A casino is a place where gambling takes place and it’s one of the most popular forms of entertainment. Although casinos often offer other amenities like restaurants, hotels and stage shows to attract visitors, they primarily exist for the purpose of gambling. Casinos have been around for centuries, but they have become more lavish as technology advances and people’s attitudes toward gambling have changed. The modern casino is much like an indoor amusement park for adults, with the vast majority of the profits coming from gambling. Slot machines, blackjack, roulette, craps and keno provide the billions of dollars in profits that casinos rake in every year.
Most games in a casino are banked, meaning the house has an actual stake in the game’s outcome. The house’s edge is determined by mathematics and it is virtually impossible for patrons to win more than the amount that they bet. The house also earns money through a commission, known as a rake, from games that are not banked.
Something about gambling (maybe the presence of large sums of money) encourages cheaters and thieves to try their hand at scamming or stealing their way into a jackpot. Because of this, casinos spend a lot of time, effort and money on security. They even have high-tech eye-in-the-sky surveillance systems that watch every table, window and doorway in a building, with cameras that can be adjusted to focus on suspicious patrons by security workers in a separate room filled with banks of monitors.
