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A casino is a facility for certain types of gambling. Casinos are often built near or combined with hotels, resorts, restaurants, retail shops, cruise ships, and other tourist attractions. Some casinos are also known for hosting live entertainment, such as stand-up comedy, concerts, and sports.
Gambling is the wagering of something of value on a random event with the intent of winning something else of value, where instances of strategy are discounted. Gambling thus requires three elements to be present: consideration, risk (chance), and a prize. The outcome of the wager is often immediate, such as a single roll of dice, a spin of a roulette wheel, or a horse crossing the finish line, but longer time frames are also common, allowing wagers on the outcome of a future sports contest or even an entire sports season.
A slot machine, fruit machine, poker machine or pokies is a gambling machine that creates a game of chance for its customers. Slot machines are also known pejoratively as one-armed bandits, alluding to the large mechanical levers affixed to the sides of early mechanical machines, and to the games' ability to empty players' pockets and wallets as thieves would.
Card counting is a blackjack strategy used to determine whether the player or the dealer has an advantage on the next hand.
Oscar Baylin Goodman is an American attorney and politician. A Democrat-turned-independent, Goodman was the mayor of Las Vegas, Nevada from 1999 to 2011. His wife, Carolyn Goodman, succeeded him as mayor in 2011.
Frank Lawrence Rosenthal, also known as "Lefty" Rosenthal, was an American professional sports gambler, Las Vegas casino executive, and organized crime associate. Rosenthal, who was once called "the greatest living expert on sports gambling" by Sports Illustrated, is credited with bringing increased exposure to sports betting to Las Vegas in the 1970s.
Cheating generally describes various actions designed to subvert rules in order to obtain unfair advantages. This includes acts of bribery, cronyism and nepotism in any situation where individuals are given preference using inappropriate criteria. The rules infringed may be explicit, or they may be from an unwritten code of conduct based on morality, ethics or custom, making the identification of cheating conduct a potentially subjective process. Cheating can refer specifically to infidelity. Someone who is known for cheating is referred to as a cheat in British English, and a cheater in American English.
Lester Ben Binion, better known as Benny Binion, was an American career criminal who established illegal gambling operations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In 1931, Binion was convicted of shooting and killing a rum-runner, Frank Bolding. In the 1940s he relocated to Nevada, where gambling was legal, and opened the successful Binion's Horseshoe casino in downtown Las Vegas.
Cheating in casinos refers to actions by the player or the house which are prohibited by regional gambling control authorities. This may involve using suspect apparatus, interfering with apparatus, chip fraud or misrepresenting games. The formally prescribed sanctions for cheating depend on the circumstances and gravity of the cheating and the jurisdiction in which the casino operates. In Nevada, for a player to cheat in a casino is a felony under Nevada law. In most other jurisdictions, specific statutes do not exist, and alleged instances of cheating are resolved by the gambling authority who may have more or less authority to enforce its verdict.
Ronald Dale Harris is a computer programmer who worked for the Nevada Gaming Control Board in the early 1990s and was responsible for finding flaws and gaffes in software that runs computerized casino games. Harris took advantage of his expertise, reputation and access to source code to illegally modify certain slot machines to pay out large sums of money when a specific sequence and number of coins were inserted. From 1993 to 1995, Harris and an accomplice stole thousands of dollars from Las Vegas casinos, accomplishing one of the most successful and undetected scams in casino history.
Griffin Investigations was once the most prominent group of private investigators specializing in the United States gambling industry; roughly half of the major casinos in the US once subscribed to Griffin's services. The company was founded in 1967 by Beverly S. Griffin and Robert R. Griffin.
Binion's Gambling Hall & Hotel, formerly Binion's Horseshoe, is a casino on Fremont Street along the Fremont Street Experience mall in Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. It is owned by TLC Casino Enterprises. The casino is named for its founder, Benny Binion, whose family ran it from its founding in 1951 until 2004. The hotel, which had 366 rooms, closed in 2009. TLC reopened 81 of the rooms as a boutique hotel called Hotel Apache in July 2019.
Gaming law is the set of rules and regulations that apply to the gaming or gambling industry. Gaming law is not a branch of law in the traditional sense but rather is a collection of several areas of law that include criminal law, regulatory law, constitutional law, administrative law, company law, contract law, and in some jurisdictions, competition law. At common law, gambling requires consideration, chance and prize, legal terms that must be analyzed by gaming lawyers within the context of any gaming operation.
Anthony Brancato was an American criminal who served as a freelance gunman to various Mafia and syndicate organizations.
The Kansas City crime family, also known as the Civella crime family or Kansas City Mafia, is an Italian-American Mafia family based in Kansas City, Missouri.
Advantage gambling, or advantage play, refers to legal methods used to gain an advantage while gambling, in contrast to cheating. The term usually refers to house-banked casino games, but can also refer to games played against other players, such as poker. Someone who practices advantage gambling is often referred to as an advantage player, or AP. Unlike cheating, which is by definition illegal, advantage play exploits innate characteristics of a particular game to give the player an advantage relative to the house or other players. While not illegal, advantage play may result in players being banned by certain casinos.
The Mob Museum, officially the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, is a history museum located in Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada, United States.
Argent Corporation was a company in Las Vegas that at one time controlled the Hacienda Hotel/Casino, the Stardust Resort & Casino, the Fremont Hotel and Casino and the casino in the Marina Hotel. The company was owned by Allen R. Glick, a San Diego real estate investor. The name Argent came from the three initials of his name, combined with the first three letters of the word "Enterprises". Over a few years, federal, state and local gaming officials in Nevada confirmed that these casinos were controlled by organized crime families in the Midwest and that a huge skimming operation was conducted within the casinos.
The 1950s was a time of considerable change for Las Vegas. By the 1950s, there were 44,600 living in the Las Vegas Valley. Over 8 million people were visiting Las Vegas annually in 1954, pumping $200 million into casinos, which consolidated its image as "wild, full of late-night, exotic entertainment". The population grew dramatically from 8,422 during World War II to over 45,000. From 1952 to 1957, through money and institutional lending provided by the Teamsters Union and some Mormon bankers, they built the Sahara, the Sands, the New Frontier, the Royal Nevada, the Showboat, the Riviera, the Fremont, Binion's Horseshoe, and finally the Tropicana. Gambling was no longer the only attraction by the 1950s; the biggest stars of films and music like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford, Andy Williams, Liberace, Bing Crosby, Carol Channing, and others performed in intimate settings and brought a whole new brigade of Hollywood film stars and others in the entertainment business to the city. In 1957, the first topless show "Minsky's Follies" was started here.
Carl Cohen, was an American executive in the gambling resort industry in Las Vegas, Nevada, in the 1940s through 1970s and is credited with playing an important role in the development of Las Vegas as a premier resort destination.
References
- ↑ Bonansinga, Jay; Gomes, Danielle (7 May 2013). Hit Me!: Fighting the Las Vegas Mob by the Numbers. Lyons Press. pp. 108–109. ISBN 978-0-7627-9431-7.
- ↑ Brodkin, Jon (March 7, 2008). "Casino insider tells (almost) all about security: Engineer built systems used by up to half the world's casinos". Network World.
- ↑ Farrell, Ronald; Case, Carole (1995). The Black Book and the Mob: The Untold Story of the Control of Nevada's Casinos. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-14753-2.
- ↑ Munchkin, Richard (2012). Gambling Wizards: Conversations with the World's Greatest Gamblers. Huntington Press, Inc. p. 113. ISBN 9780929712680 . Retrieved 1 May 2014.
- ↑ Benston, Liz (2005-09-13). "Griffin Book Producer Files for Chapter 11, Citing Suit". Las Vegas Sun .