The Belle Époque-style Casino de Monte-Carlo holds sway above the Mediterranean Sea and makes its presence known in the principality of Monaco’s Place du Casino. Indeed, Casino de Monte-Carlo has been featured in several James Bond films, including “Never Say Never Again” and “GoldenEye.” Its name in these films: The Casino Royale Monte Carlo. Monaco’s Casino de Monte-Carlo is legendary. The word casino originated in Italy, as did the world’s oldest casino-Casino di Venezia. When Steve Wynn’s Bellagio opened on Oct. 15, 1998, on the site of Vegas’ former Dunes Hotel, it was touted as being the world’s most expensive casino resort with a price tag of $1.6 billion. Also finding new homes with Resorts World are 100 trees from their former Stardust Casino Hotel and Resort home. In addition, there are over 100 different games in the Casino Bar’s slot machine room, including 60 machines offering video reels and a high-limit slots area. WinStar World Casino and Resort has more than 10,000 electronic games, and nearly 100 table games, including blackjack, craps, roulette, mini-baccarat, and Ultimate Texas Hold’ Em, along with a 55-table poker room. Gamblers are drawn by Caesars’ 1,324 slot machines and 185 table games, including blackjack, roulette, and craps, along with a slew of poker games from Texas Hold’ Em Bonus Poker to Pai Gow and Let It Ride.
At play in Bellagio’s poker room are No Limit Hold’ Em, Limit Hold’ Em, Pot Limit Omaha, 7 Card Stud, and mixed games. The casino’s upper-level houses exclusive salons designated as High Limit, Ruby, and Paiza areas with over 200 games. As for its past, the Hippodrome made news as far back as 1900 when it was a well-known circus theatre “with a 100,000-gallon pool with elephants, polar bears, and carriages pulled by racing teams of horses.” From Harry Houdini to the first performance of Swan Lake to Judy Garland’s famous five-week residency in 1968, the Hippodrome stage has titillated audiences over the years. Though gambling was always a mainstay at Casino di Venezia, it was originally known as the Theatre Saint Moses, where a casino, then called Ca’ Vendramin Calergi, was in full swing during performance intermissions. And this is not merely true in the United States-IBIS World estimates that the global casino and online gambling industry has a market size of $231 billion and employs just north of 1 million people across the world.
Italy had the honor of the world’s first gambling house, or casino, which was sanctioned by government decree in 1638 as a means of controlling people’s propensity for gambling. The casino resort’s Italian thematic design was a tip of the hat to a village in Northern Italy of the same name. When the $2.4 billion Venetian Macao Resort opened on Macau’s Cotai Strip in August 2007, the New York Times declared that the resort had “more floor space than four Empire State Buildings” and that its casino was “more than three times the size of the largest casino in Las Vegas.” At 550,000 square meters (5,920,150 square feet), said casino is the world’s largest. In 2008, the Chickasaw Nation rebranded the property as WinStar World Casino, having doubled the casino’s size to 380,000 square feet. In 2012, another 62,000 square feet was added with the launch of WinStar’s Rome Gaming Plaza.
In 2012, the venue’s casino was unveiled, featuring five floors of gaming. Despite a bounty of attractions, those with a love for gaming made beelines to Bellagio’s Megabucks slot machines promising a $24 million jackpot. Whereas the AGA’s 2022 report stated that 2019 ushered in a record $43.63 billion in gaming revenues, 2020 brought in less than $30 billion. When it opened in 2010, Marina Bay Sands was deemed the world’s most expensive standalone casino property with a construction and development price tag of $5.7 billion. OLBG looked at the history behind the world’s most famous casinos. The Stardust Casino Hotel and Resort debuted in 1958 capturing two titles in the process: world’s largest hotel and world’s largest electric sign. The Neon Museum is now home to the original Stardust’s magnificent neon sign. The Stardust’s mob ties were the subject of Nicholas Pileggi’s book “Casino,” which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film by Martin Scorsese. Perhaps even more dazzling was Stardust’s famous showgirls act direct from France-Le Lido de Paris. As casino locations go, they don’t get much more romantic than this one, which is set on Venice’s Grand Canals.
