casino or cassino. 1 Card game played with a full deck by two to four players. Its origins are obscure though it probably traces back to the Italian game of Scopa. It is a very scientific game, though playing with more than two persons reduces the strategic possibilities. Four cards are dealt to each player, and four open cards are dealt to the table. Through techniques known as building and trailing, players attempt to take the greatest number of cards (counting three points); the greatest number of spades (counting one point); the ten of diamonds, or big casino (two points); the two of spades, or little casino (one point); and the aces (counting one point each). The game ends after all the cards of the deck are dealt in successive hands of four cards each.

2 A physical establishment in which various games of chance are conducted. Many casinos are also resort hotels, such as those in Monte Carlo, Las Vegas, and Atlantic City. Due to gaming regulations in some states, casinos are sometimes built as riverboats on bodies of water (most of these casinos are actually stationary barges in artificial lakes that are connected to rivers). In 1998, U.S. casinos had $24.3 billion in revenue. Since the late 1980s casinos have been built on many Indian reservations (see under gambling). The world's largest casino is the Foxwoods Resort Casino (Ledyard, Conn.), owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Nation. Opened in 1998, the casino has 6,000 slot machines and 350 gaming tables, plus hotels, restaurants, and retail shops. Other reservation casinos include the Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota's Mystic Lake Casino (Prior Lake, Minn.), the Mohegan Sun casino (Uncasville, Conn.), the Oneida Nation's Turning Stone (Verona, N.Y.), and the many Pueblo-run casinos in New Mexico. Revenues from Indian-run casinos represented two fifths of all U.S. casino revenues by 2004.

Building or room used for gambling. The term originally referred to a public hall for music and dancing, but by the late 19th century it had come to denote a gaming house, particularly one in which card and dice games were played. Today casinos are places where gamblers can risk their money against a common gambler (called the banker or house), and they have an almost uniform character throughout the world. One of the oldest and best-known casinos is that at Monte Carlo (Monaco), founded in 1861. Others include those at Cannes and Nice (France), Corfu (Greece), Baden-Baden (Germany), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and Las Vegas and Reno (Nevada, U.S.). Casinos in Havana (Cuba) were confiscated by the Castro government after the 1959 revolution, spelling the end of a flourishing gambling scene that rivaled Las Vegas. Nevada has long had casino gambling, but other U.S. states prohibited it; that ban was ended when a casino opened in Atlantic City, N.J., in 1978. From the 1980s casinos began appearing on American Indian reservations, which are not subject to state antigambling statutes, and casino gambling expanded vastly in the U.S. as gambling became legal in more states, particularly as a riverboat operation. In the late 1990s Internet gambling sites permitted players to play casino games such as roulette and blackjack. These virtual casinos usually offered the option of playing against other players or only against the house.

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