casino gambling

sports

2007-09-20T11:41:00.000-07:00

Sports
It is widely believed that American football is a spin-off of two popular European games - soccer (known as football in Europe) and rugby. In the late 1800s, players in the United States decided to use an oval ball instead of a round one and took rules from both games to form a brand new one. For awhile, early American football was very similar to rugby - until the rules changed enough to produce the game you've come to know and love on Super Bowl Sunday.
The sport of football traces its origins to rugby, which was played in England in the early 1800s. Similar to football, rugby is played with an oval-shaped ball and has similar scoring and passing methods. The two sports differ in various ways, however, and though they trace their roots back to the same era and sport, they have now both become distinct sports, with their own fan bases and specific rules.
In the United States, the first intercollegiate football game in recorded history took place on November 6, 1869, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The match was between football teams at Princeton and Rutgers Universities, and according to some reports, featured an enormous field, more than 25 players per side, and no referees or sports officials. That early incarnation of the game was very different than the one we know today. It used a round leather ball, much like a soccer ball, and players were not required to wear protection or helmets on the field. The use of referees in the game didn't even start until six years later.
Over the course of the next several decades, the game continued to grow and be played by male students at colleges throughout the northeast. These early players transformed and reconfigured the game, introducing the rules we know today and influencing the sport as a whole. Soon an egg-shaped leather ball was being used instead of a round ball, very similar to the ones we use today. Referees were introduced into the game to keep injuries and disputes to a minimum. Eventually teams were made smaller, to only 15 players on a side, and the size of the field was brought down to modern size.
In the 1870s, football players from Harvard and Yale Universities met in Massachusetts to formalize the rules of the new game, creating the Intercollegiate Football Association (the IFA), which was to be the forerunner to the modern college football association. Although many teams were already established in various universities and colleges, each team played by distinct rules and regulations, and there was no common set of guidelines. The IFA was created to standardize the rules of football and make it easier for various teams to compete against each other in intercollegiate games.
Several years later, in 1880, Walter Camp, then a player at Yale University, worked with the IFA to consolidate and further establish the rules of football. As head of the IFA Rules Committee, he petitioned to bring the number of players down to only 11 on a side, and to introduce a scrimmage system for putting the ball in play. Two years later he introduced a system of downs for moving the ball up the field, in which each team had to advance 5 yards within 3 downs. This was a forerunner to the current system of 10 yards in 4 downs. For this, and other smaller changes, Walter Camp transformed the early game of football into a sport very similar to its modern incarnation. By many standards, Walter Camp is considered one of the fathers of modern football.
Within several decades, despite increasing popularity, the sport was banned in many colleges and universities for its rough play and high rate of injury. By then, some 250 schools had teams, and the sport was spreading rapidly. However, the rough play and lack of protective equipment had resulted in 18 deaths and hundreds of serious injuries. At the time, other than the school uniforms with slightly thicker materials and some extra layers, players didn't wear any protective gear. As a result, a meeting of over sixty schools took place, electing a seven-member Rules Committee which would later become known as the NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
Since that time, college football has continued to evolve and grow in popularity. Leagues and teams are now being played in hundreds of colleges and universities across the nation, and the sport has become symbolic of American athleticism and college teams. While rules continue to be adjusted and revised, the main tenets of football haven't changed since the early years, and the sport continues to share in the tradition laid down by early players in colleges and universities across the Northeast.

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casino gambling

2006-11-13T17:06:00.000-08:00

casino gambling

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Human nature is probably the biggest factor in the history of gambling, but it seems that gambling has been around since the beginning of time and will, apparently, exist forever. Gambling is a form of entertainment that not only spans centuries but also is a common thread that runs through every social strata, country, and race.
Make no mistake about it – gambling is not just a game; sometimes gambling can determine history. In the 11th century, for instance, a land dispute between Norway and Sweden was settled by the roll of the dice. Even earlier, gambling games (the predecessor ofKeno, supposedly) were established in China to bring money into the army’s coffers and in the 1700s lotteries were established to bail out newly established British colonies. Later on (and even today), Americans used statewide lotteries to finance educational infrastructure.
Dice – as integral to gambling as a deck of cards – originated in the ancient game of bone rolling. Dice are possibly the oldest form of gambling, predating playing cards by hundreds of years. Originally, a form of fortune telling, bone rolling slowly evolved into a gambling game. The original dice were made of bones and teeth of animals; dice in the shape we know today originate in Korea and were used in a Buddhist game called Promotion.
Cards were also an early form of gambling. The earliest found playing card dates from the 11th century and comes from Chinese Turkestan. But the French are credited for having first introduced the type of playing cards we're familiar with today including the recognizable suits: spades, clubs, diamonds and hearts. Other countries used different kinds of cards. India, for example, had round game tokens, and the Chinese, of course, had dominoes.
First there were cards and then there were card games and by the beginning of the 18th century the French were playing a nascent form of blackjack called, "vingt et un" (twenty-one). Blackjack made its way from France to the United States in the 19th century, and today it is one of the most popular card games around, both in online and land-based casinos.
Not all gambling games are ancient, however, unless you consider the beginning of the 20th century prehistoric times. The first slot machine was invented around the turn of the century by Charles Fey and it changed the way people would gamble. Slot machines are considered the quintessential casino game and in many casinos they take up 80% of the floor space and contribute to profits accordingly.
Casino gambling began in Europe and the Italian word "casino" originally meant a small villa or summerhous, usually built on the grounds of a larger Italian home or palace. During the 19th century, the term casino came to include public buildings where gambling and sports took place. In the U.S., where immigrants brought with them familiar gambling games, houses and halls in which to play became commonplace. During the early 1800s gambling on riverboats became fashionable and beautiful floating casinos graced the waters of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. In big city centers such as New York and Chicago, gambling halls also attracted refined clientele; they were often frequented by members of the upper class who could afford to bet big and lose big. Gambling halls, a.k.a. casinos, became big business.
But all good things come to an end, and the huge gambling industry turned shady and questionable as unscrupulous people worked their way in. As they did, gambling lost its high-class image and went from being considered a legitimate, sophisticated activity to being thought of as immoral, illegal behavior. Gaming laws were changed and by 1915 almost all the country’s once-legal gambling establishments, racetracks, and numbers operations were shut down. Gambling remained illegal throughout the U.S. with one exception - in Nevada where state legislators legalized gambling in order to raise money and generate revenue. This historic act essentially opened the doors to the modern era of casino gambling.
The first Nevada casino was built in Reno but it was Las Vegas that became the gambling center of the country, if not the world. During the 1970s Las Vegas and the rest of Nevada profited from a robust economy, directly related to the gambling industry and at that time Atlantic City’s first casino opened its doors, as well. But the biggest change in casino gambling has been brought about by technology – computers in general and the Internet in particular have changed the face of casino games with the advent of online gambling. Casino games have come a very long way from the days of bone dice and wooden playing cards.

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