Gambling in American History

Many gambling games utilize playing cards. Although games can be traced to prehistoric times, the use of cards did not become prevalent until the invention of paper in China about 2,000 years ago. It is likely that Chinese and Koreans were the first to use cardlike objects for gambling. Systematic decks or series of cards can be traced to Hindustan (northern India) in about a.d. 800. Chinese and Koreans probably had cards during the same era, and Europeans developed card games in the Middle Ages, aided especially by the development of the printing arts. Cards were present in Italy in 1279. The nature of today’s deck of cards was gradually established over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The sailors on Columbus’s first voyage to the New World played cards on board the Pinta, Ni-a, and Santa Maria. Except for graphics, cards have not changed much since those times. The modern deck has the same fifty-two cards divided into four groups or suits of thirteen cards each. Two suits are red; in the French system they were named couer (“hearts”) in honor of the clergy and carreau (“diamonds”) in honor of the merchants. Two black suits were named swords or pique (“spades”) in honor of the nobility and trefle (“clubs”) representing the peasants. In each suit, there are cards numbered from one (an ace) to ten, and there are also three picture cards—the jack, queen, and king.
In the American colonies, there were many card players, and printers such as Benjamin Franklin were happy to supply them. The cards were so popular that when the British found they needed more revenue to support their administrative activities in the colonies, they decided to tax playing cards. Franklin quickly became a tax protester, then a tax rebel, and finally a revolutionary demanding independence for the colonies. The British would have been best advised to leave the card industry alone when they were choosing items to tax.
The wide proliferation of cards led to an ever-expanding number of games and a great variety of rules for those games. Confusion reigned supreme over gaming before Englishman Edmund Hoyle (1672–1769) began composing a series of books on the manner of playing games. In his early career, Hoyle was a barrister. He was also a gambling instructor. After the age of seventy, he wrote A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist. He also published books on the games of brag, quadrille, and piquet, along with guides on the dice game of backgammon and also chess. By the time he died at the age of ninety-seven, he was “the authority,” and whenever a dispute arose over the rules of a game, someone would begin the declaration of the solution with the words, “according to Hoyle.” In the twentieth century, several game rulebooks incorporated his other works and honored him in their titles.
By the twentieth century, there were many new games such as poker and blackjack that had not been played during Hoyle’s life. Nonetheless, he remains one of the greatest card experts of all time.

Richard Canfield (1855–1914) rose out of poverty in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to become the leading gambling entrepreneur in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. He was the leading casino owner in New York City, and in 1902 he purchased and rebuilt the Saratoga Club House in Saratoga, New York, bringing it back to the elegance it had displayed when it was the private preserve of Jack Morrisey. As an operator, Canfield never gambled; instead, he enjoyed the finer things of life – wine, art, top fashion clothing, and carriages. He gambled in his youth, and although the activity helped him economically and gave him a social standing, it also earned him a short stay in prison as a result of operating a poker joint in Providence, Rhode Island.
Canfield was a student of many things, and when he decided that casino gambling would be a business pursuit, he decided to study gambling in its finest settings. He actually took a year to travel to Europe and examine the many elegant gambling halls of England and the continent. He was able to utilize his new knowledge when he moved the venue of his operations to New York City. New York was friendlier than Providence, as the police seemed to make their system of noninterference more regularized and reliable.
In New York, Canfield determined that the best gambling money to be made would be money spent by wealthy players, not money spent by immigrants in dives. He offered games to the upper classes, and was able to woo this clientele with his fine tastes and intellectual banter. Canfield was self-educated and extremely well read, could converse with the most renowned scholars of the day, and certainly was a welcomed host by the best business minds. He gathered partners, and they financed the most exclusive rooms in New York City for gambling. After a decade of operations, however, reformers Charles Parkhurst and Anthony Comstock pressured the city to close down Canfield’s casinos.
Rather than resist the police action of 1901 and 1902, Canfield shifted his sights to Saratoga. There he acquired a stable of the finest racehorses, and he stood above all the local casino operators by running the finest casino – the Saratoga Club House. A main feature of his house was the cuisine: the best offered in the United States. He discovered the value of loss leaders. Each summer he would lose $70,000 on food operations, much of it going for “comps” to high rollers, but he more than made up for the losses at his tables.
The Saratoga Club House remained in operation as a gambling hall par excellence for only five more years, as the reform movement reached into northern New York in 1907. This time Richard Canfield did not fight history. Rather, he retreated to a life as a Wall Street investor and a collector of fine art works.  He was a friend of James Whistler, and the famous artist did Canfield’s portrait. Canfield’s collection of Whistler and other well-known artists was often displayed in major museums. A man of distinction and fine taste, he died in 1914 in a rather mundane manner, after falling on the steps leading to the New York subway.