Four women who changed the industry built on chance

Collaborative Post | Pioneers, innovators, leaders. Women have had a key role to play in the development of many industries – including some that you might not expect. We might instinctively think of casinos and gambling as a man’s world, but in actual fact this is a niche that is indebted to the lead taken by a number of women many years ago.

Today, some gambling companies employ women in vital senior roles, with the likes of Denise Coates and Stella David leading their respective firms into a challenging new era. These are the modern pioneers, but they are only following in the footsteps of those that had blazed a trail many years – and, in some cases, centuries – ago.

Photo by David Vives on Unsplash

​Eleanor Dumont

Blackjack is one of the most popular casino games on the planet. But did you know that its development owes much to a woman known as ‘Madame Moustache’?

Eleanor Dumont was a renowned gambler on the Western Frontier in California back in the 1800s. Thought to have been born and raised in New Orleans, Dumont arrived on the west coast of the United States armed with a deep knowledge of the game ‘Lucky 21’, which is effectively blackjack as we know it today.

She was employed as a card dealer at the Bella Union casino before heading off on her own, opening her own club called Vingt-et-Un (21). Gamblers would travel from miles around to see the dealer with the fast hands and the hairy upper lip in action.

That led to Dumont’s Place, another successful card parlour, but when the gold began to dry up in California, Dumont went from gamekeeper to poacher – travelling across America and making her money as a blackjack player instead.

Today, blackjack is a mainstay of both land-based and online casinos.

Online, players can deposit as little as £5 to get started at trusted sites, including those featured in Legalbet’s guide to £5 minimum deposit casinos an expert service which publishes ratings of gambling operators. In doing so, they are, in a sense, following in the footsteps of Eleanor Dumont, without whom the spread of blackjack across the US states – which ultimately created a global appeal into the bargain – might never have happened.

Alice Ivers

Born in Devon, Alice Ivers moved to the American state of Virginia at the age of 12 in 1873. Later, the Ivers family headed on to Colorado, where she would have her first brush with the game of poker.

Having learned the rules and the minutiae of the card game from her first husband, Ivers – who would later become known as simply ‘Poker Alice’ – began participating in cash games in Colorado and further afield.

In the second half of the 1800s, it was still a novelty to see a woman at a gambling table, but any scepticism on the part of her male competition was soon diminished when they realised just how good Poker Alice was on the felt.

Soon, she was winning serious amounts of money, which historians claim she enjoyed spending on clothes in regular trips to New York City – these dresses, it’s thought, were purposely chosen to distract her opponents at the table.

Poker Alice supplemented her earnings by working in saloons and gambling dens; one of which was owned by Robert Ford, who earned notoriety as the slayer of the infamous Jesse James.

She continued to draw huge crowds to her poker games, in which she would win as much as $6,000 a night – factor in inflation and that is a serious amount of money. In relative terms, Ivers became a self-made millionaire.

And she did it by understanding the true craft of poker:

• Counting cards (frowned upon, but not illegal)
• Understanding odds and probabilities
• Intuitively reading body language
• Not being afraid to raise the stakes against her male opponents

Mayme Stocker

Here’s a surprising fact: the first official licensee of a casino in Las Vegas was a woman.
Mayme Stocker was the oldest of six children born and raised in Pennsylvania. She would be married young to a railway worker, whose job saw the family travel from town to town without ever settling for long.

In 1911, the Stockers found themselves in Las Vegas, and after a few years in the city they decided that they wanted a slice of the burgeoning hospitality sector.

They opened The Northern Club, which was billed as a soft drinks bar. In reality, Mayme Stocker sold whisky and hosted card games – this at the height of the Prohibition Era.

When the law was changed to legalise gambling in 1931, local authorities wanted to manage the growing industry by handing out licences to approved venue owners. And that’s how Stocker, with nearly a decade in hospitality under her belt, became the first officially licensed casino owner in Las Vegas.

Over the next decade, Stocker was squeezed out of The Northern Club as the Vegas strip submitted to mob rule – the dangerous Bugsy Siegel took over the management of the venue, which would later be known as the Monte Carlo Club and La Bayou.

But to this day, it’s amazing to think that a woman – in a male-dominated profession – was the true trailblazer at the forefront of a billion dollar industry.

Jeanne Hood

What would the modern casino look like if it were not for Jeanne Hood?

In the twentieth century, table games – blackjack, roulette, baccarat, craps, poker – still dominated the casino floor. Slot machines were growing in popularity, but they were mostly found in bars and petrol stations. It was Hood, for the most part, that joined the dots.

In 1977 she became the proprietor of the Four Queens casino in Las Vegas, which due to its downtown location often missed out on the revenues of the main strip.

Hood introduced slot machines at the Four Queens, before campaigning for their widespread introduction at Hyatt hotel-casinos, where she would be employed as a company president.

More and more casinos began to copy Hood’s lead and station dollar slot machines on their gaming floors, attracting new players and – for the first time in a long time – making downtown Vegas as appealing to clientele as the iconic strip.

Today, slots are the most played game category at both land-based and online casinos… but without Jeanne Hood’s innovative thinking, they may never have even made it to the floor.



Disclaimer: This collaborative post is for general information only and is not intended to encourage gambling. Gambling involves financial risk and should only ever be treated as a form of entertainment. You must be aged 18 or over to gamble in the UK. Never gamble more than you can afford to lose. If gambling is affecting you or someone you know, please seek confidential support through the NHS or GamCare.