Tickets for Tracking Players in Casinos?

aws910 asks: "I was in Las Vegas recently, and I noticed that most machines now give barcoded tickets as payment instead of coins. These tickets can then be used in other machines as a wager instead of paper money. A basic slot strategy is to move from one machine to another, and play machines in certain areas of the casino floor to improve your odds. With the ticket system, It seems all too easy for someone to build a system to track a player from one machine to another, giving the house the ability to kill the player's (already slim) edge. If a machine knows how much you've already won as soon as you sit down, do you think it will give you good odds? I couldn't find any articles on it. What does Slashdot think about this?"

Comments

Casinos Can't Change the Odds!

[thecampbeln]

Casinos can't legally dynamically change the odds on a machine period, let alone based on who you are!

Besides... moving from one machine to another does not improve your odds any better then those idiots who bet black when X number of reds have appeared in succession on a roulette table... The only ones who this will "help" are the casinos themselves (better tracking of prolific players), said prolific players (getting comps, etc.) and of course the tax man.

Re:Casinos Can't Change the Odds!

[Red Pointy Tail]

Ya, it is a commonly held fallacy that changing machines improve the odds. It is takes high-school probability training (or just simple reasoning) to see that the odds of a future given the previous events that have *already* been determined remains the same. Theoretically it is probably possible that the same machine can give 2 jackpots successively, though there is hardly the chance for that.

An aside would be that many machines have an accumulating jackpot since the last win, for which it makes sense to just pick the one with highest pot to maximize your intake if you hit jackpot.

A simple Occam razorish explanation will also to be that the casino *doesn't* need to do this to earn their big bucks. And they earn their big bucks by having a tiny skew in their basic odds (like giving 0.51 odds to themselves v.s. 0.49 odds to you) thus gives them a slight edge, that is multiplied by the volume of transaction to give them a big profit. All they need is to guarantee volume and prevent cheating. Maybe the tickets is just efficiency and to make it possible and easier to track cheaters. To imply that they would tweak the odds is just tinfoil hatting simply because they don't need to. And that is probably illegal.

Re:Naive?

[Zachary Kessin]

Plus what would be the point, you (The casino) get in big trouble if you get caught, and you are going to make money anyway.

Now it may help the casinos figure out how to set up the floor to maximize revenue or something, sort of like, people who like game X tend to like game Y but not Z, so lets move these slots over there.

But then again if you are in a casino you are a bit of a fool.