Page 9 - January 2004 • Southern California Gaming Guide

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
Carde CrapsTM—Yes, You Can Play Craps in California Casinos!
Southern California tribal casinos have it all — the latest Las Vegas-style slots, blackjack, pai- gow, mini-baccarat and all casino table games, fantastic bu ets and restaurants, fabulous entertainment and lounges—all in a wide range of beautiful properties. Walk into a California tribal casino and you can expect to play pretty much everything that you can play in Las Vegas — except for traditional craps and roulette. Why? e California Tribal-State Gaming Compact does not allow any game with a live dealer in which dice or wheels are used to determine
an outcome. Ostensibly, this is because of the possibility that dice or wheels can be manipulated.
But the enterprising ceo of Casino Pauma in north San Diego County, Richard Darder, invented a way that California casinos can o er craps (and roulette) using tables and dealers while conforming to the gaming compact. Carde (pronounced carday) CrapsTM and Carde RouletteTM are played with cards replacing dice and wheels. Since the debut of these games at Casino Pauma in April 2002, Carde Craps became the rst legal craps games in California.
Darder (who was a Las Vegas craps dealer early in his career) invented Carde Craps by capitalizing on casino technology advances, primarily the advent of the continuous card shu er, in which he resourcefully introduced the use of cards numbered 1-6 with a Joker and only one shu er to play craps without the use of dice, while retaining player interaction and a fast pace.
Darder holds a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in hotel administration from unlv where, as a graduate
assistant, elements of a casino games probability course he assisted on stuck with him that he used to create Carde Craps and Carde Roulette.
Traditional Las Vegas craps bets, odds and layout are used in Carde Craps, plus two unique proposition suit and joker bets. Craps is one of the most exciting games, and played with cards, can retain its fast-pace and exhilaration. Carde Craps perfectly simulates the random outcome of craps. Bets remain the same as on a normal craps table, and the casino o ers two, three and ve-times odds.
So why is craps called craps? Before the Middle Ages, the Arabs played a game using little numbered cubes, called az-zahr, meaning the die. e game traveled across the Mediterranean to France, where it was named hasard, then to England before 1500 a.d. where it was given the English spelling of the same word, hazard.
e roll of the lowest value in that game was called
crabs. e French adopted that term from the English, but spelled it the French way (but of course) as crabes. In the early 1700s, the game crossed the Atlantic to Acadia, and then to Louisiana, where they dropped the title of hasard and called the game simply crebs or creps — their spelling of the French crabes. By 1843, the Cajun word came into American English as craps. John H. Winn, who was a dice- maker by trade, developed a later version of craps. And by 1910, craps had become the most popular casino game in the world.
Southern California craps players from Ventura to Imperial Counties frequent Casino Pauma and Fantasy Springs Casino for the exciting Carde Craps action.
Carde Craps times at Casino Pauma are 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. seven days a week (call 760-742-2177 for information). At Fantasy Springs Casino, play Carde Craps seven days a weeks from noon until 2:00 a.m. (call
1-800-827-2946 for information).
January 2004
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