A casino is a place where people gamble on games of chance or skill. While casinos add a host of extras like stage shows, restaurants and elaborate themes to draw in customers, the vast majority of their profits come from gambling. Slot machines, blackjack, roulette and craps bring in the dollars. A small percentage of the money that is wagered in a casino is returned to players, and a larger portion is kept by the house as profit. Casinos earn their money from the “house edge,” a mathematically determined advantage that is built into each game.
Casinos are regulated by state laws, and some have additional restrictions on who can gamble there. Almost every state except New Jersey has legalized casinos. There are currently more than 340 casinos in operation across the United States, with most of them located in Nevada and especially Las Vegas. Several other states are known for their casino resorts, including Connecticut, Indiana, and Illinois.
Although gambling in some form predates recorded history, the modern casino as we know it grew out of a need for organized and controlled gambling during the Prohibition era. Mobster money flowed into Reno and Las Vegas, and the mafia largely controlled the gambling operations. Legitimate businessmen were reluctant to get involved, because of gambling’s seamy reputation. Some organized crime figures took full or partial ownership of casinos and used them as fronts for drug dealing, extortion and other illegal rackets.
Today’s casinos are more choosy about who they let in the doors. They concentrate their investments on high rollers, who gamble for much higher stakes than the average person. These customers are rewarded with comps, or freebies, such as hotel rooms, meals and tickets to shows. They are also given special treatment on the gaming floor, with a separate area for high rollers who can spend tens of thousands of dollars at a time.
To keep patrons from leaving the casino to gamble elsewhere, casino staff members use a variety of tricks. The floors are covered with bright, sometimes gaudy colors that are designed to stimulate the senses and entice players to gamble more. Casinos are often lighted with bright, flickering neon tubing. More than 15,000 miles of this tubing is used to illuminate the casinos along the Las Vegas Strip.
The games of chance that casinos offer are played with cash or paper tickets printed with bar codes. The chips have a microcircuitry that interacts with other systems in the casino to record how much is wagered, minute by minute. The electronic systems also monitor the results of each spin of the wheel or roll of the dice to discover any statistical anomalies. Similarly, the machines are regularly monitored for signs of cheating by observing the movement of each coin or chip. If any deviation from the expected results is detected, security personnel are alerted. These systems make it difficult for even the most skilled cheat to escape detection.