A casino is a place where champagne glasses clink, gamblers and tourists mingle, and the overall feeling is one of pure excitement. From the Las Vegas Strip to illegal pai gow parlors in New York City, there are more than 100 million people who visit casinos every year – and they’re all looking for a taste of that magic.
The most obvious ingredient is gambling, which ranges from the wildly popular card games like blackjack and poker to the more relaxed slot machines and roulette wheels. While casinos add a variety of other attractions to lure in customers, such as free drinks and stage shows, they always focus on gambling as their main draw.
In the end, however, a casino’s success isn’t completely up to chance. Casinos have a number of built-in advantages over players that mathematically ensure they will always make money. These are known as the house edge and are built into each game’s rules. In fact, a casino can be profitable even when it loses a large proportion of its customers.
As such, a casino must constantly work to encourage gamblers to spend more money. This is why it has a huge variety of games, with something for everyone’s tastes. It also uses sounds, lights, and physical design to create an environment that’s welcoming yet hard to walk away from. To help you keep on spending, here are nine tricks casinos use to trick you into throwing more and more cash at their tables and machines.