A casino (also known as a gaming house or a gambling establishment) is an establishment offering various types of legal gambling. Casinos are often combined with hotels, restaurants, retail shopping, and other tourist attractions. Some casinos host live entertainment events.
Gambling in some form or another has been a part of human civilization for millennia, with evidence of dice-rolling dating back to 2300 BC in China. In the modern sense of the word, casinos are institutions that allow people to wager money on games of chance, or some mixture of chance and skill, such as poker, craps, blackjack, and roulette.
In most cases, the odds are stacked against the gambler. Each game has a mathematically determined probability of losing, which is called the house edge, and while this advantage can vary from game to game, it is uniformly negative for the player. Casinos earn money from this advantage by taking a commission, or rake, from winning bets.
Some casinos also offer complimentary items to their customers, or comps, in order to entice them to return. These can include anything from food and drinks to luxury accommodations and show tickets. These are particularly common in Las Vegas, where the casino industry has pushed to make itself as much of a vacation destination as it is a gambling one.
In addition to security cameras, most casinos have other security measures in place. Due to the large amounts of cash handled by casino employees and patrons, both are sometimes tempted to cheat or steal money, either in collusion with others or individually; this is why most casinos employ multiple anti-cheating measures.