A casino is a gambling establishment offering a wide variety of games for patrons to play. In addition to slot machines and table games, many casinos also offer sports betting and even live entertainment like concerts and shows. Some casinos are also combined with hotels, restaurants and retail shopping. Casinos can be found around the world and in a variety of locations, including Atlantic City, New Jersey; Las Vegas, Nevada; Macau, China; and other cities and countries around the world.
In the past, most American states banned casino gambling, but in the 1980s they began to ease up on those laws. Casinos began appearing in Atlantic City and on various Indian reservations, which are not subject to state anti-gambling statutes. By the mid-1990s, there were 3,000 legal casinos in operation worldwide.
Most casinos are for-profit businesses. They make money by giving their players a mathematical advantage over the house, whether it be in a blackjack game where the dealer has an edge of two percent or in a craps session where the dice roll has a built in five percent advantage. The difference between the expected return of a particular casino game and what the player bets on it is the house edge, and this determines how much a casino will make in any given period.
Because of this built in advantage, a casino cannot lose money on every single bet placed in it for one day. This virtual guarantee of gross profit allows casinos to regularly offer big bettors extravagant inducements such as free spectacular entertainment, free hotel rooms and luxury cars and transportation. Even smaller bettors are given comps such as food and drinks, discounted show tickets and airline tickets.
Casinos make a lot of money by selling slot machines and other games, but they also make a great deal of cash from the fees charged to gamble in their buildings. These fees, which are collected on behalf of the gaming authority, fund local governments and police departments. In addition, the fees pay for a variety of local services and amenities such as public education, fire protection, roads and bridges, libraries and emergency medical care.
Something about the gambling environment encourages people to cheat and steal in order to gain a competitive advantage over other players, or just to win more than they deserve. This is why casinos spend a lot of money on security. Some casinos have catwalks in the ceiling above the casino floor that allow surveillance personnel to look down, through one way glass, on the activities at the tables and slot machines. Other casinos have specialized cameras that can zoom in on certain suspects and focus on specific suspicious actions, such as tampering with the game chips or changing the odds of winning. Still others have whole rooms filled with banks of surveillance monitors that can be adjusted by security personnel to focus on particular sections of the casino. There are also cameras in the ceiling that can track a particular person moving from one area to another.