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the name game How the games got their names By John Grochowski
Everyone knows how casino games get named nowadays. The game inventor, or perhaps the marketing department in a large company, decides what best describes the game, or what will sell the game to the public.
CRAPS: The French seem to have brought craps to North
Sometimes the names are descriptive. When Derek Webb invented Three Card Poker, he gave us exactly what the name says: a three-card version of stud poker. Easy enough, right?
It was derived from an earlier game called Hazard, played by English knights during the Crusades. It’s said that Sir William Tyre and his men played the game in 1125, during the time the English were laying siege to a castle called Hazarth—the source of the game’s name.
Other times, there’s a less obvious story behind the name of the game. In Caribbean Stud Poker there’s nothing Caribbean about having to beat a dealer’s qualifying hand. It was played on ships cruising the Caribbean before it was played on the mainland United States. Then there’s Spanish 21. It couldn’t help but catch the eye of anyone passing game creator Richard Lofink’s booth at one World Gaming Congress in the mid-1990s. There was Lofink, colorfully garbed in a ruffled shirt, puffy pleated sleeves and a flat-topped Spanish hat. I couldn’t pass up the chance to see what it was all about, so I stopped for a few sample hands. Lofink dealt out the game that has since carved out a lasting niche in table games pits, and explained the long list of rules beneficial to the player, such as the ability to double down on any number of cards, and the bonus payoffs on 6-7-8 and 7-7-7. I asked him how the house kept its edge with all those positive rules, and he said, “It’s because the 10s have been removed. There are only 48 cards. That’s the Spanish deck.” So it goes with modern patented, copyrighted, trademarked games—the ones whose names are capitalized when you see them in these pages. With older games, name origins are often obscure, accidents of history and location. Blackjack, craps and keno weren’t named by anybody’s marketing department, nor were terms such as jackpot, or “races” when used to describe games of keno. Let’s play the name game, and try to decipher why we call these games the names we do. 62
Southern G aming an d De s t in a t io n s
America, via Louisiana in the early 1800s, before Thomas Jefferson brought the lands into U.S. jurisdiction via the Louisiana Purchase.
The game itself had similarities to the pass line bet in the game of craps. At the start of play, the shooter rolled the dice until they landed on a total of 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9. That then became the main point. If the shooter’s next roll repeated the point, he won. If the next roll was 2 or 3, he lost. On 11, he’d win if the main point was 7, but lose on all other rolls. On 12, he’d win on points of 6 and 8 and lose on 5, 7 or 9. If the roll after the main point did not repeat the point, but was 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10, the roll became the chance point. From then on, only the main point and the chance point mattered. A shooter repeating the chance point first was a winner. Repeating the main point first brought a loss. All other numbers meant the shooter kept rolling. That’s a little more complex than the pass bet at craps, but note the similarities. The shooter establishes points. Numbers that are winners at one point of the game are losers at others. Rolls of 2 and 3 are linked as losers, while 7 and 11 are linked as winners. It’s pretty easy to see how that was refined into the modern game of craps. But why craps? Why not just all it “Haz” or some simplified form of Hazard, or perhaps a French version of the word— perhaps “risqué”? It seems to come down to the French borrowing the game and developing it into a form similar to the one we know today. French slang for a pair of 1s was “krabs.” Local pronunciation took it from there.