Generally, casinos are places where a variety of games of chance and gambling activities are available under one roof. Some of these casinos offer a host of additional luxuries to help attract players, such as restaurants, free drinks, stage shows and dramatic scenery. But even a less-lush place that housed gambling activities could be called a casino.
Although gambling probably predates written history, the modern casino as a central gathering place for a wide variety of different games of chance was not developed until the 16th century. In that period, a gambling craze swept Europe and Italian aristocrats would meet to gamble in private rooms known as ridotti. These venues were often run by organized crime figures who had plenty of cash from extortion, drug dealing and other illegal rackets.
Today’s casinos are designed to be fun and exciting, but they also have to be highly profitable. Every casino game has a built in mathematical advantage for the casino, or expected value, which is uniformly negative (from the player’s perspective). This edge can be very small, as little as two percent, but it adds up over the millions of bets placed by patrons each year to earn the casino enough money to cover expenses and build extravagant hotels, fountains, pyramids and towers.
Casinos have also been designed with many of the same security measures that are used at airports and banks, to prevent theft and robbery. Windows are very rare, and clocks are nonexistent in most casino floors, to give patrons a sense of timelessness and make them lose track of how long they’ve been gambling. Some casinos also have catwalks that allow security personnel to look down, through one-way glass, on the table players and slot machines.