The Foxes' appetite for gaming was very far from unusual: no pictures hung in the gaming rooms at Almack's, lest they proved a distraction to members, whom club rules required to keep fifty guineas at one table while playing, and twenty at another. The most usual stakes were £50 a throw, which probably explains why there was invariably £10,000 on the table. Members were invariably creatures of superstition, "turning their coats inside out for luck", as Peter Ackroyd records in London: The Biography. "They put on wristbands of leather [continues Ackroyd] to protect their lace ruffles and wore straw hats to guard their eyes from the light and to prevent their hair from tumbling. Sometimes, too, they put on masks to conceal their emotions".

None was more dedicated to Almack's than a sophisticated set who called themselves 'Macaronis' - a corruption of the Italian, maccherone, meaning a coxcomb. "They were exquisites who had travelled to Italy and prided themselves on the elegance of their dress and manners. At their insistence, macaroni was put on the menu at Almack's," (Anthony Lejeune. White's: The First Three Hundred Years).

Most of the original members of Almack's, adds Lejeune, were also members of White's, presumably explaining one of Almack's rules which stipulated that "candidature for any other club than Old White's disqualified a man from seeking admission to Almack's". But as most of the more adventurous - not to say reckless - gaming men at White's began defecting to Almack's, rivalry between the two clubs grew. Lord Carlisle, asking a friend to propose the Marquess of Kildare for both Young White's and Almack's, warned him to "take care that he is not put up first at Almack's, as that excludes him from White's".