A casino is a facility which houses and accommodates certain types of gambling activities. The industry that deals in casinos is called the gaming industry. Casinos are most commonlybuilt near or combined with hotels, restaurants, retail shopping, cruise ships or other tourist attractions. There is much debate over whether the social and economic consequences of casino gambling outweigh the initial revenue that may be generated.Some casinos are also known for hosting live entertainment events, such as stand-up comedy, concerts, and sporting events.
Casino is of Italian origin; the root casa (house) originally meant a small country villa, summerhouse, or social club.During the 19th century, the term casino came to include other public buildings where pleasurable activities took place; such edifices were usually built on the grounds of a larger Italian villa or palazzo, and were used to host civic town functions, including dancing, gambling,music listening, and sports; examples in Italy include Villa Farnese and Villa Giulia, and in the US
the Newport Casino in Newport, Rhode Island. In modern-day Italian—the source-language of the word—a casino is either a brothel (also called casa chiusa, literally "closed house"), a mess, or a noisy environment, while a gaming house is spelt casinò, with an accent.
Not all casinos were used for gaming. The Catalina Casino,a famous landmark overlooking Avalon
Harbor on Santa Catalina Island, California, has never been used for traditional games of chance,
which were already outlawed in California by the time it was built. The Copenhagen Casino was a
theatre, known for the mass public meetings often held in its hall during the 1848 Revolution, which made Denmark a constitutional monarchy. Until 1937, it was a well-known Danish theatre.The Hanko Casino in Hanko, Finland—one of that town's most conspicuous landmarks—was never used for gambling. Rather, it was a banquet hall for the Russian nobility which frequented this spa resort
in the late 19th century and is now used as a restaurant.In military and non-military usage in German and Spanish, a casino or kasino is an officers' mess.
Most jurisdictions worldwide have a minimum gambling age (16 to 21 years of age in most countries
which permit the operation of casinos).Customers gamble by playing games of chance, in some cases
with an element of skill, such as craps, roulette, baccarat, blackjack, and video poker. Most games
played have mathematically determined odds that ensure the house has at all times an overall
advantage over the players. This can be expressed more precisely by the notion of expected value,
which is uniformly negative (from the player's perspective). This advantage is called the house edge.
In games such as poker where players play against each other, the house takes a commission called the rake. Casinos sometimes give out complimentary items or comps to gamblers.Payout is the percentage offunds ("winnings") returned to players.Casinos in the United States say that a player staking money won from the casino is playing with the house's money.Video Lottery Machines (slot machines) have become one of the most popular forms of gambling in casinos. As of 2011 investigative reports have started calling into question whether the modern-day slot-machine is addictive.
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