Venice opened Europe’s first public gambling house in 1638
Casinos package chance games—often with skill edges—inside tourist magnets of hotels and shows. Venice’s Ridotto (1638) is the first known European public gambling house. Macau now leads global gambling revenue past Las Vegas, with Singapore and Monte Carlo also major. Italian casa, “house,” underlies the word.
Casinos often sit beside or inside hotels, resorts, restaurants, shops and cruise ships, and many host comedy, concerts or sporting events. Their games of chance, sometimes with a skill component, all carry a built-in mathematical advantage called the house edge, which guarantees long-run profit; the share paid back to players is the payout. Slot machines rank among the most popular attractions, and operators carefully tune sound, smell and lighting to keep people betting.
Gambling has turned up in almost every society, from Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome to Napoleonic France and Elizabethan England. Venice's Great Council opened the Ridotto during carnival to keep gambling under control, and closed it in 1774, judging it was bankrupting the local gentry. In America, early gaming happened in saloons shaped by New Orleans, St. Louis, Chicago and San Francisco. States outlawed gambling in the early twentieth century, but Nevada legalised it in 1931, launching Las Vegas, and New Jersey's 1976 approval made Atlantic City the country's second gambling city.
Celebrated names range from Caesars Palace to Monte Carlo's grand hall and the Venetian in Macau, and the biggest operators each take in tens of billions of dollars a year. Originally the word meant a small country villa, summerhouse or social club; later it covered buildings on the grounds of Italian villas used for dancing, music, sport and civic events, like Villa Farnese, Villa Giulia or the Newport Casino in Rhode Island.
Modern Italian uses casino for a brothel, a mess or a noisy place, spelling the gambling hall casinò. Some casinos never hosted betting: the Catalina Casino in California was built after gambling there was banned, and the Copenhagen Casino was a theatre that held meetings in the 1848 revolution. In Spanish and German military usage the word means an officers' mess.
Source: Casino
