images  400–3 Frith’s views on  402 images  398–418 resolution, place of  413–15 scale and spatial characteristics  407–9 songs, narratives/themes of  403–7 space/places/locations  400–3 superstition/myth, place of  411– 13 transgression/addiction, place of  409–11 music artists  398 Music of Chance, The (Auster)  99, 132, 426 My Darling Clementine (Duncan)  445, 447

social contexts for  284 social impact of  288–9 spirit power and  284 stick game  284–6 for tribal communities  282–91 Negreanu, Daniel  73 Neudecker, Keith  110–11 Nevada, casinos in  10, 50–1, 242, 331–3, 335–6, 461, 467 New Jersey  333 Newmarket  127 New Yorker  336 Niccolini, Giovanni  360 Nichols, Bill  67 no commission baccarat  251–3 No-Limit Texas Hold’em (NLHE)  136, 469 Non-Conformist Protestant Churches  145 Northbrooke, John  319 Nudges  146

naipe  124 n.2 ‘na kapso trikhes’  160–1 nard  42 National Anti-Gambling League (NAGL)  145 National Indian Gaming Act (1988)  333 National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC)  282 Native American gambling  281–91 behavior  287 benefits of  290 bingo  282–3, 290 casino  287–91, 333 contemporary  281–91 cultural contexts for  284–7 identity/heritage and  290–1 legislation for  282–3 national gaming commission  282 regulatory classes  282

Obolensky, N. N.  194 Ocean, Danny  427 Ocean’s Eleven  427 ‘Octopus Arms’  305–6 Odd Couple, The (Simon)  66, 100 offline games  172–3 Ogrean, David  74 Okanagan tribe  290 Oklahoma  333 Olick, Jeffrey  265 Olympics  170 Ondaatje, Michael  6 Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin  282 online casino  223 online gamblers  223 online gambling  21, 222–3 Ore, Oystein  44 otaku (fan) culture  299 Outcasts of Poker Flat, The (Harte)  98 Owens, Buck  405

Index Ozu, Yasujiro  301 pachinko, Japan  9–10, 294–312 automatic ball supply system  305– 7 commercial structure  298–9 early manual ball systems  303–4 evolution of infrastructure of  301–3 Hall Computer  303, 307–9 infrastructure  299–303 machine  295–6, 300 modern  295–7 overview  295–9 parlours  298–9 players’ point of view, changes from  310–11 playing resources  311–12 Paddy Power  351 Paleotti, Gabriele  362, 365–6 palii  353 Palmer, Alan  107 Panaev, I. I.  178 papal election in Renaissance Italy, gambling on  352–70 false news and  363–6 in Genoa  353–4 market manipulations and  363–6 players, social profile of  359–63 Rome vs. Venice vs. Genoa  369–70 rules of game  353–9 scommesse, end of  366–9 Venice, elections in  353–4 paper money  45–6 Paradise Poker  433 Paramount Theatre  339 Park Brigade  153 Parsons, Gram  406 PartyGaming  466–7 Paston, John  126 patterned self  166–7 Paules, Xavier  8–9

Paulson, Ronald  132 Pearson, Puggy  67, 72–3 Pelletier, Julie  289 perseverance  215–17 Pierre, D. B. C.  112 Piquet  127 pitch and toss game, Britain  141–2 in ‘Little Chicago’  150–4 as rational and respectable  142–5 working-class gambling as violence, machismo and excess  146–50 Pitch the Scrapper  146 Planet Poker  432–3 play, gambling  5–8, 12, 21–7, 39–40, 241–57; see also working-class gambling on activities  9 addiction  10 aleatory forms of  32 in American culture  83–4 in America’s neighbourhoods  330–47 atmosphere  8 and capitalism  11, 28–30 in China  41 and cities  8–9 commercialization of  143–5, 333 contemporary  23, 30–5 context(s)  20–1 control  7 cultural context of  7, 9–11 cultural tourism and  260–76 debts  184 deception/fraud  423–37 (see also card sharps/sharks) Dreiser’s relationship to  222–3 for economic purposes  20–1 ecosystems  12 emergence of  5 entertainments  241 environment  20

483

484

Index erotics of  453–4 in Europe  6–7, 41, 49, 125 (see also Europe) vs. everyday life  24 for financialization  20–1 on fruit machine  156–7 functionalist-sociological formulations of  32 as games of chance/culture  24–7 gangs  153 Goffman’s work on  22–3 in Greece  7, 160–75 high-stakes  7, 187–91 images  398–9 in India  41 Indigenous peoples and  9, 281–91 innovation  9 Italian  10, 352–70 of Italians  10 ladies  442–60 legalization of  20, 22–3, 50–1 of Manifest Destiny  11 and market activities  20–1 mercantile, rise of  45–50 Monte Carlo’s role in  8, 200–18, 221–36 in music  11, 398–418 Native American  281–91 and new mathematical models  318 online  21 overview  22–3 pachinko, Japan  9–10, 294–312 poker  5–6, 23, 30, 32, 50 politics  10 practical  22–3 real-life  178 rehabilitation of  11 representations of  80–1 responsible  34 role in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Britain  7

Russian  7, 177–94 sacralization  24–5, 28–31, 33–4 and self  7 in seventeenth-century England  10 social  45, 54 social functions of  30–5 songs, narratives/themes of  403–7 status of  5 in Stuart England  314–27 studies  3–4 superstitions and  406–7 technology  9 in United States  10 in Venice  9, 46, 48–50, 259–76 Venice as space for  9, 259–76 women gamblers  11, 442–60 Player-versus-player (PvP) gambling games  465 playing cards  7, 12, 41, 48, 121–37 Pocket Kings (Heller)  99 poker  5–6, 23, 30, 32, 50 into American life  99–101 ‘Be A Pal’ and  79–80, 85–9 cultural politics of  135 economy  465–9 ecosystem  12 evolution of  30 fiction  6, 105–13 forms of  135–6 and frontier culture  446–7 I Love Lucy’s ‘Be a Pal’ and  85–9 ladies player  442–60 in literary culture  98–101 male homosocial  6 and masculinity  112–13 mechanics of  6 real-world  112 and romance  101–5 Roseanne’s ‘Five of a Kind’ and  89–92 Sitcom representations of  6, 80–3

Index on sitcoms  80–96 as soft training for American capitalism  83–5 Stanwyck, Barbara and  442–60 table  112 on television  6, 65–70, 80–96 tournaments  107 WSOP (see World Series of Poker (WSOP)) Poker Faces (Hayano)  100 ‘Poker Game, A’ (Crane)  98 ‘Poker Mystery’ series (2007–8, Chance) 99 poker night  80–1 ‘Poker Night’ (Updike)  98–9 Poker Night: Pocket Pair (Lynne)  99 Poker: The Parody of Capitalism (Bjerg)  100, 135–6 pokher (five-card draw) game  161 Pollini, Lorenzo  364 Poor Law  151, 155 ‘pop-up’ casinos  7, 166–7 Porter, Roy  322 pot-limit Omaha (PLO)  469 practical gambles  22–3 Pratchett, Terry  426 present self  166–7 Preston, Thomas Austin  65 Principles of Rural and Domestic Economy, for the Preservation and Augmentation of One’s Inheritance’ (Grech)  179 probability theory  380 Prodigal, The (Adams)  99 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act  54 Professor’s Yarn, The (Twain)  426 Prop, The (Hautman)  99 public gaming  200–6 in France  203, 205 in Germany  203–4 Pushkin (1799–1837)  178

pyramid scheme  128 Raento, P.  409, 410, 412, 416 Rape of the Lock, The (Pope)  132 Ratzinger, Joseph  351 Raymer, Greg  75 real-life gambling  178 Red Dead Redemption  429 Reith, Gerda  137 Renaissance Italy, gambling play of  353–70 responsible gambling  34 Rhythm City Casino  340 Rialto Square Theatre  339 Ricardo, Lucy  79–80 Rice, Stan, Jr.  289 Richard, Jessica  104 Rich in Small Things (Beal)  99 ridotti  255–6, 261 Rig Veda  41 Riley, Alexander  28 risk-taking behaviour  182 rituals  165, 169–74 Rivers Casino in Des Plaines, Illinois  340 Robinson, Edward G.  446 Rockwell, Geoffrey  9 Roentgen, David  384, 385 Rogers, Kenny  69 Rogue’s Game, The (Burton)  99 Role of the Reader, The (Eco)  108 Roll the Bones  319 romance, poker and  101–5 Rombots, Theodoor  426 Rome  352–70 Rosaldo, Michelle  166 Roseanne (1988–97)  6, 85, 89–92 Roseanne’s ‘Five of a Kind’ (S2E6)  85, 89–92 Rosenthal, Richard  129 roulette  8, 50–1 for all class segments  212

485

486

Index elites’ indifferent approach towards  213–14 modern  200 and Monte Carlo  8, 200–18 popularity  212 rewarding aspect of  213–14 role of  8 Russian  214 social obligation of playing  213 superstition in  214 Rowe, R.  399 Rowlands, Samuel  132 Rowley, Rex  10 Royal lotteries crowdfunding  390–1 during sixteenth and seventeenth centuries  375–8 royal power  376 ruff  49 Ruidoso Downs Race Track  336 Russell, Catherine  11 Russian gambling  7–8, 177–94 aristocracy  183 Bank/Faro  184–5, 187 as battle  185 card game  179–82 debts  184 games of calculation  184–5 games of chance  184–5 high-stakes  7, 187–91 in literature  178 mythological system of  188–9 in nineteenth-century  182 in Pushkin’s day  185–6 risk theory and  182–3 roulette  214 writers  178 Ryan, Marie-Laure  108 Ryan, Rusty  427 Saint Petersburg paradox  380–1 Sarmona, Nicolás  124

Savage, Noble  289 Savage Mind, The (Levi-Strauss)  172 Saxon-les-Bains  204 Schadenfreude  131 Schwartz, David  5, 319, 330–3 Science vs. Luck (Twain)  98 scommesse  353–60, 366–9 scommesse de maschio o femina  353 scudi  352 n.3, 360 Sedensky, E. C.  309 Seid, Danielle  6 self-control  215–17 Seminole Tribe of Florida  282 Seristori, Averardo  361 Seven Card Stud  135 Sexton, Mike  468 Seymour, Richard  316, 321 Shaking the Hat  146 Shapiro, Barbara  318 Sheffield  151–5 Short and Plaine Dialogue Concerning the Unlawfulness of Playing at Cards or Tables, A (Balmeford)  316 Shoshone Bannock tribe  284 Showman’s Guild  156 Sibbitt, E. C.  298 Siena Charter  265 silver scudo  352 n.3 sitcoms  6, 80–96 Six Walks in the Woods (Eco)  109 skill games  5, 40–55 skill gap problem  466 Skulsky, Harold  323 Sky Edge  152 slot machines  241–2, 246–50 Smith, Adolphe  235 Smith, J. F.  436 Smith, John L.  347 Sneaky Pete  427 Snyder, Jimmy  64, 67, 70 social class  8

Index social gambling  45, 54 social games  45 social ostracism  182 Sociedade de Jogos de Macau (SJM)  243–4 Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau (STDM)  242 Société des Bains de Mer et du Cercle des Étrangers à Monaco (SBM)  200, 206–8, 211–12, 217–18, 225–9 Soderbergh, Steven  427 Soligo, Marta  9 ‘Space Pipe’  306 spas  202 casinos  202–3 resorts  203 Speculation  127, 133–4 Spiel  444 Spielpest  388 Spigel, Lynn  61, 70, 81 spirit power  284 sports betting  53 Sports Spectacular anthology series  68 stake  29 Stanwyck, Barbara  11, 442–60 Baby Face (1933)  455 in California (1947)  444, 447–9 career  443–4 Forbidden (1932)  455 in Gambling Lady (1934)  11, 444, 449–51 Ladies of Leisure (1930)  455 in Lady Eve, The (1941)  444, 451–6 Lady Gambles, The (1934)  11, 442, 444, 455–9, 459 n.5 in movies  443–4 performances  444 Stella Dallas (1937)  455 Star Trek: The Next Generation  427 State Lottery (1761)  381

Steinmetz, A.  431 Stella Dallas (1937)  443, 455 stick game  284–6 storytelling  6 Straight Flush (Maugham)  98 Strange, Susan  130 Straus, Jack  66 Street Betting Act (1906)  145, 146 Stuart England, gambling in  314–27 addiction  315–16, 320–7 card game  317–20, 324–5 contemporary responses  319–27 context  317–18 cultural impact of  322 dice game  317–20 gamester  316 historical significance  322 honour and  324–5 ludic culture  316 masculinity and  315 melancholy and  323–7 and new mathematical models  318 Suburban Xanadu (Schwartz)  330–1 suicide  321 Suits, Bernard  111–12 Sumner, Charles  111 Sun Denshi  307–8 superstitions  406–7 Super/System (Brunson)  103 Sutton-Smith, Brian  106 table, poker  112 Takeuchi, Kohei  305–6 Tambiah, Stanley  171 Taylor, Graham  7 technology  2–3, 9, 55, 99, 157, 172, 433, 443–4 television  6 All in the Family (1971–79)  89 consumption  82–3 domestic space and  82–3

487

488

Index Friends  93 I Love Lucy’s ‘Be a Pal’ and  85–9 Living Single’s ‘Five Card Stud’ (S1E23)  85, 92–6 networks  81–3 poker on  6, 65–70, 80–96 popularization  81 Roseanne’s ‘Five of a Kind’ (S2E6)  85, 89–92 sitcoms  80–96 in U.S. society  81–3 Thiruvathukal, G. K.  300 Tinno, Keith  284 Tokyo-Ga (Wender)  301 Tolstoy (1828–1910)  178 Tomorrow Show, The  66 Tonight Show, The  65 Tonti, Lorenzo  376 ‘Tony Valentine’ Series (2001–10, Swain)  99 To Tell the Truth, What’s My Line  66 tou khronou  164 tourism  260–76 Tractus de moribus (1377)  125 transparency  381 Trente et Quarante  127 tripots  205–6 trump (Parlett)  49 Tuan, Yi-Fu  400, 416 Tucker, Daniel  288 Turgenev, A. I.  180–1 Turner, Big Joe  407 Turner, Victor  171 Twain, Mark  98, 426 Twisted Fate  429 UltimateBet scandal  433–4 Uncertainty in Games  381 Ungar, Audrey  102 United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization (UNESCO)  260, 276

United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO)  265, 273–4, 276 United States  10 capitalism, poker as soft training for  83–5 casinos/gambling  330–47 television in society  81–3 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA, 2006)  465 Updike, John  98–9 ura-mawari  304 Urayama, Kirio  303–4 Urry, John  105, 270 Vagrancy Acts  141, 143, 146, 149 van Gennep, Arnold  169 van Honthorst, Gerard  426 van Rensselaer, John King  123–4, 126 Venice  9, 46, 48–50, 259–76 Ca’ Noghera  261, 271–3 carnival of  262 Ca’ Vendramin Calergi and  260–3 collective memory  264–5 elections in  353–4 Grand Canal  268 heritage  260, 263–4, 267–9 tradition of gambling  260–3 Viazemsky, P. A. (1792–1878)  180–1 video game gambling  341–3 video gaming  341–3 Video Gaming Act (230 ILCS 40) in 2009  341, 343 video gaming terminals (VGT)  341–3 Vizenor, Gerald  290 von Jurensburg, Baron Friedrich Adolf Klodt  179–80 von Lipwig, Moist  426 Wagner, Richard  261 Wagner Museum  261

Index Wake, Paul  6 Walker, Gilbert  316 Walker, T-Bone  407 Warner, Jessica  323 Webb, Beatrice  145 Webb, Natalie  109–10 Welch, Evelyn  353 Wender, Wim  301 Wener, Louise  99, 101–4 West, J.  435–6 western women  445–7 whist (early form of bridge)  184 White Snake (白蛇)  247 Wide World of Sports  68 Wiener, Matthew  85 Willmann, Gerald  375–7, 390 Wind, B.  426 ‘Wind Cards on the Wind Trade’ [Windkaart op de Windnegotie]  131 Wolkomir, M.  435, 443 women gamblers in cinema  11, 443–60 in gambling  11, 442–60 sharpers  435 western  445–7 women gamblers  11, 442–60 Women’s Poker Night (Morrison)  101 Wood, Robin  453 Woodward, Joanne  446 working-class gambling  140–1

commercialization of  143–5 entrepreneurs of  144 as excess  146–50 as machismo  146–50 in nineteenth/early twentieth centuries  142–5 politics of  145 as rational and respectable  142–5 rationalization of  143–4 skilled nature of  141 as violence  146–50 World Risk Society  105–6 World Series of Poker (WSOP)  5–6, 59–61, 99 Bollinger, Henri and  70–3 on ESPN  73–5 Moneymaker effect  75–6 new celebrities and  65–70 owners  76–7 prehistory of  61–3 professionalization  63–5 on television  65–70 Wynn resorts, Macau  242–3 Yakama tribe  290 Yanicki, Gabriel  290 Yardley, Herbert O.  100 Yavapi-Prescott Tribe  289–90 Young, Seth  53–4 zaria, dice game  164–5 Zedler, J. H.  387

489

490

491

492

493

494

495

496