A casino is a place where people gamble. It is often combined with hotels, restaurants, retail shops and other entertainment. There are even casinos in cruise ships.
Gambling in some form has been around for a long time. There are records of gambling in ancient Mesopotamia, Rome, Greece, Napoleon’s France and Elizabethan England. But the modern casino is a much more complex and expensive affair. It is equipped with security cameras, monitors, paper shredders and protective document boxes. Its employees are trained to detect everything from counterfeit money to card counting.
Every game in a casino has a mathematical expectancy that allows the house to make a profit. That is why they give big bettors special inducements such as free spectacular entertainment, transportation and elegant living quarters. The casinos are also on the cutting edge of data analysis. They use chips instead of cash to make it psychologically harder for people to gamble more than they are able, and it is easier for the surveillance system to spot statistical deviations in chips than in pieces of paper.
In the less obvious realm of casino security, dealers and pit bosses watch out for blatant cheating by watching patrons’ reactions and betting patterns. They know the rules of each game and can spot a cheating player if they do something out of the ordinary. There are more subtle things that casino security people look for as well. The way that dealers shuffle and deal cards, the location of the betting spots on a table all follow certain patterns. These are called tells and they are very difficult for cheaters to hide.