- $2,400 max Slots bonus
- $1,200 max Blackjack bonus
- Unique weekend deposit bonuses
Gambling Through Time: Part 4 - Games in the New World
-
The New World, which would eventually get old enough to be known by the more formal title of North America, filled the civilized world with a sense of mystery and further inspired some of history's greatest minds. For several centuries (and to this day), immigrants would flood into America from the far reaches of the planet Earth looking for new opportunities or an escape from old persecutions. As it pertains to our history of gambling, each of the cultures that colonized America brought with them unique customs and traditions, including games. It was in the early years of America that most of today's most popular casino games took their modern form.
While games like blackjack and roulette boast of a mixed heritage, other games like craps, poker and slots are patently American. As we mentioned earlier in our series, dice were a popular form of entertainment among Europe's poor for centuries. The same was soon true in America. The modern version of craps first appeared in New Orleans in the early 1800s courtesy of an eccentric politician and gambler named Bernard de Marigny. While Marigny himself was indisputably wealthy, it was the poorest residents of Louisiana that stripped down the original English game of Hazard and popularized the resulting game of Craps by playing it in the streets of New Orleans and even on the slave plantations of the south.
Meanwhile, to the west of the Mississippi River another kind of game was gaining popularity in the saloons, dance halls and even prisons of America's newest and wildest frontier. Rumor has it that poker also originated in New Orleans, but it is invariably associated with the Wild West. The game appeared in Louisiana around the same time as craps—the early 1800s—but it was quickly carried north on riverboats and then ran west with the Gold Rush. Though poker was often considered a game of ill-repute in its early years, thanks to its unruly patrons, it nevertheless quickly found favor with more respectable crowds.
A third gambling milestone can be credited to 19th Century America. At the end of the 1800s, the first slot machines were introduced. In less than a hundred years, they would be popular distractions on both coasts and at every casino in between.
In the first half of the 20th Century, two of the world's largest gambling destinations started to take form. While Atlantic City had long been a resort town, it wasn't until the end of the 1930s that it saw its first casinos built. Las Vegas on the other hand started as a stopover for pioneers and had always been a little shabby, but it was lifted out of obscurity with the completion of the Hoover Dam in 1935 and really found its calling when America's most notorious mobsters moved in and established the first casinos as a means of laundering money. When it came time to fill the casino floors, America's favorite games—craps, blackjack and slots—were obvious choices.
Despite Las Vegas' dark background—or perhaps because of it—people were drawn to “Sin City.” Movie stars, singers, eccentric millionaires and other, lesser, celebrities all came to Vegas when they wanted to have a good time. Before long, curiosity got the best of the rest of the world, and soon the city was flooded with tourists. For decades, Las Vegas was the be all end all of the gambling world...and then the first online casino opened.
Where to Play
Comments
Post new comment