In a culture where the latest fad can disappear as quickly as it arrives, casino marketing requires an ability to stay ahead of the curve and to anticipate what the market wants next. The games, entertainment options, and amenities that are popular today are unlikely to be the same five or ten years from now, so you need to know how to attract the right customers by staying current with trends.
Something about casinos entices people to cheat, steal and scam their way into a jackpot, but the truth is that winning a game of chance is not left entirely up to chance. There are certain built-in advantages that ensure that the house always wins. The house edge is the amount of profit that a casino expects to make from each and every game played. This is why casinos spend so much time, effort and money on security.
Like Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, which came out a few years later, Casino is not just about Sin City but about the idea of Sin City, a place where champagne glasses clink and tourists and locals mingle while trying their luck at roulette and blackjack. It’s a vision of the city that Scorsese, in particular, seems to be ambivalent about. The movie is full of hellacious violence (a torture-by-vice sequence with popped eyes and a snarling, sound-designed baseball bat beating that had to be trimmed to avoid an NC-17 rating), but it also has a few scenes that evoke nostalgia for the old days, as well as some skepticism about what might replace them.
