Where casino games come from: from 18th-century Paris to your phone
· 3 min read
Roulette's single zero, the chewing gum behind slot fruit, the Texas town that gave us Hold'em, and the TV show that invented Plinko. The surprising stories behind the games.
Most casino games are much older than the buildings they're played in, and almost all of them changed shape along the way. Here's where the games on Blibzz come from.
Roulette: a little wheel from France
Roulette means "little wheel" in French, and the game took its familiar form in Paris in the late 1700s. The early wheels had both a single and a double zero. In 1843, the brothers François and Louis Blanc opened a casino in Bad Homburg, Germany, with a wheel that had only one zero, which gave players better odds and drew the crowds. François Blanc later ran the casino at Monte Carlo, and the single-zero wheel became the European standard. American casinos kept the double zero, which is why the two wheels still exist side by side.
Blackjack: twenty-one and four soldiers
Blackjack descends from vingt-et-un ("twenty-one"), played in France in the 1700s; a Spanish version called veintiuna even appears in a Cervantes story from the early 1600s. The modern game got a mathematical makeover in 1956, when four US Army engineers (Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott) worked out the first basic strategy with desk calculators. A few years later Edward Thorp's book Beat the Dealer (1962) made card counting famous.
Craps: from hazard to the pass line
Craps grew out of an English dice game called hazard, which is old enough to turn up in Chaucer. It crossed to New Orleans in the early 1800s, where a simpler version took hold. The don't pass bet, which lets players bet with the house, was added in the early 1900s by a dice maker called John H. Winn, often called the father of modern craps.
Slots: a Liberty Bell and a pack of gum
The first slot machine as we know it was the Liberty Bell, built by Charles Fey in San Francisco in the late 1890s: three reels, five symbols and a cracked bell. When gambling machines were banned, manufacturers turned them into vending machines that paid out fruit-flavoured chewing gum. That's where cherries, lemons and plums on the reels come from, and the BAR symbol is often traced back to the Bell-Fruit Gum company's logo.
Texas Hold'em: from Robstown to television
Hold'em is said to have started in Robstown, Texas, in the early 1900s (the Texas legislature officially recognised the town as its birthplace in 2007). It reached Las Vegas in 1967, became the main event of the World Series of Poker, which began at Binion's Horseshoe in 1970, and exploded in the early 2000s when TV cameras started showing players' hole cards.
Plinko: a game show star
Plinko first appeared on the American TV show The Price Is Right in January 1983: a contestant drops a flat disc down a board of pegs and it lands in a prize slot. It became the show's most famous game, and the idea of a token bouncing randomly into a payout has been copied ever since.
Minesweeper and Solitaire: the office classics
Both owe their fame to Microsoft. Solitaire came with Windows 3.0 in 1990, partly to teach people how to use a mouse by dragging cards. Minesweeper followed in Windows 3.1, teaching right-clicking. The games themselves are older: Klondike solitaire is named after the Canadian gold rush of the 1890s, and mine-hunting puzzles existed on home computers in the early 1980s.
And then, the bouncing DVD logo
Not every game needs a long history. Our DVD game comes from the screensaver on early-2000s DVD players, and the shared joy of watching the logo almost, almost hit the corner.