We’ve come across some rather interesting tidbits about our favorite pastime over the last little while, and we want to share them with you. Have a look at these 18 astonishing gambling facts that will blow your mind!
1) A traditional 52-card deck holds 2,598,960 unique five-card hands, with a single pair having a 42.26 percent likelihood of showing up in any hand.
Generally, your cards should remain hidden until the end of the hand.
2) McCarran International Airport, Las Vegas’s main airport, is the 8th busiest airport in the world, with 850 flights a day and more than 2.5 million visitors a month, most of whom visit to gamble.
Not everyone, though…
3) Blue-chip companies get their name from blue casino chips, which are typically worth more than white or red chips.
Black chips are reserved for villainous masterminds.
4) Roulette is also known as the Devil’s game, because if you add up all the numbers in the wheel, from 1 to 36, you get 666, the Number of the Beast.
Truly evil.
5) 68% of gamblers in Las Vegas play slot machines.
Slots, not sloths.
6) Gambling and lotteries have been used to build many public projects, including the Great Wall of China.
As far as we know, Michigan has no major public works funded by the lottery.
7) The beloved sandwich was invented by John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, who didn’t want to leave the casino table to eat.
Bravo, Lord Montagu!
8) Students from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, ran a Blackjack team from 1979 until the early 2000s and made millions using legal, mathematically sound counting techniques.
To be fair, the MIT team were a bit younger.
9) The largest ever slot win came in Vegas, where a 25-year-old engineer won $39,710,826.36 on the Megabucks slot machine, beating odds of 16.7 million to one.
10) Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe, won a private lottery in 2000, sweeping a prize of 100,000 Zimbabwean dollars (about US$2,600 at the time). He is the only modern Head of State to have won the lottery.
Which lottery shall I win today?
11) The card suits we know and love – hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades – are derived from the French Ancién Régime. Cups represented the clergy, coins represented merchants, clubs were for peasants, and swords stood for the nobility.
Perhaps the baguette would be better than the club. Mind you, a stale baguette can do some serious damage.
12) Although the Monte Carlo Casino is a major source of income for Monaco, Monegasque citizens are banned from entering the casino.
No entry. Don’t try your luck.
13) Over a 6-month period in 2011, Blackjack player Don Johnson took Atlantic City casinos for over $15 million, including a $6 million win at Tropicana.
We like to think he was as happy as this guy.
14) Approximately £80 million are wagered every year on the Grand National, the richest horse race in Europe.
I think they’re doing it wrong.
15) The first online casino opened in 1996 in Antigua, and boasted 18 casino games.
“No, just the loss of my internet connection.”
16) The introduction of the US Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006 saw PartyGaming’s stock drop 60% in 24 hours.
Dramatic recreation.
17) While Las Vegas is the largest gambling center in the US, the world’s biggest gambling city is Macau, which brought in $45.2 billion in 2013. Macau players take one day to bet the same amount that is bet in a week in Las Vegas.
“People come from all over the world to visit your city? Isn’t that sweet!”
18) Richard Nixon funded his congressional election campaign with money he won playing cards in the South Pacific during World War II.
“Down! Bad President!”
