Legal gambling was already a 335-billion-dollar market by 2009
Gambling stakes something of value on a random event hoping for a larger return. When law expressly permits it, people often say gaming instead. Paleolithic evidence precedes writing; Mesopotamian six-sided dice appear by about 3000 BCE, with cards in ninth-century China and Japanese records by the fourteenth.
Three ingredients define a wager: consideration, meaning the amount put up; risk, meaning chance; and a prize. A gaming company offers legal gambling and may answer to a regulator such as the Nevada Gaming Control Board. Stakes need not be cash, since players bet marbles, Pogs or Magic: The Gathering cards. The legal market was put at roughly 335 billion dollars in 2009, and when a person keeps betting despite clear harm, the condition is called problem gambling or gambling disorder.
Those early Mesopotamian dice grew out of astragali that were thousands of years older. China had widespread gambling houses and betting on fighting animals in the first millennium BCE. Poker, the leading American gambling card game, descends from the seventeenth-century Persian game As-Nas, and the first known casino, the Ridotto, opened in Venice in 1638. Queen Elizabeth I chartered a lottery drawn in 1569, and horse racing has been a favourite British bet for over three centuries. By the early twentieth century gambling was outlawed almost everywhere in the United States, which helped the mafia grow, while Singapore shifted course by opening regulated casinos in 2010.
Many American states let 18-year-olds buy lottery tickets but require casino patrons to be 21, and laws usually demand that gambling machines be statistically random so rare jackpots are not quietly made impossible. Insurance differs from a bet because the policyholder has a real stake in the outcome, such as a house burning down. In Lipkin Gorman v Karpnale, involving a solicitor who gambled stolen money, the House of Lords let the funds be recovered from the casino. Religious traditions weigh in too: the Buddha called gambling ruinous in the Singalovada Sutra, the Arthashastra of about the fourth century BCE advised taxing and controlling it, ancient Jewish authorities barred professional gamblers from testifying, and the Catholic Church sees no moral bar if the game is fair.
Source: Gambling
