Faro Card Game Rules: How to Play

Faro is a banking card game in which players bet on which card ranks will win or lose, while a banker deals two cards each turn — the first is the losing card, the second is the winning card.

That one sentence is nearly the whole game. There are no hands to build and no opponents to read; you simply back ranks on a painted layout and watch the deck deal itself out, turn by turn. For a century faro was the loudest game in the American West, easily outdrawing poker, before it collapsed under its own cheatability.

The table

Three things make a faro game: a standard 52-card deck fed from a dealing box (historically a spring-loaded shoe), a layout painted with one card of each rank from Ace through King — usually the full suit of spades — and a banker who deals and settles every bet. Any number of players can crowd around and place chips on the ranks.

Losing card, then winning card

Play runs in turns, and each turn pulls two cards from the box:

1. The losing card comes first. Every bet sitting on that rank is collected by the bank.
2. The winning card comes second. Every bet on that rank is paid even money.

Two cards are dead and never form a turn: the soda (the very first card, burned before play) and the hock (the last card). Everything between them is dealt two at a time, which gives exactly 24 live turns per deck.

Betting the ranks

You place chips directly on ranks of the layout, and you have a few moves:

• Bet to win — plain chips on a rank, which win if that rank is dealt as the second (winning) card.
• Copper the bet — a marker (a copper token, or “hexbit”) on top of your chips flips the wager, so now you win if the rank is dealt as the losing card.
• Move between turns — you may add, pull, or shift chips before each new turn, which is why tracking the deck pays off.

One nasty wrinkle: if both cards of a turn are the same rank — a split — the bank takes half of all bets on that rank. Historically this split was the banker’s main mathematical edge.

Counting the deck

Serious games ran a casekeeper, an abacus-like frame that logged every card as it left the box. Because only four of each rank exist, watching them deplete told everyone exactly what remained. When just one card of a rank was left, it was said to be “in case” — and case cards escaped the split penalty entirely, since a split is impossible with one card left. That made them especially attractive to bet.

Near the very end, only three live cards remain (the hock aside). A player can then call the turn, betting on the precise order those last cards will fall. It’s the game’s one high-payout swing, worth around 4 to 1 for guessing right.

Why faro disappeared

Faro was fast, simple, and gave the honest house only a thin edge — which was exactly the problem. The thin margin tempted operators to cheat, and gaffed dealing boxes made it notoriously easy to rig against players. As trust eroded and richer-margin games spread, faro drained out of the casinos that had once been built around it. If you want to see what filled the void, look at how poker works at a casino and the range of modern poker game variants.