Although poker is better known today, it was fairly obscure until the late 1850’s and didn’t really catch on until the 1870s. Faro was the premier game; high-rolling gamblers liked the easy odds, and others enjoyed the quick action and the thrill of staking it all on the turn of a single card. One Colorado Gold Rush observer noted that faro was played by everyone ‘from the bonanza kings in their private clubs to the little bootblacks who buck the tiger in a shack on Carbonate Hill.’

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Although it provided a colorful spectacle for both player and spectator, faro was a stately game, even amid the pandemonium of the typical gambling house. An Easterner observed in 1872 that ‘there is rarely a word spoken during the progress of a deal, for faro is the most quiet, and in that respect, the most gentlemanly of all games.’ But this same writer also warned that ‘faro honestly played is a game of pure chance, and sometimes favors the unfortunate who meddles with it.’ Players liked the seemingly favorable odds; bankers often liked the many opportunities for cheating. Chicanery was employed by players as well as dealers, but to be caught invited gunplay. Cheating was so prevalent in the States, however, that American editions of Hoyle’s rules began carrying disclaimers that honest faro could no longer be found. R.F. Foster, an early Hoyle editor, explained that ‘to justify this expenditure [of opening a faro bank], he [the dealer] must have some permanent advantage.’ He added that if no such advantage was inherent in the game, players were likely being cheated.

Mere months after Graves’ invention, crooked dealing boxes flooded the market, designed to allow dealers to predict and/or manipulate the order of cards dealt. These ‘gaffed’ boxes sold under such exotic names as ‘tongue-tell,’ ‘horse box,’ and ‘needle squeeze.’ Honest, or’square,’ boxes sold for around $30, while gaffed boxes went for up to $200. Graves cashed in on this development, designing many of these contraptions himself.

Close behind these boxes came an array of specially designed cards. ‘Sanded’ cards, roughened on one side, would cling together, and were used with ‘two-card’ boxes that allowed the dealer to slide out more than one card at a time. ‘Strippers’ were narrower on one end, or had curved sides, so a dealer could manipulate them during the shuffle to ‘put up’ splits. Since splits occurred naturally only about three times in two deals, there was an obvious house advantage in increasing the number dealt. A faro dealer’s salary often reached $100 to $200 per week, plus a percentage of the house take. Foster charged that these genets were not paid so amply’simply for pulling cards out of a box,’ and challenged bankers, as a good-faith gesture, to let him ‘put a typewriter girl in the dealer’s place.’ He apparently had no takers. Crooked games were called brace games, defined by Indiana gambler Mason Long as those ‘in which a man has no chance of winning unless the dealer breaks his finger, and that he never does.’ Brace houses sprang up nationwide, where ‘cappers’ posed as players and’steerers’ lured in unwary ‘gulls.’ Such organized and widespread cheating led reformed gambler Jonathan Green to write in 1853, ‘A man would act more rationally and correctly to burn his money than to bet it on faro.’

The worst of the gambling hells were the ‘wolf traps’-pure skinning dens where anyone with a $20 stake could buy a stack of checks and open a’snap,’ with the house providing the layout for 10 percent of the bank’s take. No casekeepers or lookouts were employed, and cheating ran rampant. Players often retaliated by ‘goosing’ or’snaking’ the dealer’s kit and tampering with his cards, or by ‘bonneting’ the dealer-throwing a blanket over his head and making off with his bank. The management didn’t care who skinned whom, but cashed checks for anybody with no questions asked. In tamer houses, players cheated in a more discreet fashion. Some used devices such as the horsehair copper-simply a copper with a strand of horsehair attached so it could be secretly yanked from a winning card.

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