Some popular casino table games for machine-making real money are poker, blackjack, roulette and baccarat.
A card game in which players are presented with a hand of cards and have to decide whether to ‘hit’ (get another card) or ‘stand’, blackjack involves skill and luck to help you beat the dealer. It’s a fast-paced game and the aim is not to go beyond 21 otherwise you ‘bust’. A popular game of chance played in casinos, it is relatively easy to learn.
Craps
The dice-throwing game of craps is a lottery form of gambling, played by players wagering against one another or against the casino.
Players have to lay their bets on the table, which are casino tokens that they use for their wagers, and they can win or lose money based on whether their guesses were correct or not.
Whatever the dice landed on, the players entertained and made bets accordingly, cheering and crying as time unfolded.
No one is quite sure who invented the game, but it’s generally thought to have evolved from Hazard, a game brought to England by French soldiers in the 13th century or even the ‘knucklebones’ of earlier Greek armies. Thousands of years later, some say, Roman soldiers played a similar game during the siege of Troy at a time when there was nothing but time on their hands. Others believe that casino craps eventually evolved from Hazard, a game played in English pubs starting in the 17th century before finding its way onto riverboats plying the Mississippi. Street craps it was.
The modern version of craps emerged in 1907, engineered by John H Winn, a maker of dice. He created a streamlined table and designed the ‘don’t pass’ bet for his new-fangled game.
Baccarat
Baccarat is one of the simplest of table games. The game is played with six decks of cards, shuffled together, and the dealer as well as the player are dealt two cards (and a third if needed). The value of the hand closest to nine wins. Face cards count zero and aces count one.
Baccarat’s high-rolling prestige and association with lingering glamour is another reason why this game, considered the classic casino card game, has been featured in so many films. The most recent example is the 2013 movie The Great Gatsby. Baccarat is also big with Asian high-rollers.
Baccarat is quite easy to understand and with the lower table minimums, this draws a larger crowd of players and because of its fairly low house numbers it is a good option to wager on. Its popularity is widespread on casino floors around the world.
Blackjack
Twenty-one, or blackjack as it’s known in the US or vingt-et-un in French – takes pride of place as the most popular casino table game. All you need to do is beat the dealer’s hand with one of a number of tens and picture cards, or by making the bonus hand of jack, queen and king, game’s other name easy to play. It requires no prior experience of any kind; just the right sort of mettle.
All players make their initial wager before two cards are dealt, and are then able to hit, split, double down or surrender, each with its own signature gesture (pushing the cards together to scrape them across the table, or waving a hand horizontally, for instance). Unlike blackjack, the dealer doesn’t expose the hole card right away – the dealer waits until all players have said their piece. Then the dealer draws or stands, per the rules of the game.
Roulette
Roulette is a casino game of pure luck where we place the chips on the table and we wait for the croupier to spin and say ‘Rien ne va plus’. The ball will then fall in one number corresponding with the stakes that you have placed on the table and you have won the play!
It is derived from even earlier games such as hoca and portique, which exist in numerous forms. The earliest known inventor of this variant is the 17th century French mathematician Blaise Pascal, who devised it while attempting to design a perpetual motion machine.
There are different types of bets people can make in the game such as inside and outside betting. Inside betting is made by putting your chips in the section of the middle of the number you decide you want to bet and outside betting is on the exterior of the board.
Poker
Poker is a card game in which players compete against each other for the best winning hand. It’s a game of skill and strategy, yet there is a level of luck involved. Whoever wins the pot, which is all the money that was placed into the kitty at a given round, is the one who has the best poker hand at the end of that round.
Various forms of poker exist, but the basic framework is the same in each one. At the beginning of each round, players put down money to cover a bet. Then, players are dealt two cards each from a standard 52-card deck. Players then bet on the strength of their hand. At the conclusion of each round, one player serves as the dealer. In some games, players decide who this individual will be for a particular round. In other games, the same person will act as the dealer for every round.