What Is a Casino?

A casino is a gambling establishment that offers a variety of games of chance for patrons to gamble in. Some casinos add other forms of entertainment to help attract customers such as restaurants, free drinks and stage shows. In the United States, casinos are licensed and regulated by state governments. In Europe, a number of nations have changed laws to permit casinos.

Gambling in some form has been part of human culture for millennia. Evidence of dice-playing dates to 2300 BC, card games appeared around 500 AD and the first modern casinos developed in the early 1700s.

Casinos make their money by charging a percentage of bets placed at the tables. This fee, called a house edge or vigorish, can be very small (less than two percent) but it accumulates quickly over the millions of bets placed by casino patrons. This income allows casinos to build lavish hotels, fountains and replicas of famous buildings.

Casinos use a variety of security measures to prevent cheating and other crimes. Typically, floor staff watch the patrons with a close eye, and can easily spot blatant cheating such as palming, marking or switching cards or dice. Other security measures include “chip tracking,” which uses embedded microcircuitry to monitor betting patterns; electronic roulette wheels, which are monitored regularly to discover any statistical deviations from expected results; and a high-tech “eye-in-the-sky” system that uses cameras to supervise every table change window and doorway. Regardless of the size and complexity of a casino’s surveillance systems, patrons must be aware that they are always a potential target for cheating and fraud.