The Casino Experience
The world’s top casinos offer more than just games. They provide an experience that attracts gamblers from around the globe looking for luxury and entertainment. Casinos captivate with a combination of flashing lights, free cocktails, and opulent decor. While the games are a major draw, the best casinos also focus on security and fair play.
Despite all the glitz, glamour and spectacle, a casino is not a place for everyone. Some people are better suited to gambling than others, and many casinos are designed to keep you playing as long as possible. Many have been designed based on principles set by behavioral economists who studied how to influence players’ behavior. The most successful casinos use a combination of design and psychology to create the perfect environment to bleed patrons’ bankrolls.
Casinos make their money by offering games with a built in statistical advantage. This advantage is very small – less than two percent – but it adds up over millions of bets. This edge enables casinos to build lavish hotels, fountains, towers, and replicas of famous landmarks. It also enables them to pay out winning bets and rake in millions of dollars in profits each year.
Some casinos even have high-tech “eye-in-the-sky” surveillance systems to detect suspicious behavior and stop cheating. They can monitor every table, window, and doorway with cameras that can be adjusted to focus on suspicious patrons or specific machines. Moreover, reputable casinos use RNGs to ensure that each game’s results are truly random.
As far as the acting goes, nobody could have played the part of mobster Sam “Ace” Rothstein better than Robert De Niro. In fact, it’s arguably his finest performance. Sharon Stone is equally as good as Ginger McKenna, her sexy Vegas hustler/call-girl character. The movie is a masterfully crafted tale of destruction and betrayal that will stand the test of time.
While a movie about organized crime may sound dark and heavy, Martin Scorsese’s Casino rises above anything petty and instead gives us a glimpse into the darker side of human nature. It is a harsh, yet delicately balanced masterpiece that speaks even to those who hate the subject of organized crime.
The film owes much of its success to the flawless direction of Scorsese and his talented cast. Almost no other filmmaker would have been able to capture the complexities of a mobster story in such a realistic and compelling way. It also benefited from the brilliant editing of Thelma Schoonmaker. In addition, the film has some of the most striking and iconic images in all of cinema history. Using latent-image miniatures and matte paintings, Northern California’s Matte World Digital helped to recreate the look of Las Vegas in the 1970s for this film. A team of experts worked to create the dazzling sets that would help to tell this epic mob story. They included the great director, screenwriter, and editor, Martin Scorsese; co-screenwriters Barbara De Fina and Nicholas Pileggi; and stars Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, and Joe Pesci.
