Almack's enjoys a rich history. Its first incarnation was as a gaming club, founded in 1764. According to a legend which endured for two centuries, its proprietor was 'a sturdy Celt' , William Macall or McCaul, who conjured up the club's name by reversing the syllables of his surname. It was said that he did this for unspecified, 'professional' reasons. In fact, it now seems much more likely that his name was Almack, and that he was a Yorkshire man from Thirsk. What is beyond dispute is that, five years earlier, in 1759, William Almack had opened a coffee house occupying three adjacent buildings on the north side of Pall Mall.

An emphatically masculine establishment, the 'coffee house' offered the gentlemen of St James's good food and decent wine, and the chance to read the newspapers. So, too, did his club, but it was the latter's gaming tables which made it legendary. Anthony LeJeune in "White's: the First Three Hundred Years", notes that Almack's founding members were "very young, all under thirty". One of them, Charles James Fox, was just sixteen when he joined".

Very soon, Fox was one of the club's most indefatigable members, as Venetia Murray describes in A Social History Of The Regency Period: "The great political orator Charles James Fox once played hazard, a game of chance, at Almack's all through one night until five in the afternoon of the following day, losing £12,000, recovering it, then losing £11,000. The next day he spoke in a parliamentary debate and at 11.30pm went on to dinner and to White's, where he drank until 7am, then to Almack's again where he won £6,000. Two nights later his brother, Stephen Fox, lost £11,000 and the following night Charles himself lost another £10,000. In three nights these two young men, both under 25, had lost a total of £32,000 - about £1.5 million in today's money. Those who were ruined after a night of hard play would either borrow money at extortionate rates from money-lenders or, if all credit was finally exhausted, flee to the continent for a life of poverty." (Hazard, incidentally, is a dice game dating back to at least the 14th century. The nickname for the cast 1-1 in Hazard was 'crabs', which evolved into craps, the popular American dice game, whose rules were also inspired by Hazard.)