Gambling News by Gambling Headquarters

Last year an executive for a major slot-machine manufacturer gave me a tour of his Las Vegas headquarters. Don't be misled by the dozens of flashing, clanging slots in the showroom off the lobby, he told me. His wasn't a gambling company. "We're an entertainment company," he said. Unlikely as it may sound, slots, with their bright video screens and realistic sound systems, have become curiously sophisticated minimovies, complete with engaging characters (sly geishas, say, or crafty penguins) and plot twists (an unexpected game within a game), all built upon a deep understanding of the human-machine interface. Slot designers are forever searching for the precise combinations of sight, sound and potential payoff that will keep a player handing over cash, all the while ensuring the experience is not so intense that it induces seizures. Is that really so different from Hollywood? This collusion of advanced mathematical modeling, Pavlovian conditioning and multiplex smarts is intriguing. But what's even more fascinating is how this whole enterprise can be traced back to ancient Mesopotamians rolling sheep hucklebones to see which of the four sides would come up. That's the tale told in "Roll the Bones" by David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Schwartz starts in the foggy borderlands between augury and chance, when prognosticators looking for clues about the future would roll the bones and interpret the results. It wasn't a huge step to start wagering on the outcome of these rolls. And it may be that humans are genetically hard-wired for such behavior: Dice arose independently in various civilizations. The first dice in India were fashioned of brown nuts; Native American dice often were made from shells or beaver teeth. Among the many telling facts Schwartz touches upon: Dice carved with symbols actually predate the use of numerals. From dice, it's onward to playing cards and wagering on the outcome of everything from insect fights to basketball games, from lottery drawings to wheels of fortune.

This tour takes the reader from ancient ages of superstition through to the Enlightenment, which gave rise to the science of probability; from seedy Western saloons to the gilded gambling halls of Monaco; and inexorably onward, as you might have guessed, to a patch of scrappy desert in southern Nevada.

It's an epic story with an engaging cast. You'll learn a bit about Denmark Vesey, a Charleston, S.C., slave who won a lottery and used his earnings to purchase his freedom (successfully) and fund an insurrection of some 9,000 slaves and freemen (unsuccessfully). And there's John Morrissey, the bare-knuckle fighter turned gambling baron turned nearly respectable congressman, who was a major figure behind the rise of Saratoga Springs as a mid-19th-century gambling resort.

Chronicling a tale with such sweep has its challenges, not all of which Schwartz has overcome. The evolution of gambling refuses to follow a linear path; you can't trace a neat line from dice to the OTB parlor. Schwartz leaps around to give each form of gambling its due, as if in a frenzied game of Whac-a-Mole. (Speaking of which, his detour through the world of crooked carnival games is among the book's more engaging sections.)

All that hurrying around can be a bit aggravating, giving the book a jumpy feel. Leonie Leblanc, "the most famous Baden-Baden female gambler," is given only two sentences. And will anyone not feel shortchanged by this brief note: "One man even proclaimed his 'killer duck' an interspecies champion and pitted it against all canine challengers."

The narrative finds a more satisfying pace about halfway through, when the spotlight swings to the origins of modern gambling in the United States. We begin in New Orleans (where craps and poker took root), then travel with cardsharps up the Mississippi on steamboats, then push on to San Francisco during the gold rush and then Las Vegas.

Schwartz makes little effort to draw any grand conclusions about what this 5-millennium-old habit can tell us about ourselves. He seems content to simply note the obvious: that gambling is an ingrained part of our everyday life. "Roll the Bones" could have used more analysis and less inventory.

Still, Schwartz, the author of two previous books on gambling culture, does manage to accomplish something remarkable: He's made Las Vegas seem like a vast repository of history, not a crash site of implosion, rebuilding and reinvention.

The book's last chapter describes a stroll through the splashy new Wynn Las Vegas, a $2.7 billion casino that is "the most expensive ... yet built." Schwartz sees a ghostly reminder of the past at every turn - from the rise of fancy casinos in Italy, which is reflected in an Italian restaurant, to the specter of the early-19th-century German spa resorts, as seen in a lavish indoor garden.