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.

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