You stride into the Luxor, Mohegan Sun or Tropicana brimming with confidence and your wallet filled with cash. You plan on an enjoyable evening of fun gaming and a couple rounds of cocktails. But hours later you’re at the ATM, having lost hundreds or even thousands of dollars based on a roll of the dice, spin of the wheel or draw of the cards. What went wrong?

In a movie that’s as close to being a documentary as a drama can be, Casino chronicles the corruption that surrounded the casinos of Las Vegas in the 1970s. While the violence — including a car bombing, the death by overdose of Sharon Stone’s character and the murder of Joe Pesci’s Santoro — may seem over the top for a movie, they are all real-life events that occurred to their real-life counterparts.

Casinos are designed to trick you into spending your money, using sounds, lighting and physical design to influence the way you play games. For example, casinos usually have no clocks to make you lose track of time and they offer free drinks because they know that alcohol decreases your inhibitions and encourages bad decisions that will lead to more losses. They also arrange the tables and machines in a maze-like pattern to confuse you, and they use ringing bells and sirens to signal that other players are winning so that you will be enticed to join them.