The main French game that was gambled on at this time was Faro (a corruption of 'Pharaoh'), which first appeared during the reign of Louis XIV and survived long enough to be exported to the US in the early 19th century, where it remained widely popular until superseded by poker after about 1914.

Faro was fast-moving, relatively easy to learn, required only a single deck of cards, and could be played by an unlimited number of gamblers at any one time. Players gathered round an elaborately printed table, known as a layout, wagered against the house by betting on the order of cards drawn from a dealing case. But, 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. Faro’s real attraction lay in its reputation for offering gamblers a better chance of winning than any other game of cards; the margin in the house’s favour, while difficult to calculate, was generally reckoned to be little more than 1.5%. ‘An almost conclusive argument,’ one player 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.’

The game was played thus: the first card drawn from a dealing 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 players’. 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. The game’s influence 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.

I wrote about the game after it appeared in the United States in one of my books, concluding:

‘Honest faro’ was, however, seldom found in the US. Crooked layouts were especially common in the Tenderloin [the entertainment district of New York City], 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 its simplified version, known as stuss, a game in which the cards were shuffled only after bets were made.

Source

Mike Dash Satan's Circus (2007)