A casino, also known as a gambling house or a gaming hall, is an establishment for certain types of gambling. Modern casinos are often combined with hotels, restaurants, retail shops, and other entertainment facilities. This article focuses on casinos that offer a wide variety of gambling options, including poker, blackjack, slot machines and roulette.
A modern casino is like an indoor amusement park for adults, with the vast majority of the entertainment (and profits) coming from gambling on games of chance. Musical shows, lighted fountains and elaborate hotels help draw in the crowds, but it’s the billions of dollars that are wagered by casino patrons each year that make casinos profitable.
In the beginning, most of the gambling was controlled by organized crime. Mafia figures used their vast income from drug trafficking, extortion and other illegal activities to finance casinos, taking sole or partial ownership of many of them. The casinos were popular with tourists and they grew quickly, but the taint of organized crime hung over them.
The casinos became more legitimate as the law was passed limiting organized crime involvement and as people began to take the business seriously. Today, casinos have become sophisticated and high-tech places. Elaborate surveillance systems allow security personnel to monitor every table, window and doorway using cameras that can be manipulated from a room filled with banks of security screens. Some casino tables feature chips with built-in microcircuitry that allows them to be monitored minute by minute, while automated roulette wheels can be scanned regularly to discover any statistical deviation from expected results.