A casino is an establishment for certain types of gambling. It is often combined with hotels, resorts, restaurants, retail shops and cruise ships. In the United States, casinos are regulated by state and federal law.

Casinos have a reputation for being glamorous places where money changes hands, but they are also places where cheating and stealing occur regularly. The large sums of money that pass through a casino make it a tempting target for people trying to manipulate the system, whether by using rigged machines or merely taking advantage of other players’ greed or ignorance. For these reasons, casinos spend a lot of time and money on security.

Elaborate surveillance systems offer a high-tech “eye in the sky” that allow security personnel to monitor every table, change window and doorway. The cameras can be adjusted to focus on specific suspicious patrons by security workers in a separate room filled with banks of security monitors. In addition to cameras, casinos use other technology to supervise the games themselves. In poker, for example, betting chips have built-in microcircuitry that interacts with electronic systems to enable casinos to monitor exact amounts wagered minute by minute and discover any deviation from expected results; roulette wheels are electronically monitored to detect anomalies in their spinning behavior.

Gambling in its various forms has been part of human culture for millennia. Archeologists have found wooden blocks used in games of chance in China dating back 2300 BCE, and dice showed up in Rome around 500 CE. But it wasn’t until the early 1600s that the game still played today, called baccarat, became popular.