The casino is a twinkly, noisy place where you can roll the dice and see if lady luck has your back. But it’s important to remember that gambling isn’t just about spinning the roulette wheel or betting on horse races; it encompasses a broad spectrum of activities that use money as their medium. These include everything from sports betting and the lottery to putting a coin in your pocket or accepting someone’s challenge to eat a strange sandwich.
Regardless of the specific game, every bet made in a casino has some built-in advantage for the house—the mathematical expectation that it will win. This is called the house edge, and it’s a crucial part of a casino’s business model. While the house edge is uniformly negative from a player’s perspective, casinos can earn significant amounts of money through commissions on games that involve players competing against each other (such as poker), or through a fee known as the rake.
Because of this virtual assurance of gross profit, casinos regularly offer big bettors extravagant inducements such as free spectacular entertainment and luxurious living quarters. They also reward loyal customers with comps—free goods and services based on how much they gamble and how often. These range from hotel rooms to dinners and tickets to shows, and can even extend to limo service and airline tickets. This is the only way to compete with the burgeoning competition from American Indian reservations, Atlantic City, and foreign locations that don’t have state anti-gambling laws.