A casino is an establishment that provides gambling services. The modern casino is like an indoor amusement park for adults, and the vast majority of its entertainment comes from gambling. Slot machines, blackjack, roulette, craps, and keno provide the billions in profits that casinos rake in every year.

Despite their glitzy exteriors, casinos are a serious business. They have a number of built-in advantages that ensure that the house always wins. These include the fact that most games have a mathematical expectation of winning, or losing, over the long run; that the game is played in high-volume, allowing casinos to control their money supply by slowing down play; and that the house can easily adjust the odds of each machine for any desired profit margin.

Because of these factors, it is very rare for a patron to walk away from a casino without losing money. To increase their profits, casinos often offer big bettors lavish inducements to keep them playing. These can include free spectacular entertainment, limousines, hotel rooms, reduced-fare transportation and even meals while gambling.

In addition to these overt inducements, casinos also employ a variety of security measures to prevent cheating and theft by both patrons and staff. The most obvious measure is cameras located throughout the casino, but there are a lot of other ways to keep a gambler honest. Security people watch for routines in the way dealers shuffle and deal cards and pay attention to betting patterns that might indicate cheating. They also closely examine the outcomes of individual games to discover any statistical deviations from expected results.