A casino is a gambling establishment that offers a variety of games of chance. Its many amenities, including stage shows, lighted fountains and shopping centers, help draw in patrons, but gambling is the core business that generates billions of dollars for casinos every year. Slot machines, blackjack, roulette, craps, keno and baccarat provide the profits that fund their lavish hotels, towering monuments and dazzling architecture.
Although some of the games at a casino do have an element of skill, all have built-in odds that guarantee the house will win. This advantage can be quite small, such as less than two percent, but over millions of individual bets that edge adds up. Casinos calculate these odds, along with the pay-out percentage of each game and their vig or rake, using computers. This work is performed by a class of mathematicians known as gaming analysts.
As the casino industry became more professional in the 1950s, mob money flowed into Las Vegas and Reno, and mobsters became personally involved, taking sole or partial ownership of casinos, and even threatening the lives of their workers. But federal crackdowns on organized crime, combined with the fear of losing a casino license over even the slightest hint of mob involvement, forced gangsters out of the casinos. By the 1980s, real estate investors and hotel chains had accumulated enough cash to take over casinos. And today, casinos are still some of the biggest money-making businesses in the world.
