A casino is a public place where a variety of games of chance can be played and gambling is the primary activity. It may include a large resort hotel with restaurants, stage shows and dramatic scenery, or it might be a small card room in a neighborhood. Casinos have become a big business, and they generate billions of dollars each year for their owners, investors, corporations and state and local governments.
The term casino originally referred to a hall for music and dancing; by the second half of the 19th century it had come to mean a collection of gaming or gambling rooms. Probably the world’s best-known casino is that of Monte-Carlo, which opened in 1863 and is owned by the principality of Monaco.
Most casinos are designed to lure people in with free food, drinks and entertainment, and then encourage them to spend money they don’t really have. That’s how they make the billions in profits each year. The most famous casinos are glamorous, expensive and well-known, but even the smallest, simplest casino can be very lucrative if it is located in a tourist destination.
Many modern casinos have high-tech surveillance systems that provide a kind of “eye-in-the-sky” that can be adjusted to focus on suspicious customers by security workers in a separate control room filled with banks of monitors. Casinos also use computer chips with built-in microcircuitry in gambling tables that allow them to monitor the exact amounts of money wagered minute by minute and detect any statistical deviations from their expected value.