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A Chickpea Seller, a 1947 Mural and a Bond Film: How the Day of the Dead Reached Muertos Multiplier Megaways

Some time in the years before his death in 1913, the Mexico City printmaker José Guadalupe Posada etched a grinning female skeleton wearing a wide hat loaded with feathers. He called her La Calavera Garbancera. She was a joke at the expense of people who dressed up as Europeans and looked down on their own roots. More than a century later, a version of her face, painted white with flowers around the eyes, is one of the most recognised images on Day of the Dead themed slots, including Pragmatic Play's Muertos Multiplier Megaways. Very little of how she got there is what most people assume. A satire, not an ancient goddess The most common myth about the elegant skeleton now called La Catrina is that she is an Aztec deity carried forward intact. She is not. She is a twentieth century cartoon. Posada worked for the popular presses of Mexico City, producing cheap broadsheets with verses and images for ordinary readers. His calaveras, skeletons doing the things living people do, were...
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Tutankhamun, a Newspaper Curse and a Book That Was Never a Book: Where Legacy of Dead's Egypt Comes From

Valley of the Kings, Egypt, November 1922. Howard Carter's workers uncover a step cut into the rock, then a staircase, then a sealed doorway carrying the name of Tutankhamun, a minor king who had died young more than three thousand years earlier. Within weeks, the tomb was one of the most reported archaeological finds in the world. A century later, its imagery still sits on slot reels: the gold mask, the sarcophagus, the scarab, and a book that the ancient Egyptians never actually called a book. A tomb that became a news event The facts of the discovery are well documented. Carter, working for his patron George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, found the entrance to tomb KV62 in early November 1922. On 26 November, Carter and Carnarvon looked into the antechamber by candlelight. The most quoted line from that evening, "wonderful things", comes from the account Carter published afterwards; notes written closer to the moment record the exchange in slightly different ...
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Three Dates for One Machine: Charles Fey's Liberty Bell and the Story Behind the BAR Symbol

San Francisco, somewhere in the last years of the nineteenth century. A mechanic named Charles Fey builds a coin machine with three reels, a lever and a coin slot. When three cracked Liberty Bells line up, the machine drops ten nickels into a tray on its own, with no attendant needed. That automatic payout is the idea every slot machine since has inherited. What nobody can quite agree on is the year it happened. Three dates for one machine Ask when the Liberty Bell was built and the sources split three ways. The Wikipedia entry on slot machines hedges widely, placing Fey's simpler automatic mechanism "at some time between 1887 and 1895." The Fey family's own site gives 1894. The Cypress Lawn Heritage Foundation, writing about Fey as one of the notable figures connected to the Colma cemetery, dates his Card Bell to 1898 and the Liberty Bell to 1899. These are not small disagreements over a month. They span more than a decade, and each version gets repeated confiden...
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The Book That Made Vegas Rewrite Blackjack, Then Rewrite It Back

In the fall of 1960, a young mathematics instructor at MIT named Edward Thorp fed a deck of cards, translated into probabilities, into an IBM 704, a machine that filled a room and read its instructions off stacks of punch cards. He wasn't trying to build a gambling system. He was testing whether a card game everyone assumed favoured the house by a fixed, unbeatable margin actually did. The machine's answer, run and rerun over months, was no. Two years later Thorp put that answer in a book, and within roughly eighteen months, Nevada's casinos had rewritten the rules of blackjack, then quietly rewritten them back. The Four Horsemen Get There First Thorp wasn't the first to run the numbers. In 1956, four mathematicians working independently of the casino industry, Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, published "The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack" in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, having worked the odds by hand ...
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Where Roulette Came From: Pascal's Failed Wheel, the Blanc Brothers, and a Devil Who Never Signed Anything

In the 1650s, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal was trying to build a perpetual motion machine, a wheel that would spin forever without any outside force driving it. He failed, as every attempt at perpetual motion has failed before and since. What he left behind, according to many historians who have traced the game's lineage, was a spinning wheel mechanism that would later feed into roulette's design, a hybrid eventually formed with an earlier gaming wheel from 1720 and the Italian game Biribi. Pascal never built a casino game. He built a physics experiment that failed upward, into one of gambling's most recognisable objects. From Failed Physics to a French Salon Game The claim that Pascal is roulette's direct inventor is one many historians credit but few can fully verify, since the written record connecting his wheel experiments to the game that emerged decades later is thinner than the popular version of the story suggests. What's better documented is tha...
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