The game is gone from every casino floor on earth. But its fingerprints are everywhere.
Language. The phrase “from soda to hock” — meaning from beginning to end, or the whole deal — comes directly from faro. The soda was the first card burned at the start of a game; the hock was the last card remaining. To go from soda to hock was to experience everything. The phrase “from soda to hock” (meaning beginning to end) comes from Faro’s first and last cards.
The dealing shoe. Every blackjack table in every casino in the world uses a dealing shoe — the mechanical box that holds the cards and dispenses them one at a time. A Shoe appeared in the first half of the 19th century in the United States in the game of Faro as a device for dealing cards to prevent fraud of the dealer. Later, though with a great delay, this device was adopted for BlackJack.
The faro shuffle. The perfectly interlaced riffle shuffle — beloved by card magicians and considered the gold standard of card mixing — was developed by faro dealers as a method of stacking the deck.
Literature and opera. Faro appears in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades (and Tchaikovsky’s opera of the same name), Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon (and Kubrick’s film), Edna Ferber’s Showboat, and dozens of other canonical works.
Film and television. In the film Tombstone (1993), Wyatt Earp, played by Kurt Russell, becomes a faro dealer after arriving in Tombstone. In the HBO TV series Deadwood, Al Swearengen mentions Faro, rather than poker, is played in his Gem Saloon. In the video game Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014), the main character Arno Dorian, in the early stages of the game, plays a game of faro with a blacksmith but loses after the blacksmith cheats.
The “Suicide Table.” In the Delta Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, a favorite attraction is the famous Suicide Faro Table — claimed to be responsible for the death of its three owners.