On Scarne On Dice

At a book sale where the deal was "$5 for all the books you can fit in a bag" I picked up a book that barely fit in the bag, Scarne on Dice, originally published in 1943 and updated in 1974. The author, John Scarne, combines a ton of genuine gambling expertise with the demeanor of a megalomaniac crackpot. The jacket copy, written by some unknown soul *cough*, describes him as "the man who made the phrase 'Acording to Hoyle' obsolete and replaced it with 'According To Scarne'". He's invented his own kind of dice, Scarney Dice®, which are normal six-sided dice except that the two face and the five face have the word "DEAD" on them.

With Scarney Dice you can play a number of games such as Scarney 3000® ("the favorite dice game of the members of the John Scarne Game Club of my hometown of Fairview, New Jersey"), Scarney Put-and-Take Dice, Scarney Duplicate Jackpots, Scarney 21 Up and Down, Scarney Bingo Dice, and Scarney Black Jack. Many of these games feature dice combinations called "Big Scarney" and "Little Scarney", or require a player to call "Scarney" when exploiting a winning position.

There are also three chapters of the book devoted to card games Scarne has invented, games like Scarney® ("the first really new card game concept of this century"), Scarney Gin, and Scarney Baccarat. These games—stay with me here—are card games, they include no dice, and they have no place in a book called Scarne on Dice, especially since John Scarne also wrote a whole other book called Scarne on Cards. But since we're going down this route, how about the family portrait in the front of the book where John Scarne poses with his wife, his son, his books, and the board games he invented, most notably a checkers-like thing called Teeko. Did I mention that he named his son after his board game? Oh, and after himself, of course. John Teeko Scarne.

But unlike every other person like this I've ever encountered, John Scarne actually knows his stuff. He convincingly debunks parapsychology dice-rolling experiments by contrasting the way the experiment was run with the way casinos handle dice. He explains ludicrous systems for beating the casinos and then explains why they're mathematically impossible. His chapters on how to spot loaded dice, rigged games, steer joints, and general cheating are clearly a light rewrite of the lectures he went around giving on Army bases to stop GIs losing their paychecks to craps hustlers. He has a convincing description of what it would take to run an underground gambling operation, down to a detailed payroll.

What is going on here? My initial guess was that gambling is a field where being a Jeffrey Lebowski-esque blowhard is tolerated and even encouraged. That's still my primary guess, actually. But after reading the most interesting 200 pages of this massive tome and skimming the rest I I wonder if something else is going on. This book is mostly about craps, a folk game with a relatively clear origin in Hazard but no real chain of custody between its origin and the modern day. Maybe Scarne just wants to make damn sure that his contributions to ludology are properly credited. Unfortunately, his habit of naming everything after himself just made it that much easier to ignore his innovations and play the same games people have been playing for hundreds of years.

But there was one game that John Scarne invented whose genius I appreciate, even though I'll never play it. It's a drinking game called Scarney Pie-Eyed Dice and it survives in a modified version called Twenty-One Aces. Scarne describes a couple variants but here's the simplest one: in Scarney Pie-Eyed Dice the players take turns rolling two dice until someone rolls nothing but twos and fives (these are the "DEAD" faces of official Scarney dice). The first person to accomplish this orders a drink. Scarne recommends "a double rye with celery tonic, vodka with chili sauce", or something equally weird. The second person to roll twos and fives drinks the drink, and the third person to roll twos and fives pays for the drink.

That's just great. It creates two types of tension at once—who's going to drink the drink and who's going to pay for it, and it uses creativity from an unrelated field as a game mechanic. Good job.