Costa Rica has both lottery games and casino games. Until very recently, the casinos operated on a basis that most charitably would be called Third World. The casinos purportedly operated under the provisions of a 1922 law that indicated which games were legal and which games were illegal. For instance, craps was illegal, but dominos was legal. Blackjack was illegal, but rommy (a variation of the word rummy) was legal. Moreover, roulette gambling was illegal, but if a game was not gambling, it was legal. Slot machines were also illegal.
Not too much notice was given to gaming in Costa Rica before the 1960s. Games were played, but both the operators and the players were Costa Ricans, so it was all a local thing. Then residents of the United States discovered the country. It was close to the United States, and it seemed to be quiet and peaceful. It was the perfect place to retire or to run away if your name was Robert Vesco (a fugitive financier of the Nixon era) or you had the Internal Revenue Service chasing after you. Costa Rica refused to extradite fugitives to the United States. A growing population from the United States was accompanied by growing tourist interest in Costa Rica. The casino activity reached out to foreign “visitors.” In 1963, an ex-dealer from Las Vegas named Shelby McAdams saw an opportunity. He tied a roulette wheel on top of his Nash Rambler car and headed south on the Pan-American Highway. He introduced a new style of casino gaming. And along with a German expatriate named Max Stern, he offered “first class” gaming. McAdams and Stern were accepted by appreciative local residents, and soon others imitated their operations. In the 1970s and 1980s, casino gaming spread to all the major hotels in San Jose, as well as to outlying resort hotels such as the Herradura, Irazu, Cirobici, and Cariari.
The casino operators knew that the patrons wanted blackjack, roulette, and craps games, so they read and reread the 1922 law. Collectively they came up with their solution, and for two decades, they alternatively sought alliances with government officials or fought the efforts of government officials who wanted to read the law another way. I was stunned when I visited most of the gaming facilities in 1989. One casino was named Dominos. Indeed, in the middle of the gaming floor there was a long table and over it was a sign that said “dominos”. Inside the table there was a layout that showed the field, the big six, come, don’t come, pass, don’t pass, and other familiar-looking dice table configurations. The players held two little cubes with white dots on each of their six sides, and they rolled the cubes into the corner of the table. As they did so, they yelled such things as, “Baby needs some new shoes,” “eighter from Decatur,” and “seven come eleven.” I asked the manager just what they were playing. With a straight face, he said, “Dominos.” I looked at the table, and inside the play area there was indeed a stack of dominos. I said, “What are those for?” He said, “Oh, if an investigator or stranger comes in and we think he wants to cause us trouble, we ask the players to put the cubes down and throw the dominos”. As play continued at the “craps,” also known as “dominos” table, a police officer came in. But he was not there to cause trouble, merely to see the manager, who spoke to an assistant. Momentarily the assistant returned with a carton of cigarettes, and the policeman left (with the cigarettes.)
The casinos also offered the game of rommy. Rommy was played with a shoe of six decks. Two cards were dealt to players, and the dealer also took two cards. The players then either “stood” or asked for more cards. If the player’s cards added up to a number closer to twenty-one (without going over twenty-one) than the dealer’s cards, then the player won. All payoffs were on an even-money basis. The casino managers insisted that this was not “blackjack” because blackjack was prohibited by the law. This was “rommy.” There was no blackjack payoff of 5–2; there were payoffs of 10–1 if the player had three sevens and 3–1 if the player had a 5–6–7 straight in the same suit. Rommy was a legal game.
I noticed a small roulette wheel in the back of a casino. I was told that they tried this but the government at the time did not accept it (perhaps they had not given the authorities enough cigarettes?). The roulette game they tried was one called golden ten or observation roulette in Holland and Germany, where it was popular at the time. The wheel was stationary, with its number slats in the middle of a big metal bowl. The dealer would roll the ball slowly so it would make wide ellipses as it rolled to the center. While the ball was slowly moving downward, the player would observe it closely and predict where it would land. With great skill, the predictions could be correct. Hence, argued the casinos, the game was not a gambling game, but a skilled game. The argument worked better in Holland than it did in Costa Rica. The casinos also set up a roulette layout and called the game canasta (a legal game). In this “canasta” game, a single number was drawn out of a basket of Ping-Pong balls (similar to a bingo basket). The number was the winning number for a game played on a roulette layout.
The casino very much wanted to have slot machines, but there was no way they could read them into the 1922 law. In the matter of taxes, the casinos seemed to pay what the government demanded, and that amount was quite flexible and certainly much less than per-table fees stipulated in municipal ordinances.
In 1995, the casinos stopped trying to fight the law. The law was changed, clearly permitting casino games of craps, roulette, and blackjack. Slot machines were also authorized. As of 2000, the number of casinos had been reduced; there were approximately twenty in the country, a dozen being located in the capital city of San Jose. They must be in resort hotels, and the hotel must own the casino.
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