A casino, also known as a gaming house, is an establishment for gambling. In the United States, casinos are licensed and regulated by state governments. Most of them are located in resort areas and offer a variety of services to attract customers, including hotel rooms, restaurants, entertainment, and retail shops. Some casinos are operated by Native American tribes. The term is a portmanteau of “gambling” and “house.”
In the twenty-first century, casinos have become upscale facilities that feature high-quality food and beverage operations and top-billed entertainment acts. They are often designed to look like ultramodern, palatial buildings. They have vast interior spaces, which include a wide variety of gaming tables and slot machines as well as non-gambling areas such as restaurants, art galleries, and conference rooms. Many have swimming pools. Casinos can be very large; the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, for example, is three 55-story towers joined at 200 meters and has 16,500 square feet of casino space.
Most casino games have mathematically determined odds that give the house a long-term advantage over players, which can be expressed as an expected value that is uniformly negative from the player’s perspective (or, alternatively, as a vig or rake). Some casino games do have skill elements, and players with sufficient skills can eliminate the house edge by making wise decisions on individual hands. These players are called advantage players.
According to research by Roper Reports GfK NOP and TNS, in 2005 the typical casino gambler was a forty-six-year-old female with above-average income from a household of two or more people. They liked to play the most popular game, slot machines.