The first casino opened on 14 December 1856 in a modest mansion called Villa Bellevue in La Condamine. It was a disaster. Monaco had no proper roads connecting it to Nice, no comfortable hotels for visitors, and no publicity. The concessionaires, writer Albert Aubert and businessman Napoleon Langlois, could not attract enough gamblers to cover their costs. They sold their rights, which passed through two more failed operators before Princess Caroline dispatched her private secretary to Germany with a specific mission: recruit Francois Blanc, the operator of the successful Bad Homburg casino. Blanc initially refused. It took sustained persuasion from Caroline, who even befriended Blanc's wife and suggested that Monaco's mild climate would benefit her health, before he finally agreed in 1863.

Francois Blanc formed the Societe des Bains de Mer with 15 million francs in capital. Among his investors were the Bishop of Monaco and Cardinal Pecci -- the future Pope Leo XIII. Blanc received a 50-year concession and immediately demanded a rebranding: the area called Les Spelugues, where the gambling complex stood, needed a more appealing name. The choice fell on Monte Carlo, honoring Prince Charles III. The gamble on nomenclature worked. By 1878, Blanc had hired Charles Garnier, architect of the Paris Opera, to redesign and expand the casino. Blanc had the leverage -- he had loaned at least 4.9 million gold francs to the cash-strapped French Third Republic to complete the Palais Garnier. Now Garnier added a concert hall, the Salle Garnier, facing the sea, while architect Jules Dutrou redesigned the gaming rooms facing the Place du Casino.

The casino's most famous stories involve those who beat it. In 1873, Joseph Jagger discovered a bias in one of the roulette wheels and exploited it relentlessly, "breaking the bank" -- draining the reserve kept on the table by the croupier. Charles Wells pulled off the same feat repeatedly on his first two visits, inspiring the 1892 music hall song "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo." The casino also produced the most famous illustration of the gambler's fallacy: in the summer of 1913, the roulette ball fell on black 26 consecutive times. Gamblers lost millions betting against the streak, convinced that the laws of probability demanded red -- a misunderstanding of randomness that still bears the casino's name.

Citizens of Monaco are forbidden to enter the gaming rooms. Princess Caroline imposed this rule on moral grounds, and it persists. The Societe des Bains de Mer, still majority-owned by the government and the Grimaldi family, controls not just the casino but the principality's major hotels, sports clubs, and nightclubs. For most of its history, the Casino de Monte-Carlo was the primary source of income for both the ruling family and the Monegasque economy. Garnier's facade remains largely intact, the Salle Garnier still hosts opera and ballet, and the Place du Casino still draws visitors who come not necessarily to gamble but to see the building that turned a bankrupt microstate into a global byword for wealth and risk.