Tag Archives: Bet

LES CROUPIERS NEWS – Our Slot machines now have a maximum jackpot of £10,000!

This. This right here is the news of the century. If you come on down to Les Croupiers, not only will you open yourself up to having an unforgettably good time with equally good company, but you also now have the chance to win a massive £10,000 on our slot machines!

What’s that? ‘I’m not lucky enough to win that much’ ‘I never win anything!’ In the great and apt words of Hockey playing legend, Wayne Gretzky, ‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’.

When opportunity knocks, don’t shy away in the darkness, answer the door! And walk your way to ours. We hope to see you soon!

Casinos – A History

Gambling dates back as far as cavemen watching rain drops trickle down a cave wall but Casinos are far more modern. Taking the definition to mean a building specifically used for the purpose of gambling the first known example is found in Venice, Italy in 1638. There, the Ridotto was set up to provide a home for gambling during the Carnival Season. This is also where the name ‘casino’ came from, derived from the Italian ‘casa’ meaning house.

A taste for gambling spread to France where games of Baccarat and Roulette were invented which gave the House an edge and ensured the casino business prospered.

Oppressive legislation lead to more liberal neighbours supplying the demand for casinos and Monte Carlo took the lead in Europe while Nevada thanked the rest of the USA for its trade boom.

The History of the Casino Chip

The humble casino chip seems like such an important feature of the modern card table that it’s hard to imagine that they didn’t always exist. Early gamblers used whatever tokens came to hand, including sea shells, beans, bits of broken pottery and other improvised tokens. Of course, cash was a commonly used form of exchange. Gamblers in the Old West even used gold dust and gold nuggets to play with.

When the first casinos began to emerge in Europe in the 1800s, they used ivory, bone or clay tokens, sometimes circular or rectangular but also in the shape of animals or other images. To prevent counterfeiting, they began to mark them with the name of the casino.

The modern casino chip, made of a composite of clay and other materials, came into being in the 1880s. Distinctive, durable and affordable, they have remained the standard for casino visitors ever since.

Man Spends 20 Years and £80,000 on the World’s Biggest Scratchcard Collection

Most people buy a lottery ticket or a scratchcard in the hope of winning a big prize, but a Cheshire man has amassed a collection of 100,000 National Lottery scratchcards and, amazingly, 10,000 of the cards remain unscratched.

Dave Mannix, 42, collected the cards over twenty years and has spent £80,000 buying new and used cards. The collection contains almost every scratchcard released since 1994, when they were first introduced, and takes up an entire room in the house he shares with his partner Sue. Most of the unscratched cards have now expired, so Mr Mannix cannot collect any winnings.

Mr Mannix now hopes to sell the collection for £500,000, although he’s been told it could fetch up to £5 million. If he can find a willing buyer, it’ll turn out to have been a pretty tidy investment.

How to Deal With Gambling Addiction

It may sound like a cliché but the first step in dealing with a gambling addiction is admitting that you have a problem. While people who become addicted to drugs or alcohol are often easy to spot, problem gamblers routinely go unnoticed until their addiction has reached an advanced stage.

If you are having trouble controlling your gambling, borrowing money to place bets and hiding your activities from your loved ones, you are showing signs of addiction. No two problem gamblers are the same so a solution that works for one may not work for another. This means it is important to identify the underlying causes that lie behind the addiction.

Controlling a gambling problem takes enormous willpower, but it can be done. Many addicts find that group support or therapy sessions enormously useful in helping them adapt their behaviour and soon go on to lead happy, healthy lives with their gambling problems far behind them.

Chinese New Year Gambling Traditions

The Chinese are often seen as a superstitious bunch, warding bad luck off with seemingly unusual actions. Gambling around the new year is no exception to the rule.

Specific traditions that have been built on for centuries are often still acted out by the more mature and superstition bound gamblers. Here are some examples as to the lengths they go to to ensure a big win:

  • Religion is often practiced before going gambling. The gambler would pray and/or make an offering to their God(s) to try and sway their all powerful deity’s benevolence in their favour.
  • Switching on all the lights before gambling is apparently a sure fire way of getting luck on your side. Although, we’re not sure if that luck would subsidise the electricity cost.
  • If you are one of those people who believe in the power of lucky pants this one may not seem so strange to you. Wearing red underwear (or undergarments) is apparently very lucky.
  • This one is probably the strangest one of all. Some Chinese people believe that behind every gaming table lives a ghost. To ensure that ghost helps them with their monetary goals, people would come up to the table and feed the ghost with human food such as sugar. If the ghost isn’t fed, it can become frustrated and stop you from winning. Well, the ghost theory would at least explain why our chips seem to go down so quickly.

 

With many cultures that believe in superstitions, there are also things you shouldn’t do under any circumstances.

  • Don’t dare even whisper the word ‘book’ when gambling. In chinese, the word book sounds very similar to ‘lose’.
  • This is a good tip even without superstition governing it, don’t hit or touch people’s shoulders when they’re gambling.
  • We think maybe the house spread this one around, but don’t count your wins or losses during gambling. It will apparently end in loss.

These actions may seem odd to us but hey, they may be really effective. Try giving them a go in the New Year and tweet us at @LesCroupiers to tell us if they work.

The History of the Dice

Dice is an old game that involves a small object being thrown. Typically, this will be a cube, which will have six faces bearing different numbers from one to six. The numbers are traditionally represented by dots.

The numbers on a die are used to determine the outcome of a variety of games. When a die is thrown the side that rests facing upwards is used to determine the score. There are a variety of games where dice are thrown, and these range from craps to role-playing games.

Sometimes dice will be triangular rather than cubed, or have as many as ten sides. While, in place of dots or numbers, symbols may be used.

The origins of dice date back millennia, with the earliest evidence going right back to 3000BC. Even in ancient times dice was played from the Indus Valley right through the Middle East and up to Greece.

The Standard Playing Card Deck

A standard deck of playing cards is made up of fifty two cards. All of these cards are individually identified by three different characteristics. Suit, number and colour.

Initially the cards can be categorised by number. Starting at 2 and working up sequentially to 10, the cards are then given a royal position instead of a number. The 11 becomes a Jack, 12 is a Queen and 13 is a King. Following these the Ace is in the 14 position.

These are then separated into four groups of cards called suits. These suits are Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts and Spade. Each suit has one card of each number.

Finally the cards are coloured. The Hearts and the Diamonds are red and the Clubs and Spades are Black.

Using these three characteristics a player can identify any card, be it an 8 of Clubs, King of Diamonds, or just a red 3.

Behind Lucky Numbers

For some, luck resides in a rabbit’s paw, a certain shirt or a ritual blow on the dice. Others find luck in numbers themselves. What makes a number ‘lucky’ depends on many influences, some personal, some cultural.

In China, the number eight is particularly revered because, when spoken, it rhymes with the word for ‘wealth’. In Christian societies three is popular, reflecting the Trinity but also the ‘three wishes’ of folklore. Seven has enchanted the European mind for centuries – notes in an octave, colours of the rainbow, the seven classical planets, and days of the week. The number seven crops up throughout the Old Testament, too.

Prime numbers, which can only be divided by themselves and one, are popular choices for lucky numbers, with one exception: thirteen.

Perhaps the luckiest numbers though, are those that show odds in your favour.

Chip Colours and Their Meanings

Do you remember the first time you went into a casino? It all seemed so confusing, and everyone else seemed to know exactly what was going on. A little bit of research ahead of time can you save you from potential embarrassment. The colour of a casino chip, for example, is quite specific, and, while some denominations vary from one country to another, most of them are pretty standard. The first thing to keep in mind is that the colour denotes the value of a chip; for example, red is usually worth five dollars, green is worth 25 dollars, and so on. Also, the colour of the table sign indicates the value of the table, thereby preventing you from sitting down at a five hundred-dollar table with five-dollar chips.

Each casino has its own unique set of chips, and many use custom colouring on the chip’s edge, making counterfeiting almost impossible to pull off.