I discovered that the, 'Soda card,' was just the first card of what was sometimes called the, 'Soda stack,' which just meant discard pile. I'm going to offer a theory, but I want to make it very clear that this is based on nothing other than putting some thought into it and represents only my best guess: For many years aĬommon expression was from “soda to hock”. Said to have been a corruption of zodiac. The first card, exposed, face up before bets were

Is the top card of the deck when the cards were put into the dealing box Amazing what 'not a soul knew anything remotely resembling optimal strategy' did to ensure the game's survival. But it still doesn't change the fact that it's a rather dull game, but no reason why it couldn't appear on a video poker terminal or some such.īut it's interesting that blackjack survived and flourished despite having a similarly low (or lower!) house edge. Only if a pair was dealt, the house would half of all bets on that card (instead of pushing them), and that's super rare - off the top it would be 1 in 221, and you'd lose half a bet, so that's only a 0.23% house edge, and it's moot anyways because a player could wait until only 1 card of the rank remained and then the house edge could never rear it's ugly head and just bet on that card, and if the last three cards had a pair, they could make a zero-vig bet on them.Ī faro game that took half of ALL bets on any pair would give a 2.94% house edge off the top, much closer to modern standards, and you could institute an early shuffle if no pairs remained.

Card game called faro