Yet as popular as legal gambling is, illegal gambling is an even larger industry: Worldwide participants are believed to wager anywhere from $340 billion and $1.7 trillion per year.ĪTS.io examined the state of legal and illegal gambling in the United States, looking at the current size of both industries and their histories.
Though the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a 39.6% drop in revenue for Las Vegas casinos, online gambling is expanding rapidly, expected to reach a global market value of $114.4 billion by 2028. Sports-based gambling alone is a fast-growing subcategory, raking in $194.63 billion in wagers worldwide in 2021. Legal gambling has grown into a worldwide juggernaut that draws an estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide. Some of those that did not gamble were often isolated communities, such as Indigenous Australians, Pacific Islanders, and those who lived in remote areas of India and South America. When anthropologist Alfred Kroeber published his 1948 survey of world cultures, he found it much easier to count the civilizations that did not practice gambling than those that did. Evidence of gambling dates back to 3000 B.C., when archaeologists uncovered six-sided dice in what is now modern Iraq. For nearly as long as humans have been alive, they’ve fallen under the allure of placing bets and winning big.
