Casinos are gambling establishments that offer a wide range of card and dice games, as well as video poker and other electronic gaming machines. Although they make some money from food, entertainment and hotel accommodations, casinos’ primary source of revenue comes from the games themselves. They rely on the fact that every game has a built-in house advantage, which ensures that the casino will not lose money over time.

While some gamblers may cheat or steal, either in collusion with staff or independently, most casinos employ a variety of security measures. These include cameras located throughout the casino that can be positioned to focus on specific patrons and adjusted by security workers to track suspicious behavior. Security personnel also monitor all cash transactions at the casino’s main bank, as well as the payouts of slot machines.

In many ways, Martin Scorsese’s Casino is Goodfellas dialed up to 11. It recreates the lurid spectacle of mobster Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) funneling money from his fictional Tangiers casino in Las Vegas back to his mob elders in New York in what he called a morality carwash. The movie also reveals the mob’s close relationship with Vegas, and how it skimmed millions from the city’s casinos in the 1970s. Scorsese and his screenwriter, Nicholas Pileggi, used extensive interviews with real-life mobster moguls to create the film’s story. Moreover, the film’s sets and costumes were designed by Northern California’s Matte World Digital, which once specialized in creating latent-image miniature/matte painting hybrid shots for stylized productions such as Batman Returns and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.