5 Crazy Facts About Casinos and Gambling
1. Card Counting is Legal (But Could Get You Thrown Out)
The strategy of "Card counting" in blackjack, which involves keeping track of which cards have been dealt and which remain in the deck as you play, is actually legal. Movies like Rain Man and 21 make card counting seem like wizardry, but it's actually fairly simple arithmetic. That hasn't stopped casinos around the world from stopping card counting, however, especially if the player is less-than-subtle in their approach (actor Ben Affleck, for example, was banned from a casino in 2014 for his trickery). Besides asking players to leave or play another game, casinos also combat card counting by changing the rules slightly or shuffling the deck more often.
2. The Sandwich Was Basically Invented in a Casino
Back in 1765, John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, was such a huge gambler that he didn't want to leave the gaming table to eat. Instead, Montagu told his servants to just bring him some meat between sliced bread so he could eat and play at the same time. Thus the "sandwich" was born... sort of.
In reality, the Earl wasn't much of a gambler, but he did enjoy his namesake meal. The legend came from a French travel guide about London and is the only source of the gambling tale. The story caught on, however, and soon people throughout Europe were craving sandwiches. Montagu didn't invent the meal - it's meat between bread, after all; people had likely been eating this combo for centuries - but he did give it a name and a cool story to go with it (whether he liked it or not!).
3. The First Slot Machine Wasn't Even in a Casino
When mechanic Charles Fey invented the first slot machine in 1895, it wasn't even played in a casino, and it was far from Las Vegas. Fey's "Liberty Bell" machine was actually at his auto shop in San Francisco for customers to play while they waited for their cars to be fixed. It became so popular that casinos started buying them to give gamblers something to do when the table games were fully occupied.
4. You Can Voluntarily Ban Yourself from a Casino
If your addiction to gambling is getting out of control, several states allow you to ban yourself from casinos, making it a crime to step foot on the gaming floor. Ohio, for example, has a so-called "Voluntary Exclusion" program for gamblers looking to kick the habit that allows them to ban themselves for either a year, five years, or life. If you choose the lifetime ban you better mean it: there is no way to get your name off the list once you commit to quitting for good.
5. "Craps" Comes from "Crabs"
Why is the popular North American casino dice game Craps called Craps? It's a simple equation: language + time = bonkers. Historians think it all started with an old British dice game called Hazard (such a better name). In Hazard, rolling "snake eyes" was called rolling "crabs" (for some reason). French settlers in New Orleans in the mid-1700s kept Hazard alive, but over time, the combination of French and English-speaking players and changes to the game's rules slowly turned "crabs" into "craps" (for some reason) and a whole new game was born, eventually leaving Hazard nothing but a distant memory. Viva le Craps!
Find more fun facts at Ranker.com.