Now legal in the country of Paris are blackjack and craps. Not Paris Las Vegas, where such casino games have long been not only permitted but actively encouraged. We’re talking about Paris France, the City of Light.
The seven gaming clubs in the French capital received permission to start playing the new games, along with bingo and sic bo, a dice game that is hugely popular in Asia, last week. According to The Times of London, the directive comes as the Macron administration is eager to entice wealthy visitors to the city’s gaming tables.
Authorities decided to license several highly regulated, exclusive, members-only gaming clubs in 2017, following the conventional London model. This was to take the place of the troubled cercles de jeux, which had previously met Parisians’ need for gambling since the city had outlawed casinos 110 years prior.
A 1907 law made it illegal for casinos to be located within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of Paris, effectively banishing gaming businesses to beach resorts.
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Vicious Cercles
The cercles sprang up in Paris soon after the casino prohibition. These establishments somehow managed to designate themselves, amusingly, as “nonprofit organizations,” dedicated to promoting “social, artistic, literary, and sporting activities.”
After World War II, the French government allowed groups of Corsicans to run the cercles in thanks for their services to the French Resistance. But many of the clubs soon became associated with the Corsican Mafia.
In the 1970s, bloody feuds erupted between rival Corsican gangs for control of the cercles. This was followed by a period of calm that led people to believe the clubs had cleaned up their act.
Not so. In 2011, three cercles were closed down permanently as a result of criminal activity: Le Cercle Wagram, Le Cercle Haussman, and L’Eldo.
Cercle Wagram’s owner, Jean-Angelo Guazzelli, was sentenced to three years in prison for using the club as a money-laundering front for the Corsican Mafia.
Over the next few years, two more, the Aviation Club de France and the Cercle Cadet, were forced to close after police raids.
Gaming Club Experiment
The new gaming clubs were part of an “experiment” to replace the cercles with a more stringently regulated model. The games on offer were relatively limited. These included poker, punto banco, roulette-style game multicolore, local blackjack variant game Poker21, and the old-school French gambling game écarté. Slots remain off the menu.
But now, French authorities have noticed that foreigners, Asians and Middle Easterners in particular, tend to spend the most at the gaming tables, and most of them don’t know the rules to écarté. They believe the new games will boost the amount of foreign money flowing into government coffers.
Meanwhile, the gaming clubs are campaigning for the legalization of roulette tables in time for the 2024 Paris Olympics, when the city will be awash with tourists with cash to flash.
“Blackjack is extremely popular. It is an offering that was really missing,” Richard Frischer, boss of the Punto Club, told Le Monde. “But what all clubs have in their sights is roulette.”
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