Games of chance have been with us all through the ages. Records abound in Ancient Greece and Rome with evidence of different gambling techniques, as well as an account of Chinese gambling that dates back to 2300BC.
These days, an increasingly large number of people like to gamble online, at their own pace. This is possible due to gambling sites like the PayPal casinos covered here www.paypal-casinos.co and the manner in which they’ve simplified the gambling process. |
Online casinos have become a strong part of everyday life in a way traditional casinos could never have hoped to achieve. Whilst a minority of the population still makes carves out some time to visit the traditional casinos; just about everyone else is enjoying playing games with online casinos on their smartphones and gadgets. How did this happen?
The first record of a gambling house in Europe was the Ridotto in Venice, which first opened its doors to the public in 1638 and was intended to be a way of providing gambling in a controlled environment. The institution lasted 100 years but was eventually closed by the government for being a cause of impoverishment to local merchants.
In American gambling history, evidence points to saloons as the first sites of gambling. Saloons doubled up as places for people to stop for refreshments along the weary roads of the old West, and so gambling became the form of entertainment. However, social reformers and state legislation banned gambling in the early 20th century and saloons gradually went out of fashion.
The first state to legalise gambling in the US was Nevada in 1931 - naturally, the first legal casinos were first established here. In the 20th Century, America became the most popular gambling destination, as Las Vegas began to grow in leaps and bounds.
The city of Las Vegas in Nevada was formerly a desert but it rose to become the gambling capital of the world and has kept a firm grasp of this title to this day. Following Nevada, New Jersey was the next state to legalise gambling, forming Atlantic City into its own version of Las Vegas. The city is now the second biggest gambling City in the United States.
Land-based casinos, however, only catered for a select group of people. Many people lived far away from them and even those living close by didn’t have much in the way of motivation. This led to casino houses looking for ways to attract more business, hence online casino sites quickly rose to prominence.
The proliferation of online casinos allows just about anyone to play casino games regardless of their location. Aside from the launch of different cutting edge technologies to improve gaming, many of these online casinos allow people to try out games free of charge, without putting down live money until they are comfortable enough to do so.
This has been a massive draw for a lot of individuals, as it is not possible to play demo games in traditional gambling houses. When you then add in the ability to gamble anonymously, the success of online casinos becomes much less of a mystery.