A casino, also known as a gambling house, is a building or room where people can gamble by placing bets with cash or casino chips. These facilities are often combined with restaurants, hotels, retail shops or even cruise ships. People can also play casino games at home, in social gatherings or on the Internet.

Casinos would not exist without the millions of bets placed on games of chance every year. While musical shows, lighted fountains and elaborate hotel themes help draw in the crowds, casinos are ultimately about the games themselves. Slot machines, blackjack, roulette, craps and baccarat account for the vast majority of the billions in profits raked in by casino owners every year.

The casino business is built on a simple principle: every game has a mathematical advantage for the casino, no matter how skillful the players may be or how large their bets are. This advantage is usually less than two percent, but it adds up over the years to give casinos enough money to pay for dazzling hotels, giant fountains and even replicas of world-famous landmarks.

To ensure the math works out in their favor, casinos keep a close eye on their patrons. Dealers are trained to look for blatant cheating, such as palming or marking cards or switching dice. Table managers and pit bosses have a broader view of the action and can notice betting patterns that suggest collusion. Video cameras, meanwhile, provide an “eye in the sky” that can be adjusted to monitor specific suspicious patrons.

Because they are essentially guaranteed to earn at least some money on every bet, most casinos offer big bettors extravagant inducements to keep them coming back. These freebies can include anything from tickets to shows and rooms in their opulent hotel towers to reduced-fare transportation and airline tickets. The most sophisticated casinos even have a separate area of the casino dedicated to electronic sports betting, where patrons can place bets on American football, boxing, soccer and other events on large banks of plasma screens.

The most famous casino in the world is probably the three-story, red-and-gold gaming palace in Monaco, which opened in 1863 and still draws royalty, aristocracy and other wealthy Europeans looking to try their luck at the tables and slots. But there are many more casinos in the world, ranging from the small and intimate to the sprawling and glitzy. Here are 10 of them: