A nineteenth gambler named Mike Macdonald is credited with the phrase ‘There is a sucker born every minute’ and gambling of all kinds was big business in the expansion of America. The first major surge was from around 1800 to the mid-1830s. Games such as faro, craps, monte and, later, klondike became established with the sharpers, or professional gamblers, preying on the suckers with all manner of rigged games, stacked decks and a host of other tricks and traps. So prevalent and frequently ruinous was the urge to gamble that a strong moral and social backlash saw gaming shut down in many places, sending the sharpers and their tricks out across the roads of a rapidly expanding nation.

The Californian gold rushes provided another opportunity for gamblers to ply their trades. It seems that the card and dice game of banco was introduced from Europe at this time (although the founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency did not come across it until 1869 in New Orleans). It grew rapidly in popularity, developed many variations, mostly crooked and become widely known as bunco, often played in bunco parlours or bunco skins.  The game used accomplices similar to those used in the shell game and later confidence tricks to bring the mark to the fleecing. This person was known as a bunco steerer. Bunco became a byword for swindling of all kinds and the term bunco artist or bunco man became synonymous with fraud and deception of all kinds. Many police departments even referred to their fraud and gaming officers as bunco squads from the period of Prohibition when the game made a return to the criminal pursuits of gangsters, particularly in Chicago, though the numbers rackets, refinements of yet earlier refinements of ancient swindles, seem to have become the main forms of graft by this time. The once popular and powerful expostulation buncombe! is also related to bunco, though which word came first has been the subject of controversy among linguists.

A second major wave of gambling began after the Civil War and lasted to the early twentieth century. During these periods, between them, and after them, gambling ebbed and flowed depending on local politics and economics. Sometimes betting of all kinds, whether square or crooked, was banned, sometimes it was wide open, sometimes it was legal but regulated. Through all these ups and downs though, the card sharps and their victims played on, using an always evolving and extensive language of luck, cheating and skill.

The places in which these games were played and usually lost, ranged from anywhere flat space where dice could be thrown or cards laid, all the way through to elaborate resorts and casinos. The best of these palaces of pleasure and financial pain were known as splendid hells, hell being an old description for gambling dens. Those cheap premises where players set up their own games were known as wolf traps, skinning houses or deadfalls. They were also known as ten percent halls from the size of the cut that the individual gambling entrepreneur gave to the house for the privilege of playing there. If a player got a square deal – the origin of the current phrase – at any of these places it was an oversight.

One of the means devised to make sure that suckers did not prosper was the mechanical dealing box. The first of these seems to have surfaced in the early 1820s. It was a brass box, slightly larger than a standard deck of cards and with thumbhole on the top through which the dealer slid each card out of a slit in the side. A spring pushed the remaining cards to the top as each one was dealt. The potential for chicanery – already developed to a high art in hand dealing – now increased exponentially. Dealing boxes were rigged with a bewildering variety of fiendishly cunning devices for cheating with names like the tongue-tell and the sand-tell, the needle squeeze or the end-squeeze. One was called the gaff, a new variation on an old and widely used word having a long association with the arts of deception. These devices were all legal and could be purchased from specialised suppliers, along with marked and otherwise rigged decks of cards, dice, roulette wheels and hold-outs for secreting cards on the body or beneath the poker table. When all these devices and techniques failed or were unavailable, the gambler could always fall back on the folk wisdom in the traditional rhyme:

Cut ‘em thin, sure to win,

Cut ‘em deep, sure to weep.

The jargon of the many forms of gambling that have evolved in modern times is large and long. Sucker has extended to a sucker bet and there are a variety of words for unskilled or unwary players, including degenerate, meaning a compulsive gambler, a mush (possibly from Romany) is a player who always has bad luck, while a pigeon is a naive gambler. A whale bets extremely large amounts each round, and a square is an inexperienced gambler. Sharp, sharper or shark is still used to denote a professional gambler. One could be skinned, rooked, taken down, fleeced, bilked, milked, bled dry or gypped, among many other expensive consequences. Even the eminent writer and wit, Oscar Wilde, was not safe from the wiles of the notorious bunco man, ‘Hungry’ Joe Louis. He took Wilde for the enormous sum of $5000 during the celebrity’s tour of the United States in 1882. Fortunately, Oscar rapidly stopped payment on the cheque he had wisely given Hungry Joe rather than the cash that these accomplished con men preferred. If the great man responded to this experience with one of his famously well-turned quips, it is not recorded.

In his account of the New York underworld, Low Life (1991), Luc Sante notes how many terms from the card game faro have passed into popular parlance. Faro was a development of an ancient game that had many variations in Europe and Britain, arriving in America at the end of the eighteenth century, spreading across the country during the nineteenth century. It was a complex game in which many betting possibilities could be wagered by the player against the house, represented by a dealer and an assistant. Faro involved twenty-five draws or turns, with the final turn being the one on which most could be won – or lost. The assistant’s job was to replicate a smaller version of the game in a special box, or case-keeper, allowing the dealer to predict how the last turn would go. Although faro was so blatantly rigged it was apparently considered to be a fairer form of gambling than any other, one reason for its great and enduring popularity. This had faded by the turn of the twentieth century, but words and terms such as parlay, keeping tabs on someone or something, piking, to break even, to string along, to be a pigeon and to be in hock are all identified by Sante as having their origins in the hazardous diversion of faro.

Inevitably, gambling lingo has more than its fair share of terms for losing money. These brokisms include being down to the felt, tapped out and dropping money. A player on a losing streak may be cold and scared money is cash that you cannot afford to lose. A bad beat in poker occurs when a player expects to win the pot but loses, while drawing dead is to have an inevitably losing hand, as revealed by subsequent events in the game. According to poker legend, the ultimate losing combination of a dead man’s hand stems from the fact that Wild Bill Hickock was shot dead in 1877 while holding a hand of a pair of aces and a pair of eights, usually said to have been in black coloured suites.

Now, as then, the great and the obscure still flock to lose their earnings and sometimes more in a variety of bedazzling new as well as tried and true old ways. Bunco even made a return to the gambling precincts of New York in the 1980s and online gambling through the World Wide Web is a massive industry. The language of gambling reflects this ongoing tradition. Some of the older gambling terms, or new terms with similar meanings, are in current use. A carpet joint is a luxurious casino, while a sawdust joint is a very basic gambling club. Shills are employed in similar roles to those working for the fleecer in the shell game. They will play at tables on behalf of the house to fill up empty seats until real players arrive. A mechanic is still a dealer who cheats players, as he or she has been for well over a century and grease means a bribe. The commission taken by a casino is known as juice, vigorish or vig. A term associated with circus and carnival speech is also used in modern gambling lingo. The nut can refer either to the overheads incurred in running a gambling house or to the amount a gambler plans to win. It is also used in circus and carny speech. To crack the nut is to win enough to pay for all costs together with a profit margin, also termed white meat.

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