OK- so you call yourself a casino expert and you love playing games online. But did you know the following?
The Romans loved games of chance and made dice out of sheep’s knuckles.
The oldest dice known to man were found in the north of Iraq. They are roughly five thousand years old.
Poker evolved from a French game: poque, which in turn is an adaptation of a German card game: pochen which means “to brag”.
A “Dead Man’s Hand” is a hand containing an ace of clubs, an ace of spades, an eight of clubs and an eight of spades. The 5th card is either a jack or queen of diamonds (no-one is 100% sure on this one). The hand is called a “Dead Man´s Hand bacause this was the hand that Wild Bill Hickok had when he was murdered. Hickok was a famous gunman, lawman, scout and gambler from the American Old West. He was killed in a shoot-out while playing poker in Dakota.
In a looser interpretation, you are said to have a “Dead Man´s Hand” when you have aces and eights.
In a new deck of cards, the order of card suits from top to bottom is as follows: hearts, clubs, diamonds then spades.
Have you ever wondered why many slot machine feature the bar symbol? It dates back to a Fruit Gum logo which was sold in vending machiness in Chicago in the early 20th century, believe it or not.
The King of clubs and the king of diamonds are known as the “Kissing Kings”
Video poker might be one of the most popular casino games now but it only made its first appearance in the seventies.
Blackjack is called blackjack because of a trend of some casinos paying a bonus for a hand of an ace and a jack of spades. The blackjack was essential for the extra pay out, so the game´s name evolved from twenty-one to blackjack.
Blackjack is also called Pontoon and Van John which are an English speaker´s way of saying vingt-un, “21” in French.
In Keno, 20 numbers are drawn in every game
The forerunner to roulette was a game developed in England called roly-poly. Roly-poly had white spaces and black spaces, a “bar black” and a “bar white”, which were the older games´s version of the zero pocket. You bet on black or white and if the ball landed in bar black or bar white, you lost the bet. Even in those days the casinos had a house edge!
In craps, a roll of 4 is known as “Little Joe From Kokomo”
The face cards that are featured on mondern day playing cards have evolved from a design originally used in the 1400s in France. King David is the king of spades, Alexander the Great is the king of clubs, Charlemagne is the king of hearts and Julius Ceaser is the king of diamonds.
