At the same time, jackpots were introduced, requiring players to hold a pair of jacks or better before opening the betting. The draw, in particular, seems quintessentially American, the kind of innovation you might expect in a country where anyone dealt a bad hand can, in theory, discard and start over.
Schwartz carefully documents his data, even the stories that sound way too good to be true. The footnotes, however, often lead to newspaper articles or Wikipedia.org, hardly a confidence booster. No one, however, will willingly let go of the anecdote about the French naval captain who lost his shirt at Monte Carlo, then demanded his money back. When rebuffed, he threatened to turn his ship’s guns on the casino and blow it to smithereens. The casino decided to make an exception to its rules.
Like a two-week, 10-city tour, Roll the Bones moves too quickly over too much territory. The space allotted to, say, horse racing in New Zealand could have been assigned to riverboat gambling on the Mississippi, which gets short shrift, or to legendary female gamblers like Poker Alice.
There is far too little on
gambling systems and early gambling theory. Schwartz mentions the betting scandal surrounding the Breeders’ Cup horse races in 2002, in which three fraternity brothers nearly pulled off a US$3 million score, but does not bother to explain how the scheme worked. It was fascinating, one of the top horse racing stories of the year.
With gambling repackaged as family entertainment in Las Vegas, Texas hold-’em at the height of fashion and the Internet opening up new ways to bet, “Americans are never far from a chance to take a chance,” Schwartz writes. In 2004, 54 million of them visited a casino. That same year they lost more than US$78 billion on games of chance.
De Tocqueville, as always, got it exactly right. “Those who live in the midst of democratic fluctuations have always before their eyes the image of chance,” he wrote, “and they end by liking all undertakings in which chance plays a part.”
RSS