The word “casino” translates in Italian as “little house”. In the beginning, the word was used when referring to a country house and then began to be used to describe an area of the house where social activities took place, such as dancing, listening to music or betting. In spite of this, the exact origin of gambling is unknown. The Chinese were the first to record the practice in 2300 B.C, and supposedly, it has been in one form or another in every society ever since.

From the Ancient Greeks and Romans to France under Napoleon’s dictatorship and Elizabethan England, our history is rich with stories of activities based on the games of chance. In the Roman Empire, there was a law that decreed that all children had to be taught how to gamble and throw dice. A Roman emperor even designed his carriage in a way that allowed dice games to be held while travelling to his duties. We have the French to thank for playing cards, as they invented it in 1387. By the year 1440, Johann Gutenberg of Germany printed the first full deck of cards.

Many of the present gambling games are manifestations of earlier games. The French working class of the sixteenth century became skillful at the Egyptian game of roulette, while Napoleon got interested in a card game called vingt-et-un, which is nowadays known as blackjack or twenty-one. The basics of modern poker is believed to have originated from a combination of the historic influences games of chance that include the Persians, Italians and English. Poker then was modeled out by the betting techniques that were introduced by the French and the concept of bluffing that was invented by the British.
According to historians, the first legal casino to open was in Baden, Germany, in the year 1765, by Edouard Benazet, who hired a French craftsman to design the different hall styles. Despite of closing down a number of times along the history, the Baden Casino still remains open until today. Before the opening of this casino, the amount of money a player could win was determined by the amount of money he or she had. In the year 1857, Prince Charles III of Monaco, introduced the Casino Industry so as to favor its finances. In the XX century, the Montecarlo Casino rapidly became a fashion must for rich and famous people. In those days, personalities such as the director of the “Ballet Ruse” from Paris, Sergei Diaghalev, King Eduard VII of England and the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, were regular clients of the business. From that day until now, casino’s have evolved, expanded and even gone online. Around the year 1995 the first online casinos were created. Since then, the betting over the internet business has grown considerably, and nowadays there are several thousand online casinos.