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Popular Culture Review
obvious. Casino gambling is a recreational form of gambling that has reached its
fullest elaboration in the casino resorts of the Las Vegas Strip. A combination of
European casinos catering to the elite, American frontier gambling halls, and clan
destine urban gambling operations, casino gambling embraces everything from
baccarat to nickel slot machines.
In addition, casinos have inherited much from carnivals. Many of the major
players in the history of American casinos had backgrounds in carnivals and bingo,
which was itself a carnival outgrowth. Sam Boyd, founder of Boyd Gaming, a
company that operates casinos in six states, including the famed Stardust on the
Las Vegas Strip, got his start as a pitchman for Long Beach, CA carnival games
(Sheehan, 105). He used many tricks of the carnival trade to manage and build
successful and popular casinos. Bill Harrah, the founder of Harrah’s Entertain
ment, got his start running a carnival-like bingo game on a Venice, CA pier; though
he built a major casino empire, he and his top advisors never completely left the
bingo hall behind. Sometimes, the proximity of casinos to carnivals is painfully
obvious, as in Circus Circus, a garish, low-budget Strip casino and themepark.
Other times, it is less obvious, but it remains important.
In the modem American casino, a player can choose from a variety of games,
but each has two things in common: it is not completely chance, and the odds,
without adjustment by cheating, are in the casino’s favor. The only exceptions to
this rule are poker, which is played against other players and not the house, and
blackjack, a card game that, unlike other games, has a “memory;” once played,
cards are taken from the deck, and their absence shifts the odds of winning. A
skilled player deep into a multi-deck shoe, keeping track of high and low cards,
can generate quite favorable odds of winning. Casinos use a variety of means,
some of dubious ethics but all legal, to deter skill play. Since poker players only
rent a seat at their table by paying a cut of each pot to the dealer (a reliable, but
miniscule, source of revenue), casinos feature poker only as a supplementary at
traction, if at all. And skill play in blackjack is both officially and unofficially
discouraged. So it is safe to say that, within the casino, skill play is present only
marginally, if at all.
Casinos, then, generate most of their revenue from games of chance in which
the player is at a decided disadvantage. The casino’s profit, and continuing opera
tion, rests squarely on its hold percentage—its profit on each game. On the Las
Vegas Strip in 2001, the hold percentage (or player’s disadvantage) for slot ma
chines ranged from less than 4% to over 11%, depending on the denomination
machine. For table games, there was a wider variance, though all games still had
sizeable house advantages. Blackjack, with its elements of skill play, had a hold
percentage of less than 12%, while the Wheel of Fortune retained an astounding
46.3% of players’ wagers. Most other table games held between 12 and 30 percent