Been around Tor.com a while? You might know me as the adaptation-pining, animation-loving, TV intro–exploring contributor who just surpassed 50 posts on the site (pats self on back).
You might not know that I make my living in the gambling industry. I’m not much of a gambler myself—I enjoy the occasional sports bet when I catch a game with friends, and I’ll dabble in blackjack if I’m in Vegas. Still, I write for numerous gambling-focused publications and am well versed in how the industry works.
It’s no surprise, then, when I find my ears perking up when I encounter a gambling scene in a fantasy book. Or better yet, a full-fledged casino or pleasure den portion of a fantasy town.
Today, I’ll dive into three examples and discuss the elements that ring true to me, alongside those that add a dash of fantasy to fit the story.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a writer drawing inspiration from gambling and commandeering it for their own purposes. This is an imaginative genre, after all. I’m not looking for one-to-one representations of real-world gambling. Instead, I’ll look through the real-world lens to discuss what feel real about these depictions and what (if anything) feels more like fantasy.
The Gambling Industry: A Quick Primer
Generally speaking, gambling encompasses a few key sub-industries:
- Retail casinos and sportsbooks
- Online casinos (legal in six states)
- Online sports betting (legal in 24+ US markets)
- Horse racing
- Lottery
I imagine ringing and dinging slot machines or card tables are the first things to pop into your head when you think of gambling. Those locales are still very much part of the industry’s DNA—Vegas and Atlantic City remain big moneymakers.
Ask anyone in the industry, though, and you’re bound to hear about online betting first. The growth of sports betting has taken over much of the conversation, and online casinos are lagging behind, legislatively speaking. I won’t harp more on this because fantasy authors tend to use physical locations as inspiration more than, say, gambling on your phone.
The one point worth understanding is how the gambling industry sees itself. This isn’t true to a person, but there are overarching trends I’ve noticed after 10 years in the industry. In other words, please note that a lot of this is my personal opinion.
First, gambling corporations see themselves as entertainment providers first and foremost. They predictably seek to avoid the “vice” designation, steering the narrative to classify gambling as akin to paying $20 to see a movie. The unfortunate truth is that problem gamblers do exist, and there are resources available to them, many of which are legally required to be displayed on certain gambling sites.
Second, the gambling industry has historically sought to position itself as a leader in technology. That is more true now than it was five years ago, thanks to the advent of online betting in the US and big-name operators optimizing their platforms for mobile. Before any of this happened, however, gambling lagged behind more progressive technology sectors, mostly because it is so heavily regulated but also because it is a very “stuck in its ways” industry. You’re likely to find an executive uttering “we’ve always done it this way” at every gambling company. Because of this, the gambling industry constantly struggles with past perception—think Vegas mob control, peddling in vice, that sort of thing—and progressive advances on the technological front.
Finally, land-based gambling exists in a sort of purgatorial state. It struggles to bring in the younger generations due both to a lack of interest (why go to a casino when you can bet on your phone?) and the economic realities of modern-day capitalism forcing young people to be more discerning with what little disposable income they have. Many casinos are pivoting to the Las Vegas model of becoming full-fledged entertainment complexes featuring concert venues, golf courses, malls, and other add-ons.
What does this mean for fantasy? Overall, writers trend toward a more classical view of gambling. It’s oodles of fun to imagine a fantasy casino, and a few writers (as we’ll soon find) do it to great effect!
Now that you’ve got a baseline knowledge of the gambling industry, let’s look at three notable depictions of gambling in fantasy…
The Sinspire from Red Seas Under Red Skies
The Sinspire, of Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard series, towers over the city of Tal Verrar and draws gamblers of all sorts to its nine floors.
Lavish. Luxurious. Rich. Vibrant. The Sinspire is everything a Vegas casino tries to be. Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen find themselves in its clutches as they attempt to rob Requin, the Sinspire’s enigmatic owner. Cue real Ocean’s 11 vibes.
My favorite aspect of the Sinspire, though, is its hierarchy. The more important you are, the more you win, the higher up in the tower you are allowed to go. The ninth floor houses only the richest and best gamblers playing the most dangerous games.
You’d be hard-pressed to find such a cut-and-dry structure in Vegas casinos, but there’s an element of truth, here. Most casinos have a high-limit room, a section cordoned off and clearly labeled, where only high-rollers should play.
Another tangentially-related reality of casinos is the way they treat high rollers. If you spend enough at a real-world casino, you might get a VIP concierge who checks in on you, provides tickets and other perks, makes reservations, and generally attends to your needs. You might even get free hotel stays or comped meals.
There might be secret rooms in casinos where only the richest of the rich are invited to play. I’m not privy to such places as an industry journalist. It’s not far-fetched to imagine those types of gambling dens being very real.
Scott Lynch got one thing completely right: casinos operate on a hierarchy, and they treat the biggest spenders best.
…Oh, did I mention the punishment for cheating in the Sinspire is death?
To my knowledge, the movies exaggerate punishments for folks who win just a bit too much. You can absolutely get thrown out, even just for making a handful of savvy picks at a casino’s sportsbook. In most cases, this comes in the form of a polite request to leave.
The games allow Lynch quite a bit of creative license. There’s one I remember that involves drinking mysterious bottles of liquid and attempting to stay cogent throughout the game. He smartly avoids the ho-hum games of real casinos (which always give the house an advantage) and gives us some magic and spectacle in Red Seas.
The Sinspire blends a perfect amount of realism with fantasy. In my experience, it’s one of the most delightful depictions of gambling in fantasy.
Jushu Davar from The Stormlight Archive
Sorry to kill the mood here, but Jushu Davar shows us the dark side of compulsive gambling. Due to his myriad problems at home (sticking to minor spoilers only here), Jushu descends into an addictive drinking and gambling spiral.
Jushu would steal from his father for gambling money. He eventually struck a relationship with Mill, a bookie, going so far as to start a hefty line of credit on his family name.
Mill’s cronies eventually went to the Davar estate to collect the debt, but Lin (the patriarch of the family) couldn’t pay it. Mill and his posse beat Jushu severely, then forced the injured man to trudge behind their carriage on foot. Shallan ends up paying a portion of the debt to free her brother.
Problem gambling is an unfortunate reality, and while there are lots of tools and resources in place, it’s still a real problem for many. What can be a hobby for some can turn into addiction.
One bright note in the real world is that gambling providers are required to provide responsible gaming resources to bettors, whether in the form of links on a website or hotline numbers displayed in physical locations. Jushu doesn’t have that luxury, so the combination of his crumbling family life and inability to get help results in his tragic descent into habitual gambling. To be clear, those who suffer from problem gambling and addiction are not at fault. The industries that benefit from such problems should be responsible for preventing and addressing these issues—sometimes, the bare minimum resources, hotlines, and links aren’t enough to actually stem the systemic problem, and individuals shouldn’t have to shoulder that burden.
Sanderson doesn’t dive too deep into the actual games on offer, which is tasteful, considering the message. It’d be really off-putting to read a description of a “fun” gambling game only to turn around and see Jushu, desperate and struggling in the face of financial ruin and worse.
Though it’s a bleak depiction, Jushu Davar’s story has some real-world grounding. The fact that his addiction takes place in a fantasy setting (the world of Roshar) only makes it worse, because he doesn’t have proper access to help or resources.
The Barrel (Ketterdam) from Six of Crows
Let’s round things out with another tragicomic heist novel centered around a band of thieves.
I’ll be real with you all: I did not like Six of Crows. It wasn’t for me. But it did have some interesting things to say about gambling, and I’ll focus on those today instead of rousing the Grishaverse fanatics out there.
Ketterdam’s gambling hub is called the Barrel. What a name. I love it. It instantly brings to mind a world of dark, alcohol-soaked locales and gives off an instant rough-and-tumble vibe.
The Barrel is split into two major sectors: East Stave, comprising mostly gambling halls operated by criminal gangs, and West Stave, where themed brothels line the streets.
Kaz Brekker opens our eyes to the Barrel, wandering its streets and picking the pockets of easy marks. It’s the exact brand of glamorous thievery you might imagine from an old-school Vegas movie. Bardugo carefully balances this criminal activity with a harrowing backstory and a heart of gold, of course.
There’s a lot to love about the Barrel if you’re looking through a real-world gambling lens. It’s home to lavish halls and ramshackle gambling dens. In that way, it’s very Vegas. For every Bellagio, you’ve got a Flamingo, almost whimsical in its old-timey ambience.
The Barrel also hosts a bustling scene of street vendors and magicians. I consider this part of the fantasy-ification of the area. While some performers on the streets of Vegas are worth stopping for—the occasional sax player, breakdancers, some singers, even—many others are just people in costumes hoping you’ll pay a few bucks to get a picture with them. No shade, it’s just not as flashy as the street magic on display in Ketterdam.
Bardugo (I assume intentionally) draws on Vegas’ very real mob history in creating Ketterdam. There was indeed a time when many of the casinos had a substantial mob influence. In the Barrel, most of the locations are run by Ketterdam’s criminal gangs. It’s the ultimate fantasy gambling pit. It pulls from real life and the fantastical nature of the genre to create a compelling and memorable location.
[Okay, I can’t resist: The reason I couldn’t fully get on board with Six of Crows is that Kaz and crew left this place for a bland icy wasteland. I pined for the seedy underbelly of the Barrel, and instead, I walked into a freezer.]
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You’ve heard from me. Now it’s your turn: What are your favorite depictions of gambling in fantasy books? Hit me with ’em in the comments!
Cole Rush writes words. A lot of them. For the most part, you can find those words at The Quill To Live or on Twitter @ColeRush1. He voraciously reads epic fantasy and science-fiction, seeking out stories of gargantuan proportions and devouring them with a bookwormish fervor. His favorite books are: The Divine Cities Series by Robert Jackson Bennett, The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, and The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune.
Well, you say “gambling” and “fantasy” and the two other words that spring to mind are “Matrim” and “Cauthon”…
“Last Call” by Tim Powers!
I was coming right in here to put in Last Call. It’s all about playing poker and it’s brilliant. Sean Stewart’s Galveston also has a poker game that’s important to the story.
Interesting read! Been meaning to check out the Lies of Locke Lamora for a while. Feels weird to read an article blaming addiction entirely on the individual and not on the industry that makes half of its total profit on “problem gamblers”
Robert Asprin’s Dragon Series, where the main character, a dragon, runs an underground poker ring in New Orleans.
Also Phule’s Paradise by the same author, set in a space Las Vegas.
100% what Muswell said @1. Was very surprised not to find Mat here.
The examples, however, were great. Not familiar with the Barrel, except for what we saw in the “Shadow and Bone” series, but sounds good. And totally agree with the first two examples. I have never much liked Jushu, but I was sorry of him. And Sinspire … wonderfully written, but not a place I myself would fancy to visit.
There is also a casino in Amanda Bouchet’s “Nightchaser” series, from the owner of which Shade, the bounty hunter and love interest of the heroine, wants to buy back his family business. It has been awhile since I read it so I cannot remember the detalis, but as far as I do remember, the place was also run by a person who in essence was the typhoon/mafia head, and it was a lavish place, but dangerous, should the luck not be on your side.
Edit: And how could I forget the place actually called The Casino! In Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels series, one part of Atlanta is under the control of the People – the organisation of the humans who have learned the art of telephatically piloting vampires. The Casino is built to convey the sense of luxury and power – alabaster-white during daytime and golden and indigo at night, with a central dome and eight minarettes, and while the other floors serve as the People’s headquarters, the ground floor has an actual casino, complete with a bar and slot machines in the foyer, if my memory serves.
Barrington J Bayley, The Grand Wheel.
@5: as long as we’re on Asprin, don’t forget Little Miss Marker, with its climactic scene of a head-to-head high stakes game of Dragon Poker.
My first thoughts were of a couple of older short works:
* Fritz Leiber’s “Gonna Roll the Bones”: a preternaturally-skilled dice thrower goes up against a stacked casino. This first appeared in Dangerous Visions.
* Robert Arthur’s “Satan and Sam Shay”: a wily gambler wins three bets with the Devil and is condemned to never win a bet again — but the Devil’s minions have to spend more and more time making this so. (I found it in The Looking Glass Book of Stories, which ISFDB doesn’t seem to have catalogued despite the mostly-genre content.) Mostly person-to-person betting rather than industrial, but there are some interesting scenes around racetracks.
I really enjoyed in The Blacktongue Thief how natural it felt for a Towers deck to appear whenever there was downtime. If you’ve been friends with a drummer it gave me the same feeling, they needs to keep their hands busy.
The game Tonk from The Chronicles of the Black Company. I always wanted to learn the game and play with friends.
Fritz Leiber Gonna roll the Bones.
There is nearly a separate genre of Lottery stories. The Shirley Jackson “The Lottery”. The Jorge Luis Borges “La lotería en Babilonia”. I’m sure there must be others. Solar Lottery is, I suppose, science fiction, rather than fantasy.
The gambling industry, to me, is a horror and an anethema. You didn’t mention dog racing!
Of course, the snack food industry is right up there with them.
I know too many people who’ve been distressed by their spending on bets at “friendly” private poker games.
Steven Brust has a poker player named Phil who shows up in not one but two Roger Zelany tribute anthologies, playing poker.
“Calling Pittsburgh” in Lord of the Fantastic
and
“Playing God” in Shadows and Reflections: Stories from the Worlds of Roger Zelazny.
(Brust has confirmed it is the same Phil as the one in the Incrementalist novels he wrote with Skyler White.)
In the Garrett PI series by Glen Cook, featuring a hardboiled PI in a high fantasy world, we don’t see much gambling but gambling is a major vice for one of Garrett’s friends/associates (depending on the day). Morley bets on something called “water spider races” which are almost completely random … and he NEVER wins. He’s often in debt or in trouble and tags along with Garrett as much to get out from under as to help him.
From today’s reading: in The Silverberg Business, an experienced poker player has to take on several semi-corpses in a long-running game of five-card stud. Lots of interesting discussion about how to key off other players’ weaknesses.
DWJ’s “Tough Guide to Fantasyland” notes that Card games are always fraught affairs, since inevitably the fall of the cards has some miasma of meaning (OMT) that goes far beyond the game itself; players are likely to look over their shoulders nervously before reluctantly muttering “Snap.”
Crooked Kingdom, the sequel to Six of Crows brings you back from the icy wastes to Ketterdam, where the Kaz spends his time plotting revenge against and downfall of the local crime boss, who has done him dirt in more ways than one.
(I’d love for Bardugo to spend more time in Ketterdam.)
Strange that no one mentioned the novellas of The Gameshouse-trilogy by Claire North.
Absolutely worth reading!
I am currently starting book three of The Shadow Game trilogy by Amanda Foody, a YA series skewing heavy towards the A in that spectrum (protagonists are in their late teens) which I came upon at an author signing event for her much more Y skewing Wilderlore books that my 5th grade daughter is reading. Ace of Shades hooked me in by tapping deep into my long not-so forgotten feelings of lost confusion doused in teenage hormones without the swords and sorcery, but instead a more recognizable (handguns, automobiles, radio, landline telephones, etc.) tale of casinos, drug lords, street gangs, and the rumored deadly card game of elite puppet masters in a world where bloodlines actually do influence your talents and abilities to get ahead in the world. It is pretty much my childhood in the ’80s, but without Saturday morning cartoons.
I love the card game and genteel gambling den in Davinia Evans’s Notorious Sorcerer. Would love to see those decks made!
Everyone beat me to mentioning everything I might have mentioned.
As to the gambling industry itself, I can understand why people in the gambling industry would want to rationalize it. But there are fundamental and key differences between gambling and all other branches of entertainment.
In most entertainment (say, selling books) the model is to create an entertaining thing and have people pay to experience it. The customer gives the seller some money, they get the entertainment in return. In gambling, the model is for people to pay for nothing.
In most entertainment, again, the price is set; if the customer thinks it doesn’t represent value for money, they don’t pay and the seller doesn’t make money. Then either they drop the price or it turns out that particular kind of entertainment isn’t economically viable. In gambling, the price is indeterminate–the “buyer” doesn’t know how much it will cost until they’re finised–and could lead to destitution.
In most entertainment, the pitch used to get people to pay is broadly accurate. Maybe they’re a bit hyperbolic about just how good the movie or the book or the computer game is, but that’s fairly easy for customers to adjust for. In gambling, the pitch is fundamentally false–every effort is made to give the impression that the customer will win money, when in fact on average of course they will not, otherwise the industry would be losing money and go out of business. Momentarily back on topic, consider what happens in those fantasy works with gambling: Where there is an industry involved, almost always it pits the characters against the industry; they know the game is rigged, but they are pitting their skils and scams against the house’s skills and scams. In these stories it is generally clear that to come out of the casino with more money than you entered with requires incredible skills, an excellent plan, and plenty of dishonesty.
In most entertainment, once the customer agrees to purchase the entertainment, that’s pretty much it–sure, at the movies they try to get people to snag some overpriced popcorn/soda/candy, so overpriced that it is kind of scuzzy. It’s not like the entertainment business overall is perfect or anything. But basically, once you decide to buy the product, you then just get the product. In gambling, there is a ton of effort spent to mobilize every psychological trick that can be found to get the gambler to do more, and more, and more (and lose more, and more, and more money). Whether it’s pressing cheap or even free drinks on people at casinos to get them drunk so their judgment will be poor, or arranging the experience of online gambling so all the bells and flashy lights and little pseudo-rewards create addictive behaviour, the gambling industry is trying hard to squeeze more money out of each sucker than they were expecting or intending to spend. In this connection it can be noted that while I’m sure Mr. Rush is sincere in thinking it’s unfortunate that there are “problem gamblers”, the industry in fact works hard to create them.
Overall, gambling as a business is negative, parasitic, and dishonest. It destroys some, but creates nothing. It has become accepted not because people are more enlightened, but because the owners of such businesses get rich, and our society increasingly accepts all routes to wealth as inherently good because the market must be right. It is no accident that gambling as an industry is often considered a problem, whereas other entertainment industries are not. So, some people think there are problems with decadence or lack of originality in Hollywood, some people think the publishing industry has become too concentrated and commercialized, but nobody thinks there’s a problem with the very idea of making movies or publishing books.
As a side note, I still cannot understand why anyone is gullible enough to do online gambling (other than bets on sporting events). I mean, in a physical casino, sure, the slot machines are carefully tuned to take in significantly more than they give out, and games with some skill are either rigged in the house’s favour or the house just takes a cut, and it would be possible for the house to cheat in various ways. It’s a mug’s game arranged so that on average you lose. But still, you can see that little ball plunk into a spot on the roulette wheel, you can see what cards came down, and the payouts go according to that. There is at least something to indicate that if you do win, this will be acknowledged and you will get your winnings. Online, you win a game if they decide you win–not only can you not “tell” whether you “really” won or not, there is no “really” winning or losing except in the sense that an algorithm the company wrote makes people “win” at a certain frequency; what comes up on the screen is just window dressing. And the frequency can be lower because the online player is isolated. In a physical casino if no slot machine ever paid out, people would notice that everyone else without exception was also losing, and they’d stop coming. But online, you can’t tell if anyone else is winning, so they can presumably get away with lowering the frequency.
From an economic perspective, no government has a good reason to allow any gambling which is not locally owned. It is by definition a net drain on the local economy–it produces nothing, all jobs it may create are just money shifted from other parts of the local economy using money local people would otherwise have spent on something more useful, and the profit is sucked out of the local area entirely. That by definition includes online gambling, which has no impact on a local economy except to suck money out of it.
I’m sure most people in the gambling industry don’t think about it that way. This is not surprising; it’s as Upton Sinclair said: “It is amazingly difficult to get a man to understand something, if his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.”
Just finished rereading Scout’s Progress by Sharon Lee & Stephen Miller which isn’t centered on the gambling industry, but which contains an extremely satisfying gambling scene. Incidentally, Aelliana Caylon may have been one of the first STEM heroines I ever encountered and is certainly one of my favorites. If you seek it out though, CW for domestic abuse.
Agreed that Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s works often include gambling scenes, with the added fillip of Lucks — people with a “small talent” for magic that they use to bring good fortune to the player who hires them. Alas, Lucks tend to run along the shady side of the law and often cannot keep ill fortune from their own heads.
Also, Victoria Goddard’s Greenwing & Dart series features a game called Poacher which is taught to Mr. Greenwing by his father and which serves as a training ground for the complex political situation in the world he inhabits.
I would like to mention my own book, Dead Man’s Hand (by Jean Lamb) which opens with a hot dice game where it turns out to be a bad idea to have won it, Note to moderator, will totally understand if you yank this post).
In the first Harry Harrison Deathworld book, (the eponymous Deathworld), the protagonist is recruited by a team of individuals who explain that he will double their money for them. He says, “Suppose I lose?” They explain they know he can’t; he is psychokinetic, which presumably is something that the gambling establishment does not know. They then prove that they are faster, meaner, and better-armed than he is.
He wins for them!
“The Last Dragon Casino” and its owner play a big part in Monster Hunter International. Perfectly valid that a dragon would choose a casino’s sub-basement vaults as lair & hoard.