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Gambling Info
The exact origin of gambling is unknown. The Chinese recorded the first official account of the practice in 2300 B.C., and it is generally believed that gambling, in one form or another, has been present in almost every society since. From the Ancient Greeks and Romans to Napoleon's France and Elizabethan England, history is rich with tales of exploits based on the games of chance. At the height of the Roman Empire, lawmakers decreed that all children were to be taught to gamble and throw dice. One Roman emperor even designed his carriage to allow dice games while enroute to his official duties. The French are credited with inventing playing cards in 1387, and in 1440 Johann Gutenberg of Germany printed the first full deck of cards. Many present-day gambling games are incarnations of previous games. The French working class of the sixteenth century became adept at the Egyptian game of roulette, while Napoleon took interest in the card game vingt-et-un-what is now known as blackjack or twenty-one. . For example, Keno in its original form was a popular Chinese lottery game. Pai Gow Poker is the Americanized and simplified version of the ancient Chinese game Pai Gow. But China is not the only country to have contributed to the world of gambling. With the invention of the wheel in Babylonia 3.500 B.C, roulette like games probably weren't far away, and soldiers in ancient Greece are known to have played dice. Games like Craps, Baccarat, Roulette, and Black jack all have their roots in different parts of Europe.
The English developed a diversion called hazard, the forerunner of today's popular dice-throwing game of craps, and the basis for modern poker games is believed to have originated from a combination of ancient influences including Persian, Italian, and English games of chance. Further refinements to poker include betting techniques introduced by the French and the concept of bluffing developed by the British.
The term gambling has had many different meanings depending on the cultural and historical context in which it is used. Currently, in Western societies, it has an economic definition, referring to "wagering money or something of material value on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods". Typically the outcome of the wager is evident within a short period of time.
The term gaming in this context typically refers to instances in which the activity has been specifically permitted by law. The two words are not mutually exclusive; i.e.: a "gaming" company offers (legal) "gambling" activities to the public.
Legal aspects
Because many religious authorities generally disapprove of gambling to some extent, and because gambling can have adverse social consequences, most legal jurisdictions limit gambling to some extent. Some Islamic nations prohibit gambling; most other countries regulate it. Many jurisdictions, local as well as national, either ban or heavily control (by licensing) gambling. Such regulation generally leads to gambling tourism and illegal gambling. The involvement of governments, through regulation and taxation, has led to a close connection between many governments and gaming organizations, where legal gambling provides significant government revenue, such as in Monaco or Macau.
Under US federal law, gambling is legal in the United States, and states are free to regulate or prohibit the practice. Gambling has been legal in Nevada since 1931, forming the backbone of the state's economy, and the city of Las Vegas is perhaps the best known gambling destination in the world. In 1976, gambling was legalized in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and in 1990, it was legalized in Tunica, Mississippi; both of those cities have developed extensive casino and resort areas since then. Since a favorable US Supreme Court decision in 1987, many Native American tribes have built their own casinos on tribal lands as a way to provide revenue for the tribe. Because the tribes are considered sovereign nations, they are often exempt from state laws banning gambling, and are instead regulated under federal law.
Because contracts of insurance have many features in common with wagers, insurance contracts are often distinguished under law as agreements in which either party has an interest in the "bet-upon" outcome beyond the specific financial terms. E.g.: a "bet" with an insurer on whether one's house will burn down is not gambling, but rather insurance - as the homeowner has an obvious interest in the continued existence of his/her home independent of the purely financial aspects of the "bet" (i.e., the insurance policy).
There is generally legislation requiring that the odds in gaming devices are statistically random, to prevent manufacturers from making some high-payoff results impossible. Since these high-payoffs have very low probability, a house bias can quite easily be missed unless checking the odds carefully.
Gaming mathematics
Gaming mathematics, also referred to as the mathematics of gambling, is a collection of probability applications encountered in games of chance and can be included in applied mathematics. From mathematical point of view, the games of chance are experiments generating various types of aleatory events, the probability of which can be calculated by using the properties of probability on a finite space of events.
Expectation and strategy
Games of chance are not merely pure applications of probability calculus and gaming situations are not just isolated events whose numerical probability is well established through mathematical methods; they are also games whose progress is influenced by human action. In gambling, the human element has a striking character. The player is not only interested in the mathematical probability of the various gaming events, but he or she has expectations from the games while a major interaction exists. To obtain favorable results from this interaction, gamblers take into account all possible information, including statistics, to build gaming strategies. The predicted future gain or loss is called expectation or expected value and is the sum of the probability of each possible outcome of the experiment multiplied by its payoff (value). Thus, it represents the average amount one expects to win per bet if bets with identical odds are repeated many times. A game or situation in which the expected value for the player is zero (no net gain nor loss) is called a fair game. The attribute fair refers not to the technical process of the game, but to the chance balance house (bank)-player.
Even though the randomness inherent in games of chance is would seem to ensure their fairness (at least with respect to the players around a table-shuffling a deck or spinning a wheel do not favor any player except if they are fraudulent), gamblers always search and wait for irregularities in this randomness that will allow them to win. It has been mathematically proved that, in ideal conditions of randomness, no long-run regular winning is possible for players of games of chance. Most gamblers accept this premise, but still work on strategies to make them win over the long run.