Game Room & Gaming (06)

History of Roulette
This web page from house-of-roulette.com is a detailed history of the game of roulette, tracing its origins back to 17th Century France. Calling it "the oldest casino game in existence," they also describe how the game came to America in the 19th Century. There are also links to the web site as a whole, featuring roulette forums, software, online roulette games, equipment, rules, personnel, French roulette versus American roulette, tips, and links to various casinos. There are also roulette games available for download and to play online.

Blackjack Advantage Systems
This article describes various systems that blackjack players have used throughout the years to gain a supposed advantage over the house when playing blackjack at casinos. Various books like Winning Blackjack are discussed, as is the author's own obsession with blackjack advantage systems and the obsession of many statisticians in the statistics field. He discusses many systems, too complicated to describe here. It's a good read for blackjack enthusiasts looking to gain an edge. The author is a gambling instructor, and is essentially sorting through "the methods, the men, the myths, and the message" of blackjack advantage systems.

Poker Origins
There seem to be differences of opinion on the origin of Poker. Moreover, there seems to be no clear or direct early ancestor of the game. It is more likely that Poker derived its present day form from elements of many different games. The consensus is that because of it's basic principle, its birth is a very old one. Jonathan H. Green makes one of the earliest written references to Poker in 1834. In his writing, Green mentions rules to what he called the "cheating game," which was then being played on Mississippi riverboats. He soon realized that his was the first such reference to the game, and since it was not mentioned in the current American Hoyle, he chose to call the game Poker. Yet another possible explanation for the word poker, is that it came from a version of an underworld slang word, poke, a term used by pickpockets. Cardsharps who used the 20-card cheating game to relieve a sucker from his poke may have used that word among themselves, adding an "r" to make it "poker."