Bumblepuppy

According to the OED, bumblepuppy is an alternate name for "nineholes" or bagatelle, a billiards-type game in which balls are struck with a cue towards a set of nine holes arranged at the semicircular end of a special table. A variant uses marbles or lead shot, presumably aimed at holes in the ground.
It is used generically as the name or descriptor of a game in which chance plays an inordinate role. As such it appears in a high tech version "centrifugal bumblepuppy" in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". Here is the description:

"The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome-steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught."

Other Definitions

• In E.M. Forster's A Room with a View" it is a form of tennis, that is described as, "an ancient and most honourable game, which consists in striking tennis-balls high into the air, so that they fall over the net and immoderately bounce"
• William Howard Taft called his golf game "bumble puppy" golf
• It is also a form of the game of whist characterized by bad play. It is mentioned in Emily Post's ""Etiquette" in 1922.
• In Las Vegas it is a slang term for an inexperienced or careless player.
• It is also the name of a tied fly for fishing.