A casino is a gambling establishment, especially in a resort or hotel, offering a wide range of games and entertainment. It may also refer to a table game conducted by live croupiers, such as roulette and baccarat, or to a card game played against the house rather than against other players (such as standard poker).

The term casino originally meant a public hall for music and dancing; by the second half of the 19th century it had come to mean a group of gambling rooms. Today, casinos employ a wide variety of sophisticated technologies to monitor patrons, their transactions, and security. For example, “chip tracking” uses microcircuitry in betted chips to monitor their movement minute by minute, alerting the casino if they deviate from expected patterns; and roulette wheels are electronically monitored for statistical deviations.

Most modern casinos feature several table games, including blackjack, baccarat, roulette, and craps. They also offer numerous video poker machines. These machines are the economic backbone of many American casinos, generating huge amounts of money in high volumes and short periods of time for relatively low stakes, ranging from five cents to a dollar or more.

Most casinos employ a highly trained staff to prevent cheating and theft, both by patrons and employees. In addition to a physical security force, most have specialized surveillance departments that use closed circuit television and other techniques. Because of the large amounts of currency handled within a casino, both staff and patrons are at risk of being tempted to steal, either in collusion or independently.