Baccarat in London: from Tranby Croft to today

Baccarat's British history is built on two things: scandal and legislation. The scandal came first.

Tranby Croft: the game that embarrassed a prince

In September 1890, Edward Prince of Wales visited Tranby Croft, the Yorkshire estate of shipping magnate Arthur Wilson, for the St Leger race meetings at Doncaster. The house party played baccarat, as Edwardian society houses regularly did. A fellow guest, Sir William Gordon-Cumming, was observed appearing to manipulate his stake after seeing his cards, a practice called "la baccara" in French baccarat terminology. Five witnesses agreed to keep the matter private if Gordon-Cumming would sign a paper promising never to play cards again. He signed.

The secret did not hold. In 1891, Gordon-Cumming sued his accusers for slander. The Prince of Wales was compelled to testify as a witness at the subsequent trial. As the BBC's account of Edward VII notes, the Prince's appearance in the witness box was deeply embarrassing to the monarchy: he was seen to have been gambling illegally (baccarat for stakes was not legally licensed), and the episode prompted questions in Parliament. The jury found for the defendants; Gordon-Cumming's reputation was destroyed.

The significance for baccarat history is not the cheating allegation but what the trial revealed: that the game was being played quietly and habitually in the country houses and London clubs of Victorian Britain's most prominent figures, under conditions that made prosecution unlikely. The affair didn't stop baccarat; it gave it a slightly dangerous glamour that persisted for decades.

From Deauville to London: the French lineage

The Casino de Deauville in Normandy, opened in 1912, was one of the primary settings where Chemin de Fer became the prestige baccarat form of 20th-century European gambling. The French rules, with the rotating shoe and player banking, were adopted by London's private gaming clubs as they formalised under successive licensing arrangements before the Gaming Act 1968. The Casino de Monte-Carlo's Salle Medecin, still running today under the SBM group, preserves a version of this tradition: grande table baccarat with French rules, where the atmosphere is closer to the 1930s than to the floor of a modern commercial casino.

London's Clermont Club at 44 Berkeley Square, run by John Aspinall from 1962, hosted high-stakes Chemin de Fer through the 1960s and 1970s and was the room where much of London's gambling aristocracy played. Crockfords at 30 Curzon Street, founded in 1828 and one of the oldest gaming houses in the world, ran baccarat tables across multiple eras until its closure in October 2023. These rooms carried the social prestige of Chemin de Fer long after Punto Banco had become the standard on commercial floors.

The Gaming Act 1968 and the arrival of Punto Banco

Punto Banco arrived in British casinos in the years immediately following the Gaming Act 1968, which created the legal and regulatory framework that governs UK casino operation today. The variant had been developed in Cuba in the 1950s and introduced to Nevada casinos around 1959. Its essential innovation was the removal of player decisions: by fixing the drawing rules entirely, the casino could bank all hands simultaneously and manage the game with a single dealer. This made Punto Banco more scalable than Chemin de Fer, where player decisions slowed the game and the rotating bank complicated administration.

The Gambling Act 2005 created the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) as the licensing authority that replaced the Gaming Board. Every casino table in a UK licensed venue, including every baccarat table at the Hippodrome, at Wynn Mayfair, and at Aspers at Westfield Stratford, operates under a UKGC licence. The commission's published guidance on game rules governs what variants are permitted and how they must be conducted.

The Ivey ruling: baccarat reshapes English law

In August 2012, the professional poker player Phil Ivey and his associate Cheung Yin Sun played Punto Banco at Crockfords over two sessions and left with approximately £7.7 million in winnings. Crockfords refused to pay. The dispute concerned a technique called edge sorting, in which Ivey had requested that specific cards be rotated during the shuffle on the pretext of superstition, creating a subtle pattern on the card backs that could be read before they were dealt.

The case reached the UK Supreme Court in 2017 (UKSC 67). Lord Hughes, writing the judgment, found that Ivey had deliberately created an information asymmetry by deceiving the croupier about the purpose of the card rotation request. His subjective belief that he was not cheating was irrelevant; the conduct met the legal definition of cheating under the Gambling Act 2005. The court also used the case to replace the old Ghosh test for criminal dishonesty with what is now called the Ivey test, applied across fraud, theft, and related offences throughout England and Wales. As the BBC reported in October 2017, one Punto Banco session rewrote dishonesty law for the whole jurisdiction. Crockfords won the case; the room has since closed regardless.

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Sources: BBC on Edward VII, UK Supreme Court UKSC 67, BBC on Ivey ruling October 2017, Gaming Act 1968 Hansard.