Silvio Petricciani - University of Nevada, Reno

86 Silvio E. Petricciani
Now, running a Faro Bank game in the
El Dorado in 1948 and ’49. I think I told you
a little bit about it before. We went down
there with a fifteen thousand dollar bankroll,
which my dad had cosigned a note for us
here at the bank. And we made a deal with
the Moss brothers who owned the El Dorado
Club, and they paid us two thousand dollars
a month. It was a reverse rental. They paid us
two thousand dollars a month to bankroll the
game, furnish the game, the dealers and so on
and so forth and the bankroll. And whatever
we made was ours. The only expenses we had
back to the club, which really wasn’t to the
Mosses because the Silvagnis owned the bar,
and that was the complimentary drinks that
we served to our customers. We bought those
from the bar.
And Faro Bank per se is a lost game. The
percentage of the game is so very close that
it’s very difficult to make money with it. You
have to be on top of it all the time, and you
have to—I think I explained some of the game,
didn’t I?
Some—.
Yes, but it’s a very even game, and many
of the expressions that are used in the gaming
business or even outside of the gaming
business like—there’s an old expression that
they say, “getting down to cases” which means
getting down to the nitty-gritty. I don’t know
if you ever heard the expression before or
not. But in Faro Bank they have what they
call a casekeeper and that keeps track of all
the cards that come out. Casekeeper has the
thirteen cards either engraved in wood on
it or whatever, and it looks like a Chinese
abacus. However, in front of each card there’s
four little buttons that you can slide along a
wire, and well, say like on the ace, if the ace
of spades shows, why you move that button.
Now the way you move the button is if, we’ll
say the ace of spades loses, why then you move
the button completely over until it touches the
back of the casekeeper. Now, we’ll say that ace
of hearts comes out, and it wins; well, then
you move the next button but you leave an
air space in between the two. And then we’ll
say the ace of diamonds loses; then you take
the ace of diamonds and put it right next to
the ace of hearts, so that your ace of spades
you lost is right up against the back of the
casekeeper. Then there’s an air space between
the ace of hearts and the ace of spades because
the ace of hearts won.
And you keep track of all the cards in the
whole deck that you have in a box, what they
call a Faro box, and you shuffle the cards up
and you shuffle them quite a bit, cut them,
shuffle them; and then you put them in the
box, and you face up. But the only card you
can see is the first card on the deck because it
sits in this little box with a rim around it. Then
that card is the first visible card, and they call
it the soda card. Now why they called it the
soda card I don’t know. I don’t know where
that derived from or anything else. Then what
happens is the next two cards, one will win
and one will lose. So, what you do is take and
you push the soda card off, and you discard it
over to one side. Then the next card—we’ll say
it’s five of diamonds—it comes out and falls
down, and you put it right down alongside the
Faro box. That is the losing card, so the five
of diamonds lost. And the next card that you
see in the box we’ll say is the nine of hearts.
The nine of hearts is the winning card. So
on the layout, the Faro Bank layout, you can
bet a card to win or to lose. So, if you bet the
card to win, you place your bet on the card.
If you bet the card to lose, then you put on
there what you call a copper which is a little
octagon black piece of wood about a quarter
of an inch thick. It has a little design on it and