Oldest casino in the world: Venice, the spa towns, Monte Carlo and the US

People have gambled in taverns, temples, army camps and private homes for thousands of years, as the history of gambling guide shows. A casino is something narrower: a public venue, run or licensed by an authority, where gambling is the main business. Even with that definition, "oldest" can mean three different things:

1. Oldest founding date, even if the venue later closed.
2. Oldest still operating, even if it moved buildings or closed for periods.
3. Oldest building still used for gambling.

Most lists mix these up. Venice wins on founding date, spa-town casinos such as Baden-Baden win on buildings with long gambling use, and in the US the answers depend on whether you count hotels, licences or buildings. Each claim below says which kind it is.

How to read a “oldest casino” list

If a list does not say which definition it used, treat the ranking as marketing, not a historical finding.

Where the word comes from

"Casino" comes from the Italian casa, house. A casino (or casin) in eighteenth-century Venice was a small private room or club where nobles met to talk, dine, flirt and gamble. Hundreds of these rooms existed at the height of the Republic. The word spread across Europe with the spa-town gambling halls of the nineteenth century and only later came to mean a large building full of tables and slot machines.

In 1638 the Great Council of Venice opened the Ridotto in a wing of Palazzo Dandolo, near the church of San Moisè. The idea was control. Gambling was everywhere during Carnival, and the state preferred to have it in one supervised, taxed place.

How the Ridotto worked

• It opened during the Carnival season, when masks were customary, so players could hide who they were.
• Bankers who dealt the games were members of the patrician class, and they had to show their faces.
• The main games were basset and biribissi, card and lottery-style games in which the bank had a structural edge.
• Players were expected to dress formally, an early dress code; see casino dress code for how that evolved.

The Ridotto made money for the state but was blamed for ruining noble families. In 1774 the Great Council voted to close it. Gambling continued in the casini and elsewhere.

The modern claim

The Casino di Venezia presents itself as founded in 1638 and markets itself as the oldest casino in the world. The modern company dates from the twentieth century, when gambling was legalised again in Venice, and its main venue is Ca' Vendramin Calergi, a Renaissance palace on the Grand Canal. Richard Wagner died there in 1883, and the building has rooms dedicated to him. So the Casino di Venezia is the oldest casino by founding lineage, not by unbroken operation.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, wealthy Europeans travelled to spa towns to "take the waters". Gambling halls followed them, and several of those buildings survive.

The founding years for Spa and Wiesbaden vary between sources depending on whether they count earlier gaming rooms. Treat any single "oldest" date for them as an approximate claim.

Dostoevsky and "Roulettenburg"

Fyodor Dostoevsky gambled compulsively at German spa casinos in the 1860s, including Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden. His 1866 novel The Gambler is set in a fictional spa town called Roulettenburg. His second wife, Anna, recorded their Baden-Baden losses in her diary. The episode is often cited as an early literary portrait of problem gambling.

The single zero

In the 1840s the Blanc brothers offered roulette with one zero instead of two at Bad Homburg to draw players from rival spas. On an even-money bet that changes the edge from 2/38 ≈ 5.26% to 1/37 ≈ 2.70%. That one decision set the European standard.

A worked stake shows why players noticed. Ten full cycles of each wheel, $100 on red every spin:

Same number of winning colours, half the tax. The single-zero table keeps you in the game longer for the same even-money action. That is a competitive price cut, not a gift: the house still wins, just more slowly.

Germany banned public casinos in 1872, and the spa casinos closed. Baden-Baden reopened in 1933 and is still operating in the Kurhaus. It is often described as one of the most beautiful casinos in Europe, a line that is frequently attributed to Marlene Dietrich without a clear source.

Monaco was short of money in the 1850s. Prince Charles III licensed a casino to save the state’s finances, but the first attempts failed: the site was remote and hard to reach. In 1863 the prince handed the concession to François Blanc, who had made his fortune at Bad Homburg. Blanc’s Société des Bains de Mer built a proper resort, pushed for rail links and ran a single-zero wheel. The district was named Monte Carlo after Charles III in 1866. When Germany closed its casinos in 1872, gamblers moved south, and Monte Carlo boomed.

The casino’s Salle Garnier opera hall, designed by Charles Garnier (architect of the Paris Opera), opened in 1879. Monégasque citizens are banned from gambling in the casino, a rule that has lasted into modern times.

Two famous Monte Carlo stories

The biased wheel. Joseph Jagger, a British engineer, is reported to have recorded roulette results in the 1870s, found a wheel that favoured certain numbers because of a physical flaw and won a large sum before the casino started moving its wheels around. The broad story is widely retold; the exact amounts differ.

Black 26 times. On 18 August 1913 the ball reportedly landed on black 26 times in a row, and gamblers lost heavily betting on red because they thought it was "due". This is the origin of the phrase Monte Carlo fallacy. The maths:

• Chance of 26 blacks in a row on a single-zero wheel: (18/37)²⁶ ≈ 1 in 137 million.
• Chance of a run of 26 of either colour: about 1 in 68 million.
• Chance that the 27th spin is red, given the 26 blacks: still 18/37 ≈ 48.6%.

The wheel has no memory. See gambler's fallacy for why this mistake keeps coming back.

The US answer depends on the definition, because gambling moved between saloons, riverboats and clubs long before modern casinos.

• Canfield Casino, Saratoga Springs, New York (1870). Built as a gambling club by John Morrissey, a boxer and politician, and later run by Richard Canfield. Gambling there ended in the early 1900s, and it is now a museum in Congress Park. It is one of the oldest purpose-built casino buildings in the country.
• Golden Gate Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas (1906). Opened as the Hotel Nevada a year after the city was founded. It is usually described as the oldest hotel in Las Vegas and has offered gambling since Nevada legalised it in 1931.
• El Cortez, Las Vegas (1941). Often called the longest continuously operating casino in Las Vegas in its original building.

For the city’s full story, see Las Vegas history and the Stardust casino guide.

Asia

Macau’s Portuguese administration licensed gambling in the 1840s, making it one of the oldest legal gambling markets in Asia. Its modern casino industry dates from the 1960s and 1970s, when Stanley Ho’s company held the monopoly and opened the Casino Lisboa in 1970. The monopoly ended in 2002, and Macau’s gambling revenue passed the Las Vegas Strip’s in the mid-2000s.

Other early houses people mix in

Crockford’s in London, opened by William Crockford in 1828, was a famous private club rather than a public casino in the modern sense. France’s spa towns and Paris clubs ran high-stakes rooms through the nineteenth century, then public casinos were restricted for long stretches. Those venues matter for social history, but they are not continuous public casinos in the Ridotto or Monte Carlo sense. When a travel list calls something “Europe’s oldest casino”, check whether it means a club, a spa hall or a licensed public room.

The oldest casinos share a pattern: an authority allowed gambling so it could control it and take a share. The Ridotto’s bankers had a built-in edge, and the Blancs competed by publishing a smaller one. Modern players look for the same things: a fair game, a known edge and some way to trust the result.

PVPspinArena runs three player-vs-player games in USDC or ETH on the Base network: Jackpot, Coinflip and Roulette. Its roulette uses a 15-slot wheel with 7 Purple, 7 Silver and 1 Green slot. Purple and Silver pay 2x and Green pays 14x, so every bet returns 14/15 ≈ 93.33%, a 6.67% house edge. That is higher than Blanc’s 2.70% and is shown openly. The roulette odds chart compares it with European and American wheels.

The trust model is different from the Ridotto’s. Instead of a patrician dealing with his face uncovered, each round’s result comes from committed seeds, and any settled round can be checked on fairness. Play is 18+ only, and help and limits are on responsible gambling. More casino history is in the Casino knowledge topic.