History of Land Based and Online Casinos
While casinos themselves are a relatively new development in the history of man, it is certainly true that the whole concept of games of chance and wagering have been with us a whole lot longer. Wagering on how fast horses, people or dogs could run is one excellent example of how we have loved, as a species, to try and guess exactly what the outcome of any given situation might be. It is in our blood and seems to be encoded in our very DNA. We have a passion for reaching for the stars and seeing just how well we can do at bringing luck our way. It makes sense that some of the earliest writings of man have included references to wagering at the mass level, such as the lottery recorded in ancient Chinese texts that tells of the empire raising capital by offering its citizens a chance to win big money by trying their hand at the lottery. From there, it was more personal wagering between people until we arrive in the 1400’s where the very first casinos as we know them were set up. The word casino is, in fact, Latin based and it translates literally to “little house” which is a reference to the villas of Italian elite during that century that would offer a place for friends and family to get together to enjoy not just dances and music, but exciting games of chance that were just then being codified into the forms we know them as today, but these were not open to the public.
It would be another 200 years before the chance for citizens of Italy to actually wager in a public environment arose. This was the Casino di Venezia and it was located in Venice, Italy where it was built to house a huge assortment of different games that any citizen could try their hand at. This stone building still stands today as a tourist attraction that people can visit, but more importantly it inspired the result that we saw a bit later in Monaco, the world’s first true gambling destination. Here, there would be far more organized games and all of those games that we know and love today got their start in Monaco as far as being widely popularized. This was the vision that was mirrored in the sands of the Nevada desert in the United States city of Las Vegas, the center of the gaming world in that nation. The early days of the US saw wagering be a hugely popular past time and many games sprang up here, coming across the Atlantic from Europe where the settlers originated from. Today, Macau stands as an Asian destination for gamers that is very similar to both Monaco and Vegas.
Then came the online casino industry that built upon the success of online poker, the first game of chance that hit the web. It wouldn’t be long until this was a major industry and today there are a huge range of different casinos online that offer up all the games we know and love from the past.