Gambling, cards and dice, is littered with superstitions of all sorts. Here are some superstitious beliefs that were common among gamblers back in the late 1800s.
Believers in Luck
Some Odd Notions That Sway Sensible Men Who Speculate
Superstitions about gambling are not confined to ignorant people or to professional gamblers. It is rare that a man is found, no matter what his general intelligence may be, who has not some superstition about cards or dice. He may not be willing to admit that his feelings make any difference to him, but observation will show that he not only has gambling superstitions, but that he acts on them, and, however he may ridicule his fellow players, he has some point of weakness in himself.
It is hard to find the origin for the gambling superstition, which is the most common, says a writer in the New York Sun. Every man recalls any number of instances to sustain it. If he wins the first hand, he recalls that fact, and if he is a loser at the end of a game he attributes his loss to the winning of the first pot.
Another poker superstition is that the same man will beat the same man and lose to the same man during the game. That is, if A, B, C, D and E are playing together, A will win from B, B from C, C from D, D from E and E from A steadily during the game so that it would be good judgement for B, after he had lost two or three pots to A, and so by experience determine who was the man around the board who would regularly beat him, to refrain from betting against A as much as possible to reduce the amounts he would stake on his hands while with C, whom he has been beating, he would be safe in being venturesome and in risking more money.
This superstition is based on the observation of old players, and it has the same foundation that the run-of-luck superstition has. Of course in the theory of chance there is no reason why one man should be surer to have a good hand than another man, and the fact that the other man had better cards the hand before can have no arithmetical bearing on the kind of hand we will have the next deal.
The reverse superstition exists about dice and matching, though here and there are two directly opposite superstitions, each of which has its followers. The school which believes in what is known as a “change of luck” has more numerous adherents, though it is likely that for another reason these men are the greatest losers.
One of these superstitions is that the same thing has a tendency to occur in a series of two, and the other is that the same thing has not a tendency to repeat itself. In playing roulette the believers in the first superstition will play the red if the red has already won, or they will play the ace to win if it has won once and copper if it lost the time before. The other school play the black if the red has won and the ace to win if it lost the preceding turn.
An old gambling superstition is that the turning around of his chair by a player reverses the luck. This superstition extends to the position of the seats, some of which in a long game of poker become known as lucky seats and others as unlucky seats. It is a frequent thing for one player to ask another player to change seats with him or even to offer money for the exchange. Much more often is it the case that a man waiting to come into a poker game when one of the players drops out will delay his entrance until a lucky seat is vacant.
Men who match or toss coins have gambling superstitions of all kinds. There is the man who always wants the other man to say what he will do instead of deciding himself; then there is the man who believes that more bills have even than odd numbers, and the man who believes that tails come up more often than heads. They are less numerous than the man who is willing to let anybody try to match him but will not himself take the initiative in matching.
There is some force in this last mentioned superstition, which is taken from the observation of the games in regular gambling houses. It is popular belief that a machine will always beat a man. Thus it is a gambler’s axion that if in a machine there is an indefinite number of balls, half of them being odd and half of them even numbers, or half of them red and half black, with mechanism which, irrespective of the color or number, will drop out one ball at a time, the machine will eventually beat the man who bets on the color or number of the balls. It is a belief in the virtue of mechanism over the personal equation which exists in every man more of less. The same thing applies to the human matching machine that offers to bet against any even proposition the other man may make. He will put down the coin and offer to take any proposition the other man may make about it, but he will decline to make the proposition himself.
It is evident that if two men sit down to match dice for dollars, one with a capital of $100 and the other with a capital of $10, the chances are largely in favor of the man with the $100 getting the other man’s $10 if the matching is continued until such time as all the money on the table is won by one man. Of course every match is even in its chances. Every time the two men put up their dollars these chances are mathematically even but it would require a preponderance of 100 winnings for the ten dollar man to get the other man’s money, while it would require only a preponderance of ten winnings for the hundred dollar man to get all the money of the ten dollar man. As the odds against a run increase in more than arithmetical ratio, it is more than a ten to one chance in favor of the hundred dollar man. Of course, there is a possibility of the ten dollar man winning the hundred dollars, but the probability of his own stake being exhausted first is much greater.
It is thus a feature of gambling that the player must more often stop with a loss than with a gain. The man who buys a $50 stack of chips in a gambling house will have to stop when he has lost them if he has no means of getting any more, while he will not have to stop with a $50 winning. Aside for the percentage against him in the game there is that quality of human nature which makes a man want to stop a big winner and so continue to play in luck with the chance that it will turn and sweep his capital out of sight. If it were an even chance that he would win or lose, while it is not in a gambling house, for the mathematical odds are in favor of the gambler, still the odds are that the man who plays against an even game will lose $50 before he wins $51. The odds are still greater in geometrical ratio that he will lose the $50 before he wins $100. Few men are satisfied with a small winning or with winning even the stake. They go on betting and, unless they have extraordinary luck which keeps up until they get all the money the bank has, they will lose everything they put up.
Another gambling superstition is a belief in the runs of luck, and that it is a mistake for men to fight against their luck. This refers to the superstition previously mentioned that things run in sequence, and that bad luck and good luck have their sway, and that the roulette balls or the cards will fall according to the run of luck a man is in. With this belief comes the gambler’s axiom: “Crowd your good luck and stop on your bad luck.” In other words, increase your bets when you are in good luck and diminish them when you are in bad luck. There is an assumption in this that a man can tell beforehand what luck he is in and regulate his conduct accordingly. But though it is easy for any man looking back over his playing to see that he has been in bad luck or good luck, there is no scientific way to determine beforehand how long either kind of luck is going to last, and how it will affect him.
Any man who matches coins often will see that this is possible if he keeps an account of his winnings and losings. It was an even thing with him when he began to match and it was an even thing every time he matched, but the odds are many to one that he is either a winner or loser through the decision of a number of events in each of which the chances were even. This can be attributed both to the laws of chance and to the mysterious element called luck. There are some men who are lucky at matching and whose matching account year after year shows a succession of gains. There should be some way to explain this outside of the laws of chance, for in matching few men put themselves in the position of the dealer at a game who hazards no guesses, but takes what bets come.
It is rare that any man who plays is free from these superstitions in one form or another. The longer he gambles the more likely he is to acquire some superstition. The most firmly rooted of them all, and the one which is the most advocated, is that a machine beats human nature, and that the way to win is to bet against all superstitions which logically would include betting against this particular one if it be a superstition and not a fact.
Source: The Ketchum keystone. (Ketchum, Idaho), 22 July 1893.
