Horseshoes and Bells? Casino Symbols explained

There's a lot of symbols around nowadays that people just take for granted, like the face buttons on a video-game controller. There's a logical reason why everyone uses the ABXY layout popularised by the SNES but not many would pick up a later Xbox controller and wonder why they chose the letters that they did. The same is true for other games - have you ever wondered why cards have the symbols they do on them or why slot machines have theirs? Well, wonder no more! Here's a quick rundown of where these symbols and terms came from.

The Symbols on Cards

Just about everyone is familiar with what a deck of cards looks like, and a fair few are at least somewhat aware of its connections to an earlier game involving cards, the mysterious Tarot of Italy. Unlike a conventional deck of cards, a Tarot deck contains a whopping 78 cards with a whole separate set of 22 cards referred to as the "Major Arcana" by occult readings. The symbols on these cards for the four suits were Wands, Swords, Coins and Cups which, over time were turned into Clubs, Spades, Diamonds and Hearts. In addition, the Tarot held a fourth face card called the Knight who is absent from modern playing cards. The only card from the Major Arcana to make the jump to the standard playing deck is The Fool who was renamed the Joker and served as a Wildcard.

Interestingly enough, Tarot itself has its roots in another country - that being China. As early as 1,000 CE, China had something resembling playing cards (though they were quite different from the symbols we find in Tarot, mostly consisting of strings of coins) and as they travelled west from China, so did the playing card until it was eventually adopted in Italy.

The Symbols on Slot Machines

By contrast, the slot machine has surprisingly little legacy behind its symbols. Invented in the 1920s by Charles Fey, initially the machine was used to simulate playing poker and used the same playing card symbols. But as the game evolved, they began to use different symbols inspired by the idea of luck, such as the horseshoe and lucky clovers. But what's so lucky about fruit?

The fruit symbols are actually related to gambling prohibition, when it wasn't legal to use the machines to win a cash pay-out, they were instead used as a means to win packs of candy - most commonly, chewing gum. And the fruit symbols were to indicate the flavour of the gum that could be won. This is also, co-incidentally, where the BAR symbol comes from! Bar was a popular brand of chewing gum and included their branding as a means to win on the game.