Why did James Bond really play in Casino Royale

Many Ian Fleming purists had been clearly surprised to see James Bond playing poker instead of the baccarat described in the book. Probably poker won its place in the film due to its increasing popularity in the world nowadays, but it had always been baccarat that bore the title of the most aristocratic high-stake game.

Baccarat is an originally French game (Fr. title “baccara”) in which the goal to be reached by the players is accumulating as many point as possible using two or three cards at most. In the purest and oldest incarnations of this game the players played against each other and each of them decided whether he or she needed to draw the third card in addition to the already drawn two. Currently this game is usually played in casinos, the only player plays against the casino with the help of a dealer and whether the third card will be drawn or not is regulated by the specific casino rules. This modern version of baccarat – “mini-baccarat” is also known under the Spanish nickname “Punto Banko” and French “chemin de fer”, “the nine” or “macau”.

The clear origins of baccarat are unknown and many European casinos still argue (for the prestige sake) about it. The most likely places of origin for this game are Italy or France. It is really hard to follow through to the very beginning of a trend of playing this game, but according to the popular gambling mythology, the inventor of baccarat was an Italian man called Felix Falguere. At those times the game had initially been played with the tarot cards and the name “baccarat” – “zero” can be explained by an outstanding significance of this number for the tarot deck, which actually starts and ends with the zero card. The less mystical explanation of the name of the game would be the fact that all the cards in the deck – those with negative, positive and zero meanings gave out the result of zero when all summed up.

The colorful casino legend tells that Falguere based his game on an ancient Etruscan fortune-telling ritual for young maidens. One toss of nine-sided dice defined the girls’ destiny.  Those who got 8 or 9 became priestesses, 6 and 7 forbade any participation in religious rituals for the girls and those unlucky maids who got less than 6 had to be drowned in the sea. This old tale explains the “nine” title that the game has in some countries – though the dice had been forgotten the numeric symbolism lives on in this game. Nowadays the stakes in baccarat are not so drastically life-changing, but are still deemed to be very high. Since the late fifteenth century the game spread to the royal courts of France and then other royal residences all over the Europe so baccarat forever remained a royal-class aristocratic game which perfectly suited to the mysterious and rich image of a secret agent.

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Mr WordPress said, in December 1st, 2011 at 5:07 pm

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