Although it first came to prominence along the Mississippi during the 1830s, poker did not become America’s favourite card game until the first years of the twentieth century. Before that time, another, now–forgotten, game held sway throughout American and Europe. This was faro — named for the portrait of an Egyptian monarch that once appeared on French card decks — which owed its popularity to the fact that, of all games played by gamblers, when played fairly it offered the least advantage to the bank; the margin in the house’s favour was generally reckoned to be little more than 1.5%; in addition, each individual gambling transaction could take place very quickly. ‘An almost conclusive argument,’ one gambler observed in 1900, ‘for the theory that the percentage at honest faro is virtually non-existent is the fact that the canny management of Monte Carlo has never permitted the game to be played at that celebrated resort.’

Originally a French invention, which had first appeared in Louisiana some time before 1800, faro grew in stature throughout the nineteenth century, eventually spawning a faster, simpler variant known as stuss, which was the main game played in American gambling houses till at least 1914. As in roulette, the variety and complexity of the wagers allowed could be bewildering, and even experienced players found it difficult to master the ever–shifting odds. And, unfortunately, the game was also very frequently run by crooks.

Gamblers playing faro wagered not against each other but against the house, betting on the order of cards drawn from a dealing case. The first card out of the box was regarded as dead. Thereafter, cards were pulled out two at a time, the first in each pair being the bank’s and the second the player’s. Thus if a gambler bet on, say, the dealing of a four, and a four was drawn on the bank’s turn, he lost. If the card emerged on the player’s turn, he won. If two fours were drawn together, bets were split. Success in faro depended on the ability to count cards while keeping track of an often-complex pattern of bets placed on a colourfully-marked board, or 'layout'. The game’s influence, like that of poker, can be gauged from the number of faro terms that found their way into everyday English. Players tracked the cards that had been dealt by ‘keeping tabs’, and ‘broke even’ when they bet a card to win and lose an equal number of times; others preferred ‘stringing along’, a method for betting on 21 different groups of cards simultaneously.

Crooked faro layouts were especially common in the Tenderloin district of New York, where the game became – in the words of one early historian of gambling – ‘the medium of the first extensive cheating at cards ever seen in the United States, and the rock upon which was reared the wolf-traps of the nineteenth century’. Trimmed and sanded cards and rigged dealing boxes were readily available and openly advertised as ‘advantage tools’ in the trade press of the day. By manipulating concealed springs and sliding plates, skilled dealers, known as ‘mechanics’, could make cards appear as and when they wanted them, and they were paid accordingly. The potential for cheating was even greater in stuss, a game in which the cards were shuffled only after bets were made.

Source

Mike Dash, Satan's Circus (2005)