A casino is a place where champagne glasses clink and people mingle, playing cards, roulette and slots. It’s a place where you can feel the energy and excitement, and where even the most jaded person will get lost in the buzz of the throngs of people laughing and cheering, or tutting when luck doesn’t go their way.
The casino is a gambling establishment where the house always wins. While they offer a lot of luxuries to their patrons, casinos are in business to make money and will always have some advantage over their customers, even if it’s only a small percentage of the time. This advantage is known as the house edge and it’s something every casino needs to keep in mind when planning their operations.
Security starts on the floor, where pit bosses and table managers watch over the games and the patrons with a tight eye on any blatant cheating or suspicious betting patterns. They also have a higher-up who tracks the results of each game, using mathematicians and computer programmers to calculate the house edge and variance for all their games.
Martin Scorsese’s Casino is a testament to his talent as a director, balancing the lavishness of Vegas and its criminal underbelly with a tight and tense story that’s a thrill to watch from start to finish. De Niro and Sharon Stone are both excellent in their roles, with the former giving a performance that’s worthy of her Oscar nomination, while the latter is truly terrifying as mobster Santoro.