Gambling News by House of Odds

Last year an executive for a major slot-machine manufacturer gave me a tour
of his Las Vegas headquarters. Don't be misled by the dozens of flashing,
clanging slots in the showroom off the lobby, he told me. His wasn't a
gambling company. "We're an entertainment company," he said. Unlikely as it
may sound, slots, with their bright video screens and realistic sound
systems, have become curiously sophisticated minimovies, complete with
engaging characters (sly geishas, say, or crafty penguins) and plot twists
(an unexpected game within a game), all built upon a deep understanding of
the human-machine interface. Slot designers are forever searching for the
precise combinations of sight, sound and potential payoff that will keep a
player handing over cash, all the while ensuring the experience is not so
intense that it induces seizures. Is that really so different from
Hollywood? This collusion of advanced mathematical modeling, Pavlovian
conditioning and multiplex smarts is intriguing. But what's even more
fascinating is how this whole enterprise can be traced back to ancient
Mesopotamians rolling sheep hucklebones to see which of the four sides would
come up. That's the tale told in "Roll the Bones" by David G. Schwartz,
director of the Center for Gaming Studies at the University of Nevada at Las
Vegas. Schwartz starts in the foggy borderlands between augury and chance,
when prognosticators looking for clues about the future would roll the bones
and interpret the results. It wasn't a huge step to start wagering on the
outcome of these rolls. And it may be that humans are genetically hard-wired
for such behavior: Dice arose independently in various civilizations. The
first dice in India were fashioned of brown nuts; Native American dice often
were made from shells or beaver teeth. Among the many telling facts Schwartz
touches upon: Dice carved with symbols actually predate the use of numerals.
>From dice, it's onward to playing cards and wagering on the outcome of
everything from insect fights to basketball games, from lottery drawings to
wheels of fortune.

This tour takes the reader from ancient ages of superstition through to the
Enlightenment, which gave rise to the science of probability; from seedy
Western saloons to the gilded gambling halls of Monaco; and inexorably
onward, as you might have guessed, to a patch of scrappy desert in southern
Nevada.

It's an epic story with an engaging cast. You'll learn a bit about Denmark
Vesey, a Charleston, S.C., slave who won a lottery and used his earnings to
purchase his freedom (successfully) and fund an insurrection of some 9,000
slaves and freemen (unsuccessfully). And there's John Morrissey, the
bare-knuckle fighter turned gambling baron turned nearly respectable
congressman, who was a major figure behind the rise of Saratoga Springs as a
mid-19th-century gambling resort.

Chronicling a tale with such sweep has its challenges, not all of which
Schwartz has overcome. The evolution of gambling refuses to follow a linear
path; you can't trace a neat line from dice to the OTB parlor. Schwartz
leaps around to give each form of gambling its due, as if in a frenzied game
of Whac-a-Mole. (Speaking of which, his detour through the world of crooked
carnival games is among the book's more engaging sections.)

All that hurrying around can be a bit aggravating, giving the book a jumpy
feel. Leonie Leblanc, "the most famous Baden-Baden female gambler," is given
only two sentences. And will anyone not feel shortchanged by this brief
note: "One man even proclaimed his 'killer duck' an interspecies champion
and pitted it against all canine challengers."

The narrative finds a more satisfying pace about halfway through, when the
spotlight swings to the origins of modern gambling in the United States. We
begin in New Orleans (where craps and poker took root), then travel with
cardsharps up the Mississippi on steamboats, then push on to San Francisco
during the gold rush and then Las Vegas.

Schwartz makes little effort to draw any grand conclusions about what this
5-millennium-old habit can tell us about ourselves. He seems content to
simply note the obvious: that gambling is an ingrained part of our everyday
life. "Roll the Bones" could have used more analysis and less inventory.

Still, Schwartz, the author of two previous books on gambling culture, does
manage to accomplish something remarkable: He's made Las Vegas seem like a
vast repository of history, not a crash site of implosion, rebuilding and
reinvention.

The book's last chapter describes a stroll through the splashy new Wynn Las
Vegas, a $2.7 billion casino that is "the most expensive ... yet built."
Schwartz sees a ghostly reminder of the past at every turn - from the rise
of fancy casinos in Italy, which is reflected in an Italian restaurant, to
the specter of the early-19th-century German spa resorts, as seen in a
lavish indoor garden.