Canada’s online casinos of today provide an exciting and entertaining alternative to Canada’s traditional offline casinos, but games of chance have been around for a very long time. Canadian residents who enjoy playing online casino games are actually carrying on a gaming tradition that has been enjoyed by their ancestors for many generations.

Historians and archaeologists have found mentions of gambling in many ancient texts and suspect that games of chance were a common feature in many of the world’s premier early civilizations, although they certainly took on a different form than the online casino games that we are familiar with today. Experts have identified an ancient Chinese account that describes the practice of betting on games of chance in texts dating back to 2300 BC as one of the first recorded instances of gambling.

Games of chance were popular have been popular in many eras throughout human history since then, although casinos themselves are relatively young in comparison. The first casinos were, technically gambling houses and not actually known as casinos, but they housed wagering opportunities since they came into existence. The first gambling house of this sort appeared in seventeenth century Venice, Italy, as a controlled alternative to the street bets common during the Carnival season. Later European incarnations of gambling houses shared a degree of exclusivity with the original Venetian version. American casinos came about during in the nineteenth century as meeting places for settlers to come together for conversation, drinking, and gambling purposes.