A casino is a place where people gamble, typically with cards, dice, or slots. While stage shows, restaurants and shopping centers draw in customers, casinos would not exist without games of chance like blackjack, video poker, baccarat, roulette, craps and slot machines. These games of chance, with only the slightest element of skill in some cases, are what bring in the billions in profits that casinos rake in each year.

Even though casino patrons might be tempted to think that luck (or something else) will turn their losing streak into a winning one, the truth is that every game offered at a casino comes with a mathematical expectancy against them. This mathematical advantage, called the house edge, is accomplished by a combination of game rules and payout structure. The mathematicians who study the house edge and variance of individual games for casinos are called gaming mathematicians and analysts.

In addition to their gambling mathematicians, casinos employ a wide range of other professionals to help ensure that their odds are fair. Pit bosses and table managers oversee the tables with a close eye on betting patterns that might indicate cheating. Fraud experts investigate potential fraud and money laundering activities. The casino’s surveillance systems monitor every nook and cranny in the building, and can be focused on specific areas by security personnel at a central control room.

A casino’s employees also do a lot of “coloring up” at the tables, which means changing smaller-denomination chips into larger ones so that they can be carried all the way to the cashier’s booth. This saves them the trouble of carrying large stacks of chips from one table to another, and it also helps keep track of how much a player has won or lost in any given period of time.