A casino is a gambling establishment that houses games of chance and some with an element of skill, like poker, blackjack, and roulette. Aside from the games themselves, casinos offer a variety of luxury amenities and entertainment shows to draw in customers. In most cases, patrons must be of legal age to play in a casino.
Gambling in its many forms — from the low-key bookie to the glitzy Las Vegas casino — has been part of human culture for millennia. But there is something about the casino that seems to encourage people to cheat, steal and scam their way into a jackpot. This is why casinos spend a lot of time, effort and money on security.
Elaborate surveillance systems provide a high-tech eye-in-the-sky, with cameras in the ceiling watching every table, window and doorway, which can be adjusted to focus on suspicious patrons by security workers in a separate room full of banked screens. There are also more traditional measures: slot machines pay out according to pre-programmed probabilities, so they can’t be rigged; and dealers watch patrons carefully for signs of card counting or other blatant cheating.
But the biggest challenge to casino security comes from compulsive gamblers, who generate a large percentage of casino profits but spend their own money on gambling instead of paying for local goods and services. In fact, some economic studies show that casinos actually drain communities of money by shifting spending away from other types of entertainment.