20 Interesting Gambling Facts

Do you want to know more about gambling? If yes, below there are some interesting, sometimes unbelievable facts about this activity.

1. 1. People have been gambling since early times. The first recorded taxation and regulation of gambling was made up in the 4th century BC.
   2. Keno was invented in China somewhere in the 2^nd century BC.
   3. Gambling and lotteries have often been used to realize lots of public projects. For example, The Great Wall of China was constructed to a big proportion from money derived from Keno.

1. Roulette is the oldest casino game. It’s also called the Devil’s game, since the sum of all the numbers in the wheel is 666, the Number of the Beast.
2. In the past the Catholic and Judaic priests supported gambling.
3. The sandwich got his name after John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich. He invented the sandwich because didn’t want to quite the game to eat.
4. The card suits (hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades) came from the French Ancién Régime. Cups stand for the clergy, coins mean merchants, clubs are for peasants, and swords are the nobility.
5. Italians and French still have arguments about who invented blackjack.
6. Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States, funded his congressional election campaign with money he won while playing cards in the South Pacific during World War II.
7. Despite the fact that the Monte Carlo Casino is a major source of income for Monaco, this country’s citizens are not allowed to visit the casino.
8. Las Vegas is well-known all around as world’s gambling centre. However, today the world’s biggest gambling city is Macau, which earned in $45.3 billion in 2013. It takes one day for Macau players to wager the same amount that is wagered in a week in Las Vegas.
9. The main airport in Las Vegas, McCarran International airport, is the 8^th busiest airport in the world.  There are 850 flights a day and over 2.5 million people a month, most of whom are gamblers.
10. The first online casino was launched by Microgaming in 1996 in Antigua, and had 18 casino games.
11. 68% of players in Las Vegas play slots games.
12. The famous MIT team consists of students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They played blackjack from 1979 until the beginning of the 21^st century. They made millions with some legal techniques such as card counting.
13. President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe won 100,000 Zimbabwean dollars (that is US$2,600 at the time) in a lottery in 2000. He is the only modern Head of State who won the lottery.
14. The largest slot jackpot win was in Vegas in 2003. A 25-year-old engineer hit a $39,710,826.36 jackpot on the Megabucks machine, beating odds of about 17 million to one.
15. You can’t see clock and windows in brick and mortar casinos.
16. In 2011, Blackjack player Don Johnson won over $15 million in Atlantic City casinos for half a year.
17. The potential for Royal Flush (poker) is 1 in 649,740.
18. 2,598,960 unique five-card hands can be made from a standard 52-card deck, with a single pair having a 42.3% likelihood of being in any hand.