History of Gambling

Gambling history has many stages that correspond to the historical periods and the introduction of different games. It is believed that gambling has existed from the beginning of man. Three ancient gods Hades, Poseidon and Zeus had to roll the dice in order to divide the Universe into three parts: heaven, sea and hell.

Numerous archeological evidences claim that gambling was known among the first men. The scientists revealed the dice made of bones that dates back about 40,000 years. Furthermore, some cave drawings also represent people rolling the dice and playing other gambling games. By and large, dice are believed to be the oldest playing tools that are used even these days in traditional games.

The game with dice or craps was designed by Chinese in 2300 B.C. which then came to Greece. It is also known that gambling was not legal at those times, but people continued to play the dice. The ivory dice dating back 1500 B.C. were discovered in the area of Thebes. Dice were very popular in the Roman Empire in which even children had to know how to gamble throwing the small cubes.

Nevertheless, in the 14th century officially gambling was prohibited by King Henry VIII who discovered that his soldiers used to waste most of the time gambling.

Native Americans were convinced that gambling games were created by God that's why they never considered gambling to be sin. They made dice of plum stones and marked them in white and black. Americans were probably the first to use dice to forecast destiny.

First official lottery was introduced in 1793 in Washington. At those times, during the Revolutionary War lotteries became the perfect way to make the finance improvements and soon all the states began to organize lotteries. In the 1830's there existed 420 state lotteries in the United States.

Card games, such as poker and modern internet blackjack, were popular in the New World and were usually played at the riverboats. Some of the gaming venues were legal and some of them were not. Staring from those times the players always tried to cheat and when the tricksters were spotted they were punished. Nevertheless, more and more techniques to manipulate playing cards were invented.

After the Civil War all the lotteries were banned and the next step was to ban any kind of gambling. Thus starting from the 1890's all gambling activities were not legal in the United States and they had to go underground. However, in 1931 the state of Nevada legalized various kinds of gambling and lots of old and new gambling establishments emerged again. It was the beginning of the unbelievable development of gambling business all around the planet. Probably, the final stage in the development of gambling is the invention of online casinos with variety of games and good online casino bonus offers that these days attract millions of players from different countries.