The house edge is one of the most fundamental things to understand when you play casino games. It is the built-in advantage that casinos have over players, and it guarantees their profitability. Casinos have no choice but to make money, and they will do whatever it takes to keep you gambling. They do this by increasing the speed of the games, offering free drinks, and keeping your attention with flashing lights. It’s a complex business, but the bottom line is that you will lose in the long run.
Like Goodfellas a few years later, Casino is a film about the mob’s relationship with Las Vegas. But unlike that film, it does not treat its protagonists as dashing underworld heroes; rather, like Boogie Nights a few years after that, it imagines a grim hellscape — albeit one that’s deserving of hate mostly for how carefully sanitized it is. This ambivalence is also evident in Scorsese’s use of violence, from the torture-by-vice scene that features a popped eyeball to a baseball bat beating that had to be edited down to avoid an NC-17 rating.
Casino stars Robert De Niro as Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a bookie who is given the Tangiers hotel by the mob to run in exchange for his gambling charges back East. There he meets and falls in love with drug-addicted con-artist trophy wife Sharon Stone, while struggling to maintain his friendship with mob heavy Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci). The movie also covers the mob’s skimming techniques at other casinos and from other parts of the establishment, including food service and gift shops.