Definition
A card game in which all players wager against a single banker or dealer, staking money on the order in which cards will be dealt from the pack. In legal usage, faro appears almost exclusively as a named prohibited game — one of several gambling games expressly identified by statute as unlawful in many American jurisdictions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The game's mechanics involve players placing chips or other tokens on a layout representing card values; the dealer then draws cards in pairs, one losing and one winning, until the pack is exhausted. The dealer's position as permanent counterparty gave the house a structural advantage that legislatures and courts treated as characteristic of professional gambling operations rather than social gaming.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In current general English, "faro" refers primarily to place names — municipalities in Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, and the United States.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A gambling game at cards in which all other players play against the dealer or banker, staking money on the order in which cards will be dealt from the pack. The term "faro bank" denoted both the capital staked by the proprietor and the physical place where the game was conducted.
The common meaning has essentially vanished from ordinary English, leaving the word today as geographic nomenclature rather than a description of any game or activity. A researcher encountering "faro" in a nineteenth-century legal source should immediately understand it as gambling terminology, not as a reference to any place. The legal and historical common meanings are, for practical purposes, identical; the modern common meaning is entirely unrelated.
Common Confusion
Faro should not be confused with the generic category of "banking games" or with keno, though historical statutes sometimes grouped them together under headings like "keno or faro bank." Some jurisdictions treated the "faro bank" — the dealer's operation — as the unit of criminal liability rather than the game itself, meaning prosecution could attach to running the establishment even without proof of a completed game. Researchers should also distinguish between statutes prohibiting the game of faro by name and broader anti-gambling statutes that reached faro incidentally.
Why It Matters in Research
Faro is a research term primarily encountered in three contexts: criminal statutes listing prohibited games by name, prosecutions for running a gaming house or faro bank, and civil cases involving recovery of money lost at gambling.
The key navigational challenge is that faro's legal significance was almost entirely statutory. Many nineteenth-century American states enumerated specific prohibited games — faro, keno, monte, roulette — rather than relying on general definitions of gambling. A researcher searching for gambling law in an 1850–1920 source must check whether the relevant statute covered only named games (in which faro would appear explicitly) or used a general definition that subsumed faro without naming it. Cases arising under named-game statutes will use "faro" as a term of art; cases under general statutes may not mention it at all.
The "faro bank" formulation in historical sources creates an additional layer. Some statutes targeted the banker or operator specifically, imposing liability on whoever "kept a faro bank" rather than on individual players. This means case law on faro often concerns the operator's criminal exposure or civil liability, not the players'. Researchers looking for player-side issues — recovery of losses, voided contracts — may need to look under gaming statutes of general application rather than faro-specific provisions.
Jurisdictional variation in statutory language is significant. Some states banned faro by name from an early date; others reached it through catch-all provisions. As faro declined as a popular game through the early twentieth century, named-game statutes became less frequently litigated and were sometimes repealed or absorbed into modern gaming codes that use entirely different frameworks. A researcher working in post-1930 sources is unlikely to encounter faro as a live legal issue; it survives mainly in historical criminal records and in cases construing the scope of older statutory prohibitions.
Anderson's cross-reference to "GAME, 2" is a useful pointer: faro's legal treatment is almost entirely subsumed under the broader law of gaming, and the faro-specific authorities are best understood as applications of gaming doctrine to a named game rather than as an independent body of law.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are consistent on the basic description: faro is a card game in which players wager against a banker on the order of card dealing. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier align closely, with Bouvier adding the detail about chips representing money — a clarification that distinguishes faro from games where cash is staked directly on the table.
Black's 2nd Ed. supplies case references that confirm the game's status as a recognized subject of criminal prosecution, citing Alabama, federal, and Texas authorities. These citations reflect the game's prevalence across multiple jurisdictions and the consistency with which courts treated it as unlawful without requiring extended analysis of whether it constituted "gambling" — that question was answered by the statute naming it.
Anderson's entry is the least informative, merely directing to the general game entry. This is itself instructive: by the time Anderson's was compiled, faro had no independent doctrinal significance worth treating separately from gaming law generally.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the civil side of faro litigation — suits to recover money lost at play, defenses to contracts made in connection with gambling debts, and the liability of premises owners. Researchers should not expect faro-specific authority on these questions; general gaming law governed.
Jurisdictional Note
American jurisdictions varied in whether they prohibited faro by express statutory name or through general gaming prohibitions. Southern and western states, where faro was particularly prevalent during the nineteenth century, generated the bulk of named-game prosecutions. English legal sources are largely irrelevant; the game was treated under English law as part of general gaming regulation without the American practice of enumeration by name.