Useless Facts Related To Gambling
In 1950 at the Las Vegas Desert Inn, an anonymous sailor made twenty-seven straight passes (wins) with the dice at craps. The odds against such a feat are 12,467,890 to 1. Had he bet the house limit on each roll he would have earned $268 million. As it was, he was so timid with his wagers that he walked away from the table with only $750. The dice today are enshrined in the hotel on a velvet pillow under the glass.
Residents of Nevada bet an average of $846 a year in gambling casinos.
When prevented from gambling, compulsive gamblers often experience physical withdrawal symptoms resembling those undergone by heroin addicts. The reactions range from restlessness to shakiness, severe headaches, and diarrhea.
From a fifty-two-card deck it is possible to deal 2,598,960 different five-card poker hands. Of these 1,088,240 will contain a pair. Other possibilities are 4 royal flushes, 36 straight flushes, 624 four-of-a-kind hands, 3,744 full houses, 5,108 flushes, 10,200 straights, 54,912 three-of-a-kind hands, and 123,522 two-pair hands.
Gamblers in ancient Greece made dice from the ankle bones and shoulder blades of sheep.
Eskimos don't gamble.
At race tracks, the favorite wins fewer than 30 percent of all horse races.
The opposite sides of a dice cube always add up to seven.
Horse-racing regulations state that no race horse's name may contain more than eighteen letters. (Names that are too long would be cumbersome on racing sheets.) Apostrophes, hyphens, and spaces between words count as letters.
According to Gambler's Digest, more cheating takes place in private, friendly gambling games than in all other gambling games combined.
There is one slot machine in Las Vegas for every eight inhabitants.
Sir Miles Partridge once played at dice with Henry VIII for the bells of St. Paul's church, won, and collected the bells.
On a bingo card of ninety numbers there are approximately 44 possible ways to make bingo.
Madame de Montespan, second wife of Louis XIV, once lost 4 million francs in a half-hour at the gambling table.
In eighteenth-century English gambling dens, there was an employee whose only job was to swallow the dice if there was a police raid.
At Brook's, an eighteenth-century gambling club, the faro table had a large semicircular section cut out of one of its sides in order to accommodate the enormous stomach of the famous statesman Charles James Fox.
According to Gambler's Digest, an estimated $1 million is lost at race tracks each year by people who lose or carelessly throw away winning tickets.
No patent can ever be taken out on a gambling machine in the United States.
Parimutuel betting was invented in 1865 by a Parisian perfumer maker named Pierre Oiler.
In poker, a pair of aces and a pair of eights is known as a “dead man's hand.” The odd name originated in 1876, when Wild Bill Hickok was shot down by Jack McCall during a card game in a saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota. As Wild Bill slumped over the table he exposed his hand for all to see—it showed a pair of eights and a pair of aces.
The receipts from illegal gambling each year in the United States surpass the total revenues of America's seventy-five largest industrial organizations combined.
There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.