Bettors Palace
Commericializing Betting Games
By commercializing betting games, sharpers remade American gambling for good.
The paved the way for the widespread introduction of such casino games as twenty-one, roulette, and the frontier favorite, faro, that were well-suited to a businesslike approach to betting.
They quickened the pace of cultural change by constantly reshaping games of chance in order to accommodate both their own needs and the shifting preferences of the American public.
Professional gamblers helped to popularize poker, for instance, during the antebellum period.
They carried it from its port of entry, New Orleans, up the river frontier and eventually to eastern and western centers of population where it became a favored pastime after 1850, and they modified the rules to conform to national tastes.
The addition of wild cards and bluffing helped to Americanize this Old World game.
Sharpers added the draw to stud poker, too, partly because the extra round of discarding and dealing enhanced opportunities for cheating, and partly because of the prospect of new cards added excitement and stimulated betting.
In such a manner Westerners adopted and modified games for American consumption.
Perhaps even more significantly, professional gamblers on the river frontier remade American gaming by helping to eliminate the influence of social rank that betting in the early republic had inherited from the English aristocracy.
The sharper often disguised himself as a gentleman, knowing that some men status would refuse to play with lesser opponents, but he hardly cared whose money he won.
Participants in betting games were no longer regarded so much by their social status, but rather by their position at the table.
Bettors were divided into players and gamblers; one viewed gambling as recreation while the other saw it as business.
The new type, the professional bettor, diverged sharply from the genteel ideal that southern colonists had tried to cultivate.
The rise of sharpers along the rivers of the old Southwest added a new dimension to gambling for the rest of the country.
Professional gamblers belonged to that broad spectrum of tricksters and confidence men, indigenous to the cotton frontier of the old South, that came to be immortalized by a popular body of regional literature.
These chevaliers d'industrie pioneered the gameship that set American sport further apart from English and European traditions.
They helped to create a fashion of play that their countrymen accepted roundly, yet they were also targets of scorn and condemnation.
Sharpers thrived in a society that embraced the hazards and adventure of thorough-going free enterprise at the same time that it feared the consequences of speculation and commerce when they were pushed to extremes.
The nation's ambivalence toward gamblers paralleled the mixture of attitudes that Marvin Meyers has termed 'the Jacksonian paradox'.
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