Whether you love to spin the slots or lay down your chips on a roulette wheel, there’s no better place to satiate your gambling urge than at a casino. These opulent temples of temptation, decked out with opulent furnishings and overflowing bars, elevate the thrill of throwing down your hard-earned cash to an art form.
The word casino derives from the Latin cazino, meaning “small room.” By the second half of the 19th century, casinos had developed into gambling dens and were often found in upscale resort destinations. Monte-Carlo, for example, opened its first casino in 1863 and is still regarded as one of the world’s most beautiful and prestigious casinos.
While casinos are primarily a place for people to gamble, many also have other attractions such as restaurants and shows. Despite the obvious appeal of casino games, the large amount of money handled in a casino can make both patrons and employees susceptible to cheating and theft, either in collusion or independently. To prevent this, casinos employ a variety of security measures. These include video cameras and sophisticated software that tracks betting activity in order to detect any statistical deviation from expected results. In addition, most casinos employ gaming mathematicians and computer programmers to analyze game theory and design software to help them monitor the games they operate.
Besides monitoring the games themselves, casinos employ mathematicians to calculate the house edge and variance for each game they offer. This helps them decide what kind of profit they expect to make from each game, what percentage of the total amount of money bet is theirs and how much in the way of cash reserves they need on hand.