Talk:Faro (banking game)/Archive 1

Decidedly
Sentences like "It was, however, the most dangerous game for the destruction of families ever invented." seem to be decidedly NPOV, hence the tag. -- AlexR 02:36, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Problems with this piece
The rules of the game are incorrectly described. A faro layout has only one suit (13 cards, usually spades as it was typically the suit used on the layout) on which gamblers place bets. The suit of the card that is dealt is irrelevant; if a bet is placed on the four of spades on the layout the bet pays if the winning card dealt is a four in any suit. Further, the bets pay even money, not 2 to 1 as this page describes.

(Rick Rutt 19:45, 7 December 2005 (UTC) I revised the article to describe the table, and clarify "2 for 1" versus "1 to 1".)

So a match consists of matching the winning (or losing) card's denomination, regardless of suits. That's what I finally gathered after struggling through the existing rules, so I've made an attempt at fixing them. Also, I thought the casekeep descriotion could use a small clarifying addition. Peter Delmonte (talk) 05:23, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Also, there is considerable debate regarding the origin of the name faro, though it appears unlikely that it is related to the term pharoah.

Here are a couple of links with good faro info:

http://www.lahacal.org/gentleman/faro.html

http://www.bcvc.net/faro/start.htm

(Rick Rutt 01:28, 13 December 2005 (UTC) I added a link to Mark Howard's article at www.bcvc.net )

See also, John Scarne, New Complete Guide to Gambling

How do folks feel about updating this page?

Odds are always fair, except when a pair is dealt
The original article contained this betting analysis:

"Suppose a person to put down 20s. upon a card when only eight are in hand; the last card was a cipher, so there were four places to lose, and only three to win, the odds against being as 4 to 3.

"If 10 cards only were in, then it was 5 to 4 against the player; in the former case it was the seventh part of the money, whatever it was, £1 or £100; in the latter case, a ninth. The odds from the beginning of the deal insensibly stole upon the player at every pull, till from the first supposed 4 per cent. it became about 15 per cent."

This analysis incorrectly implies a house edge that increases as the cards in the shoe are dealt out.

For each deal, two cards are dealt, as described in the article. If the denomination is dealt to one pile, it is a winner; if to the other pile, it is a loser. The number of remaining cards of that denomination is irrelevant -- only which pile the next one lands on counts. Think this through, and you see there is no house edge (provide different denominations are dealt to each of the two piles).

The house edge comes from the situation when a pair is dealt -- the same denomination to both piles. The dealer takes half of any bet on that denomination.

Refer to the links in the prior discussion note to confirm these rules.

Rick Rutt 19:41, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Faro Dealers
Faro Dealer's were not called "sharps, sharpers, and blackleg." A sharp, and sharpers, are names for confidence men. True, a faro dealer might cheat, and someone may accuse them of sharping, but "shaper" is not synonymous with "faro dealer."

This page needs fixing
Someone needs to fix this page. I don't know who wrote "the rules," or where they got their information, but the names and rules are different from what is currently there. It seems the writer mixed European rules and names, with U.S. rules and names. They also used slang names, like "coffin" and "mechanical shoe" for dealing box, not standard all over the country, which only confuses readers. The whole article needs re-writing, using standard names and rules. Soapy 11:28, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

I began correcting some of the mistakes, but do not know the European rules, or at least, that is what I am guessing the writer was using. I collected artifacts and books on faro, and played the game for many years, and I have never come across the game and payoff rules in this article. Then again, I studied and played 19th century U.S. faro. Soapy 11:28, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Recent Faro
I personally played this game at Tropicana in Las vegas in early 80's. It continued in Reno for a couple more years. There have been recent musings about bringing it back. See John celona 14:44, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Probably not worth mentioning here, but the otherwise forgettable PC casino game Reel Deal Gold Rush included Faro. And managed to blow half the game by eliminating the casekeeper and use of a single deck.  (Having only purchased the game for its inclusion of Faro, I felt genuinely ripped off upon discovering the game so badly mangled.)  There is a free online Flash game called Wichita Faro that uses a casekeeper and single deck, and, as such, is a way better electronic approximation of Faro than the one that Reel Deal marketed commercially.  FWIW.  74.131.51.240 (talk) 01:31, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Doc Holliday Did Not Deal Faro
Wyatt Earp did. Doc never twisted the tiger's tail. Holliday preferred poker where skill and nerve are predominant. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.6.239.53 (talk) 07:09, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps you should not limit your knowledge of Old West history to the movie Tombstone. 204.115.253.51 20:20, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

It is at least likely that Holliday ran the Faro games for Earp at times. For his own gambling, he certainly preferred poker. 76.28.103.69 (talk) 21:04, 20 September 2009 (UTC)Will in New Haven76.28.103.69 (talk) 21:04, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Word origin
"Its name is believed by some to be a corruption of pharaoh and refers to the Egyptian motif that commonly adorned French-made playing cards of the period, though no records of any Egyptian Motif on any playing cards of that era have been found." This is a little confusing- how do we know an Egyptian motif was common if there are no records of it? I'm hoping I've misunderstood this. Does it mean that there is no record of the French cards being used to play this particular game, or in areas where it was popular? -FZ 16:22, 24 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I've seen an antique paper encyclopaedia (circa 1900) that stated the French-made Pharaoh-portrait cardback story emphatically as fact. I'll see if I can hunt it down and cite it if I can, although I'm worried that the emphatic phrasing could have been a careless mistake on the part of the paper encyclopaedia's editor.  74.131.51.240 (talk) 01:36, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Country of origin?
Says France in the text, Italy in the fact box. Which is it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.108.138.68 (talk) 19:46, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Minor Edit to Clarify Rules
"The banker collected on all the money staked on the card laid on the right, and he paid double the sums staked on those on the card remaining on the left (of the dealing box)."

I removed this sentence from description of the rules, because the previous sentence already describes how the bets on the two cards are paid, and because the phrase "paid double the sums staked" could be interpreted to mean that the payoff on the player's card is 2 to 1. OldTimeNESter (talk) 19:26, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

French terms used in Faro
This is a mix of Basset and Faro terms, not just Faro. For instance, you can't cock the corner of a card in Faro to Paroli. That's Basset. It's even taken from the Wikipedia article for Basset: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basset_%28card_game%29. Thus I'm removing it. 74.10.226.163 (talk) 17:51, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Actually, that section on the French terms is taken from Pantologia. A new cabinet cyclopædia  published in 1819. You can see the content here:, so I don't think it is appropriate to remove this. I've been pondering that section though for a while, and I do think it needs to be split between the classical European play and the American West play, as many terms used in one locale did not migrate to the other, and as you say, things like cocking the card may have originally been part of gameplay when the game forked from Basset, only to later fall out of common practice. Crow  Caw  22:14, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Hrrm, what's really needed then is knowledge of at which point the "modern" (or American?) game came into being. While hardly conclusive, Bicycle's car game glossary only lists 8 words (http://www.bicyclecards.com/card-games/glossary). Most folks playing or reading about Faro now would be looking for the one played in saloons rather than the Venetian derivative of Basset. Also, the rules listed are for the American style game, not an older European version. Also, while completely speculative on my part, it's hard to imagine a drunken, semi-literate miner in a saloon in Alaska using French words. I wish Pantagolia listed the Italian terminology, that would make it easier to trace. Perhaps the terminology should be left in but with a disclaimer? 74.10.226.163 (talk) 16:03, 15 April 2015 (UTC)

Another Alternate Spelling: "Farrow?"
I've seen the spelling of "farrow" used along with "pharaoh" amd "faro." Should it be included in the opening paragraph as a another alternate spelling?

Dont follow at all.
As someone who doesn't know how to play, the procedure makes little sense to me. I would not be able to deal a game of faro based on what this article tells me.

"A deck of cards was shuffled and placed inside a "dealing box", a mechanical device also known as a "shoe", which was used to prevent manipulations of the draw by the banker and intended to assure players of a fair game.   The first card in the dealing box was called the "soda" and was "burned off", leaving 51 cards in play. The dealer then drew two cards: the first was called the "banker's card" and was placed on the right side of the dealing box. The next card after the banker's card was called the carte anglaise (English card) or simply the "player's card", and it was placed on the left of the shoe.[6]    The banker's card was the bettor's "losing card"; regardless of its suit, all bets placed on the layout's card that had the same denomination as the banker's card were lost by the players and won by the bank. The player's card was the "winning card". All bets placed on the card that had that denomination were returned to the players with a 1 to 1 (even money) payout by the bank (e.g., a dollar bet won a dollar). A “high card” bet won if the player’s card had a higher value than the banker’s card.[7] The dealer settled all bets after each two cards drawn. This allowed players to bet before drawing the next two cards. Bets that neither won nor lost remained on the table, and could be picked up or changed by the player prior to the next draw. A player could reverse the intent of his bet by placing a hexagonal (6-sided) token called a "copper" on it. Some histories said a penny was sometimes used in place of a copper. This was known as "coppering" the bet, and reversed the meaning of the win/loss piles for that particular bet. When only three cards remained in the dealing box, the dealer would "call the turn", which was a special type of bet that occurred at the end of each round. The object now was to predict the exact order that the 3 remaining cards, Bankers, Players, and the final card called the Hock, would be drawn.[6] The player's odds here were 5 to 1, while a successful bet paid off at 4 to 1 (or 1 to 1 if there were a pair among the three, known as a "cat-hop"). This provided one of the dealer's few advantages in faro. If it happened that the three remaining cards were all the same, there would be no final bet, as the outcome was not in question." So, what, the players place bets on a particular card in the suite pasted to the table, say '5'. The dealer draws two cards, and if your card is a 5, you win, if HIS card is a 5, you loose...and if neither is a 5, nothing happens? I had to re-read this like 7 times to finally notice the line that says 'all bets placed on the layout's card', which was crucial to understanding the rest. Before that I was seriously thinking it was just saying that you flipped over two cards.....I'm not actually sure WHAT I thought it was saying before that. It seems to me that the cards pasted to the table are a crucial part of the game, and this should be more clearly explained.

64.223.165.28 (talk) 04:26, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

Identifying bets, cheating, etc
How on earth do they keep track of which bet belongs to which person? What if 3 players all want to bet on the 3? (And while I'm at it, it doesn't say if the suite of cards on the table are drawn from a different deck from the one the dealer is using or not; I assume that the dealer uses a full deck, and so there are 4 of each card that can be drawn per deck, in addition to the cards glued to the table?) But if there is only one suite glued to the table, how do they keep track? According to the 'cheating' section, players could slide their bet to a different place when no-one was looking: if you could get away with that, what's to stop you from claiming someone else's bet was actually YOURS and that HE had been the one who bet on the 3 that lost? And how on earth could someone get away with fixing a thread to their bet while at table, and no-one sees the tread at all? No one sees the bet moving, with or without the copper on top? And the tread leads right to you, whether it's fixed to the copper or the bet, and even if you tug the copper off tge bet, you now ave a copper lying on the table for some reason...with a tread leading right back to you. Somehow a lot of these sound like fantasy or the act of fools to me, not actual, effective methods for cheating the game. And come to think of it, if the player wins money by having a winning card higher than the dealers, doesn't that create an incentive to bet on the higher cards? Equal risk for greater payout, etc.

64.223.165.28 (talk) 04:47, 27 March 2018 (UTC)