The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader : Communities, Cultures and Play

"Casino games and traditional card games have rich and idiosyncratic histories, complex subcultures and player practices, and facilitate the flow of billions of dollars each year through casinos and card rooms, and between professional players and amateurs. They have nevertheless been overlooked by game scholars due to the negative ethical weight of "gambling" - with such games pathologized and labelled as deviance or mental illness, few look beyond to unpick the games, their players, and their communities. The Casino, Card and Betting Game Reader offers 25 chapters studying the communities playing these games, the distinctive cultures and practices that have emerged around them, their activities and beliefs and interpersonal relationships, and how these games influence - both positively and negatively - the lives and careers of millions of game players around the world. It is the first of a new series of edited collections, Play Beyond the Computer, dedicated to exploring the play of games beyond computers and games consoles"-- Provided by publisher Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Illustrations Contributors Chapter 1: Why study games and money? Part I: Foundations Chapter 2: Gambling games, money and late capitalism Chapter 3: To skill, perchance to win: How chance and skill have co-existed in gambling history Part II: Poker Chapter 4: ‘An hour’s commercial for the Horseshoe’: Popular memory, sports television and the World Series of Poker Chapter 5: Be a Pal: Women’s intrusions into men’s poker play on TV sitcoms Chapter 6: Poker fiction: Romance, possible worlds and magic circles Part III: Money and class Chapter 7: Cards, banking games and the normalization of finance Chapter 8: ‘Pitch and toss’: Casinos of hope and despair in working-class Britain Chapter 9: Selves in play: Pop-up casinos and discontinuous persons in Greece Chapter 10: Honourable risks and dishonourable certainties: Naiveté and cynicism at play over the card table in Imperial Russia Part IV: Casino cities Chapter 11: Monte Carlo’s wheel of fortune: The social impact of risk, reward and roulette on visitors to Monaco’s legendary casino, 1863–1914 Chapter 12: Gambling in the kitchen: Monte Carlo from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century Chapter 13: What statistics don’t say: Game innovation in Macau’s casinos since 2002 Chapter 14: Playing with heritage: Gambling and Venice’s tradition Part V: Spaces and times Chapter 15: Locating Native American gambling traditions in contemporary Indian casino gaming Chapter 16: On the infrastructure of gaming: The case of pachinko Chapter 17: An enchanting witchcraft: Masculinity, melancholy and the pathology of gaming in early modern London Chapter 18: Everyday casinos: The expanding gambling landscape in America’s neighbourhoods Chapter 19: The market in the conclave: Gambling on election outcomes in Renaissance Italy Chapter 20: Eighteenth-century lotteries Part VI: Cinema, art, literature and culture Chapter 21: ‘Whiskey, women, and loaded dice’: The images and places of gambling in popular music Chapter 22: From parasite to anti-hero: Shifting depictions of the card sharp Chapter 23: Gambling ladies: The games that Barbara Stanwyck plays Part VII: Insiders Chapter 24: The poker economy: The skill gap problem and the lifecycle of PvP games Index