A Brief History of Casinos: From Venice to the Internet

People have gambled for as long as there have been objects to throw and things to bet. The casino, a dedicated, sanctioned building for games of chance, is much younger, usually traced to Venice in 1638. Since then the setting has moved from candlelit salons to desert resorts to phone screens. The math underneath has barely moved at all.

Ancient roots: dice, bones and bans

Dice and dice-like objects turn up in archaeological sites across many ancient cultures. Some of the earliest were knucklebones from sheep and goats, which land on one of four sides with unequal probabilities. Gambling on the result came naturally.

So did attempts to control it. Authorities in many societies, from ancient Rome onward, tried to limit or ban betting on dice, generally with little success. The pattern of popular demand meeting official unease would repeat for the next two thousand years.

What those early players lacked was probability theory. The mathematics of chance took formal shape in Europe in the seventeenth century, when mathematicians began working out how to split the stakes of interrupted games fairly. The tools to calculate a house edge arrived, fittingly, around the same time as the first casino.

Venice and the first casino

The word itself is Italian. A casino was a small house or pavilion used for social gatherings, music and, often, cards.

In 1638, Venice opened Il Ridotto, a gambling house sanctioned by the government. The idea was practical: gambling was going to happen, so it might as well happen somewhere supervised, with rules, and with the state taking a share. Il Ridotto ran for well over a century before Venetian authorities shut it down.

That logic of channeling gambling into a controlled, taxed venue is still the foundation of most casino regulation today. We cover the modern version in how gambling regulation works.

Spa towns and Monte Carlo

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gambling rooms became a fixture of European spa towns, where wealthy visitors came to take the waters and stayed for the tables. Roulette, in roughly its modern form, spread through these resorts.

The Casino de Monte-Carlo opened in 1863 and turned the tiny principality of Monaco into a byword for glamour. It also made the single-zero wheel famous. That one green pocket sets the house edge at 1/37, or 2.70%, on every bet, the same edge you face on a European wheel today.

Monte Carlo also supplied gambling's most famous cautionary tale. In 1913, black came up 26 times in a row, a run on the order of one in tens of millions. Players lost fortunes betting that red was "due." It remains the textbook case of the gambler's fallacy.

America: riverboats, Nevada and the Strip

In nineteenth-century America, gambling flourished on riverboats, in frontier saloons and in mining towns. By the early twentieth century, most of it had been pushed underground by reform movements and state bans.

Two inventions from this era still shape casinos. Around 1895, Charles Fey built the Liberty Bell, the classic early slot machine, with three reels and an automatic payout. And blackjack, descended from older European card games, became a staple of American gambling halls.

In 1931, Nevada legalized casino gambling. Las Vegas grew from a railroad stop into a resort city, with the boom accelerating after the Second World War. Some early resorts were financed with money from organized crime, which pushed regulators toward stricter licensing and, over time, toward corporate ownership by publicly traded companies.

In 1962, mathematician Edward O. Thorp published "Beat the Dealer," showing that tracking cards could give a skilled blackjack player a small edge. Casinos responded with more decks, earlier shuffles and the right to refuse play. Our card counting guide covers how it works and why it is hard.

Expansion: Atlantic City, tribal gaming and Macau

For decades, Nevada had legal casinos largely to itself in the US. That changed when New Jersey voters approved casinos for Atlantic City in 1976, and the first one opened there in 1978.

In the late 1980s, federal legislation set up a framework for casinos on tribal lands, and gaming spread across many more states. Riverboat casinos and racetrack casinos followed in various places.

The biggest shift came in Asia. After Macau opened its casino market to more operators in the early 2000s, it grew at a remarkable pace, and by the late 2000s it had become the world's largest gambling hub by revenue.

The digital era: screens, RNGs and the internet

Inside casinos, microprocessors gradually replaced mechanical reels and timing. Random number generators began choosing slot outcomes, which allowed designers to set probabilities and payouts with precision and to build machines with far more possible combinations. Our guide to random number generators explains how they work.

The first online casinos appeared in the mid-1990s. Antigua and Barbuda's Free Trade and Processing Act of 1994 is often cited as an early licensing framework. Regulators in other countries followed with their own rules, and the UK passed its Gambling Act in 2005, with the UK Gambling Commission beginning operations in 2007.

In the US, New Jersey launched regulated online casino play in November 2013. In May 2018, the Supreme Court's decision in Murphy v. NCAA struck down the federal ban on sports betting, letting individual states decide whether to legalize it.

Timeline at a glance

What never changed

Across nearly four centuries, almost everything about casinos has been reinvented: the buildings, the games, the laws, the technology and the way people pay. One thing has stayed fixed. Every game is built so that the house keeps a small, predictable slice of every bet over time.

That is why casinos have survived bans, wars and economic busts. They do not need luck. They need volume, and the law of large numbers does the rest. You can watch that principle in action by running thousands of spins in our roulette simulator, or read about the business side in how casinos make money.

The bottom line

The casino began as a pragmatic compromise in seventeenth-century Venice: if people will gamble anyway, give them a supervised place to do it. From there it passed through spa towns, Monte Carlo, Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Macau and finally the internet.

The games got faster and the venues got bigger, but the house edge kept doing exactly what it always has. Knowing that history is a good reminder that no new format changes the oldest rule in the building.