s at cards.

Nevertheless, it is often found that those who do so give no further
proofs of superior memory and judgment, whilst persons of superior
memory and judgment not unfrequently fail egregiously at the card-table.

The gamester of skill, in games of skill, may at first sight seem to
have more advantage than the gamester of chance, in games of chance; and
while cards are played merely as an amusement, there is no doubt that a
recreation is more rational when it requires some degree of skill than
one, like dice, totally devoid of all meaning whatever. But when the
pleasure becomes a business, and a matter of mere gain, there is more
innocence, perhaps, in a perfect equality of antagonists--which games of
chance, fairly played, always secure--than where one party is likely to
be an overmatch for the other by his superior knowledge or ability.

Nevertheless, even games of chance may be artfully managed; and the most
apparently casual throw of the dice be made subservient to the purposes
of chicanery and fraud, as will be shown in the sequel.

In the matter of skill and chance the nature of cards is mixed,--most
games having in them both elements of interest,--since the success of
the player must depend as much on the chance of the 'deal' as on his
skill in playing the game. But even the chance of the deal is liable to
be perverted by all the tricks of shuffling and cutting--not to mention
how the honourable player may be deceived in a thousand ways by the
craft of the sharper, during the playing, of the cards themselves;
consequently professed gamblers of all denominations, whether their
games be of apparent skill or mere chance, may be confounded together
or considered in the same category, as being equally meritorious and
equally infamous.

Under the name of the Doctrine of Chances or Probabilities, a very
learned science,--much in vogue when lotteries were prevalent,--has been
applied to gambling purposes; and in spite of the obvious abstruseness
of the science, it is not impossible to give the general reader an idea
of its processes and conclusions.

The probability of an event is greater or less according to the number
of chances by which it may happen, compared with the whole number
of chances by which it may either happen or fail. Wherefore, if we
constitute a fraction whereof the numerator be the number of chances
whereby an event may happen, and the denominator the number of all the
chances whereby it