What people say
Blow on the dice, never count money at the table, never wear green in a casino.Luck · 70 searches a month
Gambling superstitions
Blow on the dice, never count money at the table, never wear green in a casino.
When it actually starts
How old is this one
First recorded
Antiquity; casino-specific rules from the 20th century
That makes it
about 76 years old
Rank by age
40 oldest of 40 dated here
Category
Luck
Searched
70 a month
Gambling produces superstition faster than any other activity because it is pure randomness with immediate feedback — the exact laboratory conditions under which ritual forms.
Why it stuck. Skinner demonstrated this with pigeons in 1948: random rewards produce elaborate ritual behaviour in animals with no capacity for belief at all.
What is going on
Every game with a house edge is designed so that no ritual can affect the outcome. This is the one category where the futility is mathematically provable.Where it applies. Universal; Chinese gambling superstitions are the most elaborate and the most studied.
Other luck superstitions
Recorded around the same time
Gambling superstitions is the 40th oldest of the 40 dated superstitions here. Of those, 6 are younger than a century and 5 predate the common era.
First-recorded dates are the earliest documented appearance in written sources, not the earliest possible origin — an unrecorded practice can be older. How the dating works and where it is uncertain →