A casino is an establishment that offers gambling. Most casinos also offer restaurants, hotels, and other amenities for visitors. They are also known as gaming houses, or gambling dens. The United States leads the world in casino gambling, with the highest concentration of casinos located in Clark County (which includes Las Vegas).
Casinos are carefully designed to influence visitor behavior and keep them playing longer than they intend. Using concepts learned by former addiction counselors and architects, casinos are often built with intimate, windowless spaces and a maze of slot machines to create an illusion of endless fun and keep players coming back. Casinos also use scent and music to manipulate the emotions of visitors to create a manufactured blissful experience that keeps people hooked on gambling, even when they are losing money.
The large amounts of cash handled within a casino make it vulnerable to theft by both patrons and employees. To reduce the risk, casinos employ a variety of security measures. These include cameras that monitor all activities inside the casino, as well as electronic systems for table games like roulette and blackjack that monitor the exact amount of money wagered minute by minute and instantly detect any anomalies. Some casinos also use “chip tracking,” in which the chips have microcircuitry that allows them to be tracked and accounted for. Other technological innovations, such as automated card shuffling machines and random number generators, have made casino games less dependent on human dealers and croupiers.