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 Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2005 1:38 pm Post subject: Prehistoric Gamblers |
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Prehistoric Gamblers:
Chance
A Guide to Gambling, Love,
the Stock Market &
Just About Everything Else
Hardcover
By Amir D. Aczel
A mathematician directs his gaze at probability theory in this fascinating gem of a book.
| Quote: | The History of Probability Predates History
Probability and chance and the interest human beings have had in them predate historical times. Dice made of animal bones have been found and dated to the Neolithic period, more than six thousand years ago. They look remarkably similar to modern dice. In other words, at about the same time the earliest farming societies were being formed, man started playing ur-craps.
These early dice, mad of animal bones, are called astragaloi (the singular is astragalus) and came from particular hoof bones of sheep that had two rounded sides and four square of almost equal size. When early humans played with such primitive dice, starting in prehistoric times and extending to the Greek and Roman eras, the games consisted of betting on the four possible outcomes, disregarding the two rounded sides, since the dice couldn't land on them. Astragaloi remained in use even after the six-sided die, made from bone or carved from wood or stone, was invented, indicating both their usefulness and that there were nostalgists even back then. (Footnote omitted) (From Introduction, pgs. vii and ix). |
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| Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 10:33 am Post subject: |
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The Poker Face of Wall Street
Hardcover
By Aaron Brown
| Quote: | At some time in the distant past, after the invention of language, two strangers who could communicate met for the first time. I don't know what they said, but two good guesses are "Wann bet?" or "Wanna swap?" Gambling and trading are two of the oldest human activities. In fact, some researchers trace these activities to animals, bacteria, and even single genes. Both of these activities involve risk, one of the most important and least understood puzzles life throws our way.
In premodern societies, gambling was the preferred way to make decisions when adequate facts were not available to make informed choices. Stone Age societies throw sticks, stones, or bones - or examine animal entrails - to decide where to hunt or whether to move on. The Bible and other ancient sources make frequent references to casting lots to determine God's will. (From Chapter 4, A Brief History of Risk Denial, at p. 75) |
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Last edited by editor on Mon Dec 31, 2007 12:54 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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| Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2007 12:53 pm Post subject: |
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London
The Biography
Hardcover
By Peter Ackroyd
| Quote: | The first evidence of gambling in London can be adduced from the Roman period, with the excavation of dice carved out of bone or jet. The unexpected turns of life, as then experienced, are also revealed in the elaborate equipment of a fortune-teller found beneath Newgate Street. In the early medieval period Hazard was played in taverns and other low houses, together with another dice game known as Tables. In medieval brothels, too, gambling and drinking were part of the service. Quarrels over a game were sometimes fatal and, after one round of Tables, 'the loser fatally stabbed the winner on the way home'. There was plentiful scope for fraud, also, and there are reports of the gaming was everywhere. An excavation in Duke's Palace revealed 'a piece of medieval roof-tile shaped into a gaming counter', according to a report in The London Archaelogist, and as early as the thirteenth century, there were rules in Westminster for the punishment of any schoolboy found with dice in his possession. A stroke of the rod was delivered for every 'pip' on the dice.
Playing cards were imported into London in the fifteenth century, and their use became so widespread that in 1495 Henry VII 'forbad their use to servants and apprentices except during the Christmas holidays.' Stow records that 'From All hallows Eve to the day following Candlemas-day there was, among other sports, playing at cards, for counters, nails and points, in every house'. They were found in every tavern, too: packs of cards had the names of various inns imprinted upon them. Their merits were widely advertised. 'Spanish cards lately brought from Vig. Being pleasant to the eye by their curious colours and quite different from ours may be had at 1/- [one shilling] a pack at Mrs Baldwin's in Warwick Lane.' The business in cards became so mid-seventeenth century an annual income of five thousand pounds which meant that 'some 4.8 million packs of cards' must have been traded.
Fulham earned a reputation as early as the sixteenth century for its dubious traffic in dice and counters; it is evoked by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where
For gourd and fullam holds
And 'high' and 'low' beguile the rich and poor.
A fullam in this context was a loaded die...
... Gaming was declared illegal but, despite nightly raids upon certain selected hells in the city, it continued to flourish. There was always 'assembled a mixed crowd of gentlemen, merchants, tradesmen, clerks and sharpers of all degrees and conditions', ready to play at Hazard, Faro, Basset, Roly-poly and a score of other games involving dice and cards. Into these hells came the puffs, the flashers, the squibs, the dunners, the flash captains with a regiment of spies, porters and runners to give notice of approaching constables. At Almacks, a famous gaming club in Pall Mall, the players 'turned their coats inside out for luck'; they put on wristbands of leather to protect their lace ruffles and wore straw hats to guard their eyes fro the light and to prevent their hair from tumbling. Sometimes, too, they put on 'masks to conceal their emotions'. At Brooks's, the twenty-first rule stated that there whould be 'No gaming in the eating room, except tossing up for reckonings, on penalty of paying the whole bill of the members present'. There were othedr less agreeable occasions for a wager, as recorded in London Souvenirs. A prospective player once dropped down dead at the door of White's; ;the club immediately made bets whether he was dead or only in a fit; and when they were going to bleed him the wagerers for his death interposed, saying it would affect the fairness of the bet'.
... The traditions of public gaming were continued into the nineteenth century by such places as the Royal Saloon in Piccadilly, the Castle in Holborn, Tom Cribb's Saloon in Panton Street, the Finish in James Street, and Brydges Street Saloon in Covent Garden otherwise known as 'The Hall of Infamy' or Old Mother Damnable's'. On the other side of London, in the East End, there were gambling rooms and gambling clubs, to such an extent that one minister working among the poor of the area informed Charles Booth that 'gambling presses drink hard as the greatest evil of the day... all gamble more than they drink'. The street urchins gambled with farthings or buttons, in a card game known as Darbs, and betting on boxing or horse-racing was carried on through the agency of tobacconists, publicans, newsvendors and Booth's survey of the East End, 'Women as well as men...men and boys tumble out in their eagerness to read the latest 'speshul" and mark the winner.'
And then there was the lottery. It was first established in London in 1569... (From Chapter 42, A Turn of the Dice, at pgs. 381-385) |
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| Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 12:01 pm Post subject: |
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The Chess Artist
Genius, Obsession and the World's Oldest Game
Hardcover
By J.C. Hallman
| Quote: | My family had a pool table in the basement when I was a boy. I spent a lot of time down there. I didn't really play pool so much as use the table as a kind of fortune-telling device. If I broke and ran off nine balls in a row, I thought, good things would happen. Much later, in my chess research, I learned that the chance mechanisms of many games - dice, lotteries - had their origin in religious rites. As a boy attempting to participate in my own oracle, I acted out an age-old transition from pagan augury to ancient ritual.
In college, I played pool for money, which approximated another transition of chance mechanisms - from organized religion to gambling. Gambling inaugurated for me a fascination with games that was half indulgence half anthropological investigation. I became competent in poker, gin, bridge, and pool.
It was my interest in games that eventually led me to seek work as a casino dealer - another subculture to investigate, another seamy facet of my personality to indulge. I went to dealers school, received "degrees" in several gambling games, and started work in Atlantic City. It was fallacy. Whatever hypothesis I had thought to test mutated so badly that it needn't have existed at all. Play was fiction, I came to learn. Play was alternate space. Puppies and children know intuitevely that play matters, and to mature is to simply confuse play with nonplay, to assign seriousness to that which is still whimsical. Casino dealers understood this, I learned. They appeared to be playing but were not. They occupied the same space as players, but were wholly outside the universe of the game. (From Chapter 3, Writing Sonnets in Public, pg.s 25-26) |
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| Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 10:19 am Post subject: |
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Exodus to the Virtual World
How Online Fun Is Changing Reality
Hardcover
By Edward Castronova
| Quote: | Which Came First, the Society or the Game It Plays?
Just because the virtual exodus creates these pressures doesn't mecessarily mean tat the real and the virtual will become more similar. A country without mountains cannot become a country with them. Can the virtual world become more like the real world? Can the real world become more like the virtual?
To reflect on these questions, consider the following:
Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ingnominy, imprisonment... I owe that almost monstrous variety to an institution - the Lottery - which is unknown in other nations, or at work in them imperfectly or secretly. I have not delved into this institution's history. I know that sages cannot agree. About its mighty purposes I know as much as a man untutored in astrology might know about the moon. Mine is a dizzying country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality... My father would tell how once, long ago - centuries? years? - the lottery in Babylon was a game played by commoners.
-- Jorge Juis Borges, The Lottery in Babylon (1962)
(From the chapter entitled, Migration, p. 75) |
| Quote: | Jorge Juis Borges
Collected Fictions
Translated by Andrew Hurley
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| Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 11:11 am Post subject: |
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From the ESL Gambler's Guide to Children's Literature:
Arabian Nights
Stories told by Scheherazade
retold by the great pacifist and supporter
of women's suffrage Laurence Housman, younger bro of poet A. E.
with illustrations by Edmund Dulac
Hardcover
| Quote: | Aladdin and the Magic Lamp
Once upon a time, in a far city of Cathay, there dwelt a poor tailor who had an only son named Aladdin. This boy was a born ne'er do well, and persistently resisted all his father's efforts to teach him a trade by means of which he would be able to in future to earn a livelihood. Aladdin would sooner play at knuckle-bones in the gutter with others as careless as himself than he would set his mind to honest business; and, as to obeying his parents int he smallest matter, it was not in his nature. Such was this Aladdin, and yet - so remarkable is the favor of fate - he was strangely predestined for great things.
Stricken with grief because of the waywardness and idle conduct of his son the father fell ill and died, and the mother found great difficulty in supporting herself, to say nothing of the worthless Aladdin as well. While she wore the flesh off her bones in the endeavor to obtain a meager susbsistence Aladdin would amuse himself with his fellow urchins of the street, only returning home to his meals. In this way he continued until he was fourteen years of age, when his extraordinary destiny took him by the hand, and led him, step by step, through adventures so wonderful that words can scarce describe them.
One day he was playing in the gutter with his ragged companions, as was his wont, when a Moorish Dervish came by, and, catching sight of Aladdin's face, suddenly stopped and approached him. This Dervish was sorcerer who had discovered many hidden secrets by his black art; in fact, he was on the track of one now; and, by the look on his face as he scrutinized Aladdin's features, it seemed that the boy was closely connected with his quest. (Thus opens the best translation of one of world's greatest tales, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, now, strangely, the exclusive purview of children's literature) |
A word about knuckle-bones:
| Quote: | The origin of knucklebones is closely connected with that of dice, of which it is probably a primitive form, and is doubtless Asiatic. Sophocles, in a fragment, ascribed the invention of draughts and knucklebones (astragaloi) to Palamedes, who taught them to his Greek countrymen during the Trojan War. Both the Iliad and the Odyssey contain allusions to games similar in character to knucklebones, and the Palamedes tradition, as flattering to the national pride, was generally accepted throughout Greece, as is indicated by numerous literary and plastic evidences. Thus Pausanias mentions a temple of Fortune in which Palamedes made an offering of his newly invented game.
According to a still more ancient tradition, Zeus, perceiving that Ganymede longed for his playmates upon Mount Ida, gave him Eros for a companion and golden dibs with which to play, and even condescended sometimes to join in the game (Apollonius). It is significant, however, that both Herodotus and Plato ascribe to the game a foreign origin. Plato (Phaedrus) names the Egyptian god Thoth as its inventor, while Herodotus relates that the Lydians, during a period of famine in the days of King Atys, originated this game and indeed almost all other games except chess. (Herodotus, History, Book I)
There were two methods of playing in ancient times. The first, and probably the primitive method, consisted in tossing up and catching the bones on the back of the hand, very much as the game is played today. In the Museum of Naples may be seen a painting excavated at Pompeii, which represents the goddesses Latona, Niobe, Phoebe, Aglaia and Hileaera, the last two being engaged in playing at Knucklebones. According to an epigram of Asclepiodotus, astragals were given as prizes to schoolchildren, and we are reminded of Plutarchs anecdote of the youthful Alcibiades, who, when a teamster threatened to drive over some of his knucklebones that had fallen into the wagonruts, boldly threw himself in front of the advancing team. This simple form of the game was generally played only by women and children, and was called pent alit ha or five-stones. There were several varieties of it besides the usual toss and catch, one being called tropa, or hole-game, the object having been to toss the bones into a hole in the earth. Another was the simple and primitive game of odd or even.
The second, probably derivative, form of the game was one of pure chance, the stones being thrown upon a table, either with the hand or from a cup, and the values of the sides upon which they fell counted. In this game the shape of the pastern-bones used for astralagoi, as well as for the tali of the Romans, with whom knucklebones was also popular, determined the manner of counting. The pastern-bone of a sheep, goat or calf has, besides two rounded ends upon which it cannot stand, two broad and two narrow sides, one of each pair being concave and one convex. The convex narrow side, called chios or the dog counted I; the convex broad side 3; the concave broad side 4; and the concave narrow side 6. Four astragals were used and 35 different scores were possible at a single throw, many receiving distinctive names such as Aphrodite, Midas, Solon, Alexander, and, among the Romans, Venus, King, Vulture, &c. The highest throw in Greece, counting 40, was the Euripides, and was probably a combination throw, since more than four sixes could not be thrown at one time. The lowest throw, both in Greece and Rome, was the Dog. (From helpful Wikipedia) |
| Quote: | Note: We're about to receive a Naxos CD of the tales narrated by UK actor Toby Stephens, who has received good reviews, but, ultimately, we search in vain for our ancient childhood recording, which sent us many nights - perhaps a thousand - to peaceful slumber with a booming basso voce cautioning,
'I am the GEE-nee-aye of the LOMP!
Com-MOND MEE!
For I am the SLAVE of who-EV-er holds the LOMP in his hand!'
This one, too, was punctuated by sweeping excerpts of Rimsky-Korsakov but, alas, we've been unable to find it. Sound familiar? If so, please e-mail legal@pokerpulse.com. Free beer for the first good soul to supply a lead! |
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| Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 12:52 pm Post subject: |
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The Earth After Us
What legacy will humans leave in the rocks?
Hardcover
By Jan Zalasiewicz
| Quote: | | It is not safe simply to assume, because we are familiar with finding fossils from hundreds of millions ago, that we as a species will leave a viable long-term fossil record. It is a little sobering that, despite the many active professional paleontologists of the last century and plenty of interested amateurs, we have found representatives of only a tiny fraction (some 0.01 per cent, at a rough but reasonable estimate) of all species that have ever existed. Statistically, then, the odds are stacked against us. Fossilization is a game of chance, and the odds are not good. But fossilization is poker, not roulette. There are things that a species can 'do' to improve its chances of immortality. So, let us examine whether or not the deck is stacked in our favour. (From the chapter entitled, Body of Evidence, p. 192) |
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| Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 8:52 am Post subject: |
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Summer Moonshine
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | The terrace terminated in a low stone wall, along the top of which were dotted busts of the Caesars and other ancient worthies, placed there in the spacious days of Sir Wellington, when people liked that sort of thing. The one nearest Joe was that of the censor Cato, an unpleasant-looking man who suffered from having a long nose and no eyeballs, but had the saving virtue of possessing a very large bare upper lip, the sort of upper lip which calls imperiously to every young man of spirit to draw a moustache on it with a pencil.
Joe, fortunately, had a pencil on his person, and was soon absorbed in his work. So absorbed, indeed that it was only a moment or two after it had been uttered that he heard the curious, sharp exclamation in his rear. ...
He turned again to Cato. The moustache was coming out well - a fine, flowing affair with pointed ends, not one of those little smudges. Cato now looked like a Mississippi gambler, and Jane was not proof against the spectacle. Her dignity, always easily undermined, suddenly collapsed. She uttered a little squeal of laughter.
'You are an idiot!'
'That's more the tone.'
'It's no good being furious with you.'
'I wouldn't try. How does that strike you?'
'A little more body to the left side,' said Jane surveying Cato critically.
'Like that?'
'That's better. Oughtn't he to have whiskers too?'
'Whiskers most certainly. What flair you have in these matters. I will attend to it immediately.' (-- pgs. 144-149) |
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