The dealer dealt two cards per turn from a standard deck of 52, and the object was for players to predict which cards would appear.

Spades were usually depicted, but suits didn’t matter only face value counted. Players bet against the house, placing bets upon a green cloth-covered layout with painted images of 13 cards, ace through king. In later years, a framed tiger portrait hanging outside a gaming house announced the presence of a faro game within.įaro was possibly the simplest gambling game ever devised. Some early faro cards and layouts also displayed a portrait of a Bengal tiger, inspiring such terms as ‘bucking the tiger’ or ‘twisting the tiger’s tail’ to describe playing the game.

Its name often spelled ‘pharo’ or ‘pharaoh,’ derived from period French playing cards, whose backs sometimes bore the likeness of an Egyptian ruler. Born in France, the game came to America in the 1700s. Whether or not we believe the old gambler’s tale (a brush with the ‘Prince of Pistoleers’ would have sold copies in 1892, especially since Hickok was no longer around to refute it), the story illustrates what a player was often up against when he tangled with the king of all frontier gambling games faro. As he swung around to cover the room with two six-shooters, his hat fell off, revealing a mane of long, sandy hair and the familiar countenance of James Butler ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok. Without warning, the furious player whacked the dealer and his partner over the head with his walking stick, toppled the table and began stuffing his pockets with the contents of the till. ‘Fifty goes when you lose,’ replied the dealer. When the dealer handed over only $25, the stranger protested and was told, ‘the house limit’s 25.’ ‘But you took 50 when I lost,’ said the man. The fellow placed the same bet again and this time won. One day a strangely familiar gent, with blue-tinted spectacles and his hat pulled low on his forehead, sauntered up to a gaming table and placed a $50 bet, which he promptly lost.

Devol was working in the Gold Room saloon in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, at the time. In his 1892 autobiography Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi, gambler-bunco artist George Devol described a brush he had with a celebrity in 1874. Faro: Favorite Gambling Game of the Frontier Close

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