For now, let’s skip the strong case against casinos: perilous addictions, the specter of organized crime, Michael Bolton concerts. The American Gaming Association says 22 states licensed casinos, slot parlors, or video lottery rooms by 2010, not including Indian tribe casinos. But are casino owners interested in us? “We’re a 1.8-billion-dollar market and they’re all salivating,’’ says Senate President pro tem Stan Rosenberg, a Democrat from Amherst. “This is the last big frontier.’’
So what are we getting into, my fellow fish? You can plumb the long view in “Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling’’ (Gotham, 2006) by David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. It validates the verities: There has always been gambling (humans are wired for risk) and disapproval of it (because risk can bring ruin). Cro-Magnon used to roll “astragali’’ (sheep bones) in games of chance. The Bible says lots about casting lots. The Greeks and Romans thought gaming was only about luck, since they didn’t know the concept of probabilities. That would come a millennium later, when a Renaissance polymath named Girolamo Cardano first hit on how to calculate odds.
Such mathematical eye-openers (Galileo even wrote a treatise on dice) helped create the professional gambler, because now you could bolster luck with logic. Cardano and Galileo, however, didn’t factor in the house advantage, something losing bettors will discover, painfully, over dirty martinis in the Pair o’ Jacks Lounge, soon enough.
