9 'I Bet You Didn't Know' Facts About Gambling

• The Romans loved games of chance and made dice out of sheep’s knuckles.
• The oldest dice known to man were found in the north of Iraq. They are roughly five thousand years old.
• Poker evolved from a French game: poque, which in turn is an adaptation of a German card game: pochen which means “to brag”.
• A “Dead Man’s Hand” is called so because this was the hand that Wild Bill Hickok had when he was murdered. Hickok was a famous gunman, lawman, scout and gambler from the American Old West. He was killed in a shoot-out while playing poker in Dakota.
• In a new deck of cards, the order of card suits from top to bottom is as follows: hearts, clubs, diamonds then spades.
• The King of clubs and the king of diamonds are known as the “Kissing Kings”
• Blackjack is called blackjack because of a trend of some casinos paying a bonus for a hand of an ace and a jack of spades. The blackjack was essential for the extra pay out, so the game´s name evolved from twenty-one to blackjack.
• The forerunner to roulette was a game developed in England called roly-poly. Roly-poly had white spaces and black spaces, a “bar black” and a “bar white”, which were the older games´s version of the zero pocket. You bet on black or white and if the ball landed in bar black or bar white, you lost the bet. Even in those days the casinos had a house edge!
• The face cards that are featured on mondern day playing cards have evolved from a design originally used in the 1400s in France. King David is the king of spades, Alexander the Great is the king of clubs, Charlemagne is the king of hearts and Julius Ceaser is the king of diamonds.