On this page:

1. Faro Table Gambling
2. Fargo Game
3. Faro Card Game Free
4. Free Online Gambling For Fun
5. What Is Faro Gambling

• 4 Special moves and situations
• 5 History of Faro

If you’re heading to Faro for some gaming, you can play your hand at Casino Vilamoura, located 10.9 mi (17.6 km) away, though it’s not the only place worth checking out while you’re in town. Tourists speak highly of the local cuisine, fantastic nightlife, and shopping. Some of the better known were Tom Kemp’s Dance and Gambling Hall, which in 1879 featured vaudeville song-and-dance star Eddie Foy; the Texas House, where proprietors Bailey Youngston and ‘Con’ Featherly provided a dozen faro tables around the clock; and ‘Pop’ Wyman’s Great Saloon, in which a large sign over the bar read: ‘Don’t.

Faro is the English name for a French card game that developed in the 1600s from the game Basset. It is also known as Pharaoh, Pharo, and Farobank. How it made its way over the Atlantic is unknown, but it was probably English immigrants who brought it with them to the New World. What we do know is that it became a very popular saloon game in North America in the 19th century.

The deck

Faro is played with a standard 52 card deck. There are no jokers. No cards are wild.

Terminology

Playing Faro

1. Faro is traditionally played at an oval table covered in green baize. A board is placed on top of the table and a suit of cards (usually the suit of spades) is placed on the board in numerical order to create a spot for the players to put their bets.
2. The players place their bets on the suit of cards. If you want to bet on the queen, you put your wager on the queen-card, and so on. You are allowed to put bets on several cards if you want to. You can also split a wager by placing it between cards or on specific card edges in a fashion that you might recognize somewhat from the roulette table.
3. An alternative bet called the High Card Bet is possible. The betting area for this bet is located at the top of the layout. If you bet on this, you get paid of the Player’s Card is higher than the Banker’s Card.
4. The full 52 card deck is shuffled and placed inside the dealing box.
5. The first card (known as the soda) is removed from the deck and put aside. This is known as “burning” and is not unique to Faro.
6. The dealer draws two cards. The first card is the Banker’s Card and the second one is the Player’s Card. The Banker’s Card is placed on the right side of the dealing box and the Player’s Card on the left side.
7. All bets of the same denomination (regardless of suit) as the Banker’s Card are lost and goes to the bank. All bets of the same denomination (regardless of suit) as the Player’s Card gets paid 1:1 by the bank.A high card bet gets paid if the Player’s Card is higher than the Banker’s Card.
8. Bets that haven’t been lost or gotten paid remain on the table unless the punter removes his wager before the dealer draws two new cards.

Special moves and situations

The copper

A punter can reverse the intent of his bet by placing “the copper” on it. This reverses the meaning of the win/loss piles for that bet.

The copper is a six-sided (hexagonal) token. If coppers are unavailable, some gambling halls will use penny coins instead.

Calling the turn

When there are only three cards left in the shoe, the dealer will call the turn. Now, the players can make a special bet by trying to predict the exact order of the three remaining cards.

Then, the dealer will draw the Banker’s Card, the Player’s Card and finally the Hock.

If all three cards are of the same value (which is rare) there will be no calling the turn bet.

The dealer draws a doublet

If the dealer draws a doublet (two cards of the same value), the bank takes half of the stakes upon the card which equals the doublet.

This is the only statistical advantage that the bank has over the player.

History of Faro

During the reign of Louis XIV, a game called pharaon was played in southwestern France. When Basset was banned in France in 1691 Pharaoh emerged as an alternative, but eventually, Pharaoh was banned as well.

In England, both Basset and Pharaoh – known there as Pharo – was widely played in the 1700s. As the game Pharo was introduced to North America, the spelling Faro became dominant. From the mid-1820s and onward, Faro was an extremely popular card game in the saloons and gambling halls in the United States. Data from the civil war period show that Faro was played in over 150 locations in Washington DC alone.

Two slang expressions for the act of playing Faro is “bucking the tiger” and “twisting the tiger’s tail”. In the mid-1800s, the association between Faro and tigers had become so strong in the U.S. that some gambling houses would hang a drawing of a tiger in the window to let gamblers know that Faro was offered inside.

Cheating

Historically, cheating at Faro has been very common and committed by both bankers and punter.

When played without any cheating, the banker (“the house”) has a very low statistical advantage over the punters, causing low long-term profitability for the house. Unscrupulous dealers would cheat in various ways to improve their odds, e.g. by using stacked or rigged decks that would produce plenty of doublets.

One of the most common types of cheating among punters was moving a wager from a losing card to a winning (or at least not losing) card.

Examples of famous faro players

• Giacomo Casanova, a Venetian 18th-century adventurer, and author
• Friedrich Freiherr von der Trenck, an 18th-century Prussian officer
• Casimir Abraham von Schlippenbach, an 18th-century Dutch cavalry commander who, according to his autobiography, won huge sums by playing this game.
• Charles James Fox, an 18th century Whig radical who preferred Faro over all other games.
• Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith II, a crocked Faro dealer and club owner in 19th century Denver, Colorado.
• William “Canada Bill” Jones, a 19th-century scam artist and card sharp in North America
• Whyatt Earp, an Old West gambler, deputy sheriff (in Pima County) and deputy town marshal (in Tombstone, Arizona Territory).
• John “Doc” Holliday, an Old West gambler and dentist who dealt Faro in the Bird Cage Theater in Tombstone, Arizona.

Fictional Faro

• In Leo Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace”, Nicholas Rostov loses 43,000 rubles to Dolokhov playing Faro.
• Faro is an essential part of Alexander Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades”, and consequently also for Tchaikovsky’s opera “The Queen of Spades”.
• In Puccini’s opera “La Fanculla del West”, the miners play Faro in the first act.
• Numerous references to Faro is made in Gunsmoke (both the radio drama and the television series).
• In the video game “Assasin’s Creed Unity”, Arno Dorian plays Faro and loses to a cheating blacksmith.

OBJECTIVE OF FARO: Place winning bets on cards to receive a payout each turn.

NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 2-10 players

MATERIALS: 52-card deck, betting chips, coppers (pennies), case-keeper, dealer box (optional)

RANK OF CARDS: A,K,Q,J,10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2

TYPE OF GAME: Gambling

Faro Table Gambling

AUDIENCE: Adult

INTRODUCTION TO FARO

This gambling game was extremely popular in the American Wild West and the gold rush, today Faro is a lesser known and enjoyed game, having gone out of style in the 1950s. It’s believed to have originated in France sometime in the late 17th century and was called “Pharaon.” As it passed through western Europe its name changed to Pharo in England, once it arrived in the United States its name was converted to Faro.

Faro is a derivative of the game Bassetta, which was brought to Paris from Italy in the early 17th century. Its origins can be traced back to as early as the 15th century.

HOW TO PLAY

Setting Up

The dealer also acts as a banker.

Players buy chips from the banker in order to place bets during the game.

The banker uses a table, typically covered in green cloth. It’s 3 x 1.5 feet with thirteen cards of one suit (usually spades) printed on it. Below is a photo of the table layout.

In saloons, an employee of the banker or anyone not playing the game would manage the casekeeper. It is an abacus-like board with four beads on a wire opposite of a card. Once a card has been shown, the casekeeper would push a bead over to indicate so. Before a fresh deal, all the beads are pushed over to the other side of the wire to indicate they have not been shown. In the absence of a casekeeper a cue sheet may be used. Simply grab a fresh piece of paper, to the far left, from top to bottom, mark A-K-Q-J-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2. If a card is shown, and it is a winner, indicate so by placing a straight line beside the corresponding rank. If the card is a loser, indicate that with a 0 next to the card show. A soda is marked with a dot. in the event of a split, mark an x. Reminder, there will only be three notations beside the card’s rank on the cue card if there is a split.

Betting units should be decided prior to starting the game.

Betting

1. Size: There are two limits on size: plain limit or running limit. The plain limit is the highest amount staked on a card for the initial bet. The running limit is 4 x the plain limit. So, if the plain limit is 5 the running limit is 20. For example, a player bets 5 and wins. They may leave their original stake and winnings, which totals 10, in the same spot or move it to another card where they also can win 10. This means the player’s total stake is 20, the running limit imposed by the banker. If the player wins that last bet, they may only stake 20 on the next. This is called parleeing a bet. If the player wins, their maximum stake doubles. So, if the first bet is 5 the second is 10, the third is 20, the fourth is 40, and so on. Bankers generally allow parleeing bets because they have the statistical advantage.
2. Placing Bets: Players must decide what cards on the Faro board they wish to bet on. Placing a betting chip in the center of a card is placing a bet on that card alone. However, they are several possible ways to bet on cards in Faro. If a player places a betting chip equidistant from four cards in the center of the table, they are placing a bet on all four of those cards. Bets may also be placed in the corner of a card, this places a bet on that card and the card directly diagonal (drawing a line through the chip to the next card) of the card with the chip. Players may also place a betting chip toward the end of the table, equidistant from three cards, one of those being one of the cards farthest out in the layout. This places a bet on all three of those cards. The last simple way to bet is high card. On the Faro table will be a rectangle marked “high card,” placing a bet here means you think the winning card will be higher than the losing card.
3. Coppered Bets: Placing a copper (simply a penny) on top of your bet reverses the bet. You are then betting that a card (or cards) will be a losing card rather than be a winning card.
4. Players may avoid risking their stake on a turn by declaring, “I bar this bet for a turn.”
5. Players can reduce their stake by half by declaring, “one-half of this bet goes.”

Playing Faro

After bets all placed, the dealer shuffles and cuts the deck and places it face-up beside themselves. Ideally, the dealer will use a dealing box. It is a spring loaded box the dealer puts the deck in so that cards come out one at a time and players can’t see cards below the one on top. This reduces cheating.

The first card on top is called the soda, it is not used and immediately discarded to the left of the board. Following the soda, the next card is the loser card. It is placed between the soda and the pack, on the left side of the board. The next card face-up on the deck is the winning card for that turn. Each turn has two cards, a winner and a loser. Before the next turn, the winning card is discarded to the same pile as the soda.

The game has 25 turns with betting rounds in between, starting with the soda and ending with the hock (the last card turned). All bets are settled at the end of a turn and new bets are placed.

Fargo Game

Loser cards only win for the banker, who collects the chips placed on the losing card on the table, unless the bet was coppered. If the bet was coppered the player wins, their winnings is equal to the amount of the bet placed.

Winning cards win for the player who bet on them. Their winnings is equal to the bet amount placed on the winning card and paid out by the banker.

If the winning and losing card are the same in a turn this is called a split. The dealer collects half the chips placed on that card.

When the deck runs dry, and the hock is disposed of, cards a collected and reshuffled. This is a fresh deal. Playing resumes as normal.

Faro Card Game Free

REFERENCES:

Free Online Gambling For Fun

http://web.archive.org/web/20160507070137/http://www.thegamesforum.com:80/Faro.htm

http://www.pophaydn.com/uploads/7/7/6/6/7766194/faro_booklet.pdf

What Is Faro Gambling

https://www.pagat.com/banking/faro.html