Published on February 23, 2026 | 6 min read
Casino floors are a graveyard of games that were once dominant. Faro took more money in nineteenth-century America than roulette and blackjack combined, and today you cannot find a table anywhere. The reasons games die are nearly always arithmetic: either the house margin was too thin to pay for the floor space, or it was so fat that players abandoned the game once they could compare it with something else.
What follows is a short tour of games that have genuinely disappeared or nearly so, with the mechanism that made each one work and the margin that eventually decided its fate.
Faro: the game that ran the American West
Faro was dealt from a box onto a layout showing the thirteen ranks. Players backed a rank, the dealer turned two cards — one losing, one winning — and the bets were settled. It was fast, the layout was simple enough for a crowded room, and it needed almost no skill from the player.
The house took its money from two narrow rules. When both cards of a turn were the same rank, that was a split, and the bank took half of everything staked on that rank. On the last turn of the deck, with three cards left, the payouts shifted in the bank's favour. The honest margin was slim, which had a predictable consequence: faro became the game most associated with rigged boxes and crooked dealers, and regulation and reputation killed it together.
Trente et quarante: a near-even bet with a catch
In trente et quarante the dealer lays two rows of cards, black and red, adding pip values until each row passes thirty. The row closer to thirty-one wins. Because both rows are built the same way, the bet is very close to even money — which is exactly why the game needed a rule to pay for itself.
That rule is the refait. When both rows total thirty-one, the hand is void and the player must either leave the stake in play for the next deal or pay half of it to withdraw. The house edge lives entirely inside that one situation and comes out at roughly one per cent, among the lowest margins ever offered on a casino table. The game survives in a handful of French and Monegasque rooms and essentially nowhere online.
Hazard: the ancestor rather than the game
Hazard was the English dice game of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, played with a nominated number called the main and a second number, the chance, that the shooter then had to repeat. It did not vanish so much as evolve: the American simplification of hazard is craps, and the word crabs for the losing throw survives in the name.
What hazard shows is that games are rarely killed by their odds alone. Hazard's margin was reasonable; its problem was that the rules took a paragraph to explain, and a simpler version with the same mathematics beat it on the floor. Every table game that has survived to the present day is one a stranger can learn standing up.
Boule and sic bo: one punished players, one did not
Boule is the clearest case of a margin that was simply too high. A ball drops into a dish of eighteen compartments bearing the numbers one to nine, so each number appears twice. A winning number pays seven to one. Do the arithmetic: you win seven units once in nine attempts and lose one unit the other eight times, so the expectation is minus one ninth, about eleven per cent against you — four times the cost of European roulette. Boule remained a provincial French curiosity for precisely that reason.
Sic bo is the counter-example: an old three-dice game that never went away because its main bet is fair enough to survive comparison. Betting that the total is small or big loses only on a triple, and a triple occurs six times in two hundred and sixteen, so the margin is 6 ÷ 216, about 2.8 per cent. The specific-total bets on the same layout run far worse, which is the real lesson of the table: the game is not good or bad, the individual bet is.
| Game | Origin | Where the margin came from | House edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Faro | 17th-c. France, then the USA | Splits and the last turn | Thin |
| Trente et quarante | 17th-c. France | The refait at 31–31 | ≈ 1 % |
| Hazard | England, pre-1800 | Main and chance | Became craps |
| Boule | France | 7-to-1 payout on a 1-in-9 chance | ≈ 11 % |
| Sic bo | China | Triples beat small/big | ≈ 2.8 % on small/big |
What the graveyard teaches
Three patterns run through every one of these games. A thin margin invites cheating, because the only way to make the game pay is to break it. A fat margin survives only as long as players cannot compare it with anything else. And complexity loses to a simpler game with identical mathematics, every time.
The practical use of this history is comparison. An old game is not a better bet for being old — boule is one of the worst bets ever offered in a European casino, and it is two centuries old. The only question worth asking about any table, old or new, is what the margin is on the specific bet you intend to make.
Frequently asked questions about historical casino games
Why did faro disappear?
Its honest margin was too thin to support a table, which made rigged dealing boxes endemic. Once regulators and players both recognised that, the game lost the trust it needed and was replaced by blackjack and craps.
Can I still play these games?
Trente et quarante and boule survive in a small number of French and Monegasque casinos. Sic bo is widely available, including online. Faro and classical hazard are effectively museum pieces.
Do older games offer better odds?
No. Age tells you nothing about the margin. Trente et quarante is one of the cheapest bets ever offered and boule one of the most expensive, and they come from the same country and century.
What replaced these games?
Blackjack, craps and roulette on the table side, and later slots, which need no dealer and no minimum number of players. Floor economics, not player taste alone, decides what stays.
Further reading on the game that once dominated American gambling: the encyclopaedia entry on faro.
The same arithmetic view carries over to what chip colours really encode, to how slot randomness is generated and certified, to how casino credit turns a session into a debt and to the limits that actually change how a session ends.