A casino, or a gambling establishment, offers customers a variety of games of chance. These include slots, table games (like blackjack, roulette, and baccarat), and video poker. Casinos make their money by taking a small percentage of each bet placed by patrons, which is referred to as the house edge. Other sources of revenue are fees for dealing services and a portion of the payouts on slot machines.
Casinos have a long history of attracting organized crime figures, who often have plenty of cash from other illegal activities and are willing to risk it all on games of chance. Mob money helped establish Reno and Las Vegas as gambling destinations. Some mobsters took sole or partial ownership of casinos, and even hired or threatened casino employees to get favorable treatment.
In recent decades, casinos have adopted sophisticated security measures. Many are equipped with cameras that give them a high-tech eye in the sky, and monitor every table, doorway, and window. Some also use special chips that have built-in microcircuitry to interact with electronic systems that track the exact amounts of money wagered minute by minute, so the casino can quickly discover any statistical deviation from expected value. Other technological innovations in casinos have included automated dice, a variation on roulette where the wheels are monitored electronically rather than by croupiers, and wholly enclosed versions of classic games such as baccarat that require no dealers and can be played on machines.