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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?"
Many casinos issue cards for frequent customers. The cards allow you to build up points, redeemable for comps and such.
These systems already provided plenty of tracking. So the tickets are just a logical extension of this system really.
Assuming I already used a card, I would be happy to slip a ticket in my wallet rather than carry around buckets of heavy coins.
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.
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
(Why anyone considers casinos worth spending time/money at is a discussion left for another day.)
I'm pretty sure the Nevada Gambling Comission/Board would have an issue with devices listed as separate games acting in concert to provide an overall odds. They spend a lot of time and money to ensure as much 'randomness' as possible, yet design the games to have very definite odds. I don't think they're about to overhaul the whole system.
Are you joking? I thought this board was supposed to inhabited with math-clueful types.
Just so we're clear - there's no player edge on slots - it's advertised to go up to 97.8% payback and is more usually at 90%
stay frosty and alert
Looking at my Station Casinos Preferred Membership Card, I can tell you exactly what the cards are for. It's to get you to come back to the same Casinos. The cool thing about the Station card is you can use it at any of their Casinos. And they have quite a few. The card gets you stuff like free plays, discounted drinks, and automatically registered for a jackpot drawing. My father-in-law hit it for 35 grand recently on a dollar slot. This is the only card I'm familiar with, but I'm sure they are all pretty much the same thing. My card is valid at Boulder Station, Palace Station, Texas Station, Sunset Station(my fav), and Santa Fe Station.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I thought the basic slot strategy was continue to press the "spin" button until all your money disappears? In that case, this card idea makes it so much easier!!
On another note, have you considered actually investing the money in short term stocks or doing some intense day trading? The thrill is the same as gambling, except the odds are actually in your favor to make money. Not to mention the experience you'd gain at picking stocks; something that will benefit you WAY more in the long run than the ability to pick slot machines.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
The casinos do not care if you win or lose - all they care about is that they win. It is necessary that people occasionally win, otherwise nobody would play. They don't care whether it's you, or someone you saw. The odds will be set so that even with the odd big payout, they still profit.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Suppose a slot machine has a payout schedule such that, on average, the machine pays out 97% of the amount it takes in. Somebody will win the occasional big payout but most people will lose, and the losses will tend to more than cover the wins.Why should the casino care whether the payouts go to you rather than the next guy? All they care about is that the overall odds are in their favor, and they are. Somebody will win the jackpots, and it might as well be you as much as anybody else. You don't scare them.
When you say "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.", you are talking nonsense. Switching machines doesn't change your odds*, so the casinos don't need to do anything special to foil that strategy. You can't combine negative expectation bets to get a positive expectation bet.
(* actually, there's an exception to that rule, and I've made money exploiting it, but I gather you're not talking about wonging into machines with unusually high per-machine progressives. That's gotten pretty hard to do lately due to stiff competition and "anti-flea" features built into the newest machines by the manufacturers. But it was fun while it lasted, eh?)
I play Nerd-Folk!
For example, here's a system that worked a few years ago:
(1) Find a bank of "Piggy Bankin'" slot machines.
(2) Walk down the row, pushing a button on each machine, causing it to "wake up" from attract mode and display how many coins are in the bank.
(3) If the number of coins in the bank is greater than 30, camp out at that machine and play one coin at a time until you "break the bank", then immediately cash out. and stop playing.
(4) go find another batch of Piggies, or hover in the background while people play these for a while so as to build the banks back up so you can tear them down again.
If the bank was at $40, your expected income was $20 (subtract 20 from the bank to get the expected value), and it should take less than 20 minutes of play to "earn" it.
Sadly, you won't find banks of original Piggies anymore, and even if you did, you wouldn't find them with large untapped jackpots because too many other advantage players know about them. So I'm not giving anything up by telling you about it now. There are other similar opportunities around, but (a) they tend to be short-lived or otherwise limited in scope, and (b) players who exploit them too aggressively tend to get barred.
I play Nerd-Folk!
In any sports-style betting where there are a large number of ill-informed betters, a well informed better can extract a profit from their ignorance.
Somewhere in hyperspace thate is a "perfect" set of odds for any event. In a fully informed world, the bookmaker and the betters would know this, the bookmaker would set odds that reflected this (minus a cut for his profit) and the betters would lose money at a steady rate.
In the real world, however, some betters will bet unreasonably - because they like the horses name or owners, because the team has a celebrity player, because even it is a bad team it is their team, etc. This means that the weight of bets is such that, if that horse/team does win, the bookmaker will have to pay out a lot. So the bookmaker responds by shortening the odds on this horse/team (knowing that the suckers will still bet emotionally) and lengthen the odds on the competing horses/teams. This means that anybody backing the competing horses/teams has an unfair advantage. Not that they will win any more often, but when they win, the payout will be bigger than it "ought" to be.
The bookmaker doesn't mind - effectively he is buying insurance. If the favourite wins, he has got a bit more income to set against the big payout he has had to make. If the favourite loses, he doesn't mind paying out a few smart gamblers from the big pot he has taken from the suckers. He makes his cut either way.
So it doesn't require absolute knowledge of an event, just relative knowledge. You have to know when the crowd are betting emotionally. And it is only worth betting when the weight of emotional betting is enough to counteract the bookies slice: if the effect is small, you won't take enough to cover the steady drain of the bookie.
As far as the bookie is concerned, the well-informed punter's money is increasing his capital: if he has enough canny punters, he can take more bets off the suckers. And since his profit is from volume, that means he makes more money. Which is nice.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Geez, this is not news, Vegas (and other resorts) have been doing this for awhile. If you are staying at a hotel you are encouraged to use your equivalent of the grocery-store shopper card. This serves two purposes, (a) hotel guests spend more money gambling in their casino owned by their hotel and (b) Vegas can optimize their payout... (oh and (c) you spend more when it's virtual cash). They can track consumer behavior and demographics. All the more reason to only play with cash and forego the comps. The same goes for grocery-store cards.. consumers get screwed in the long run.
I mean (of course) not that they modify any odds, but that they can "comp" certian guests and give free meals, shows, etc. to guest to 'perceive' they got something for all the cash they lost at the slot machines and more likely to return and/or spend more gambling. And after all the 'odds' we are speaking about is really return on investment (negative in most cases).
As far as Nevada gaming commision goes, slot machines don't have to meet any 'perfectly random' requirement. Machines can be (I mean ARE IN FACT) designed to payout differently depending on how full they are, where in the casino they are (ie. by the entrances/exits), what time of day, what time they were last serviced. What the casino must maintain is an overall average payout (usually around 95% on the strip and 98%+ in the suburbs).. Which means best case you are losing money over the long run.
However, many professional gamblers make a living playing video poker which *if* you play *perfectly* can payout >100%.. I've heard that 40hrs/wk in front of a video poker machine can earn you at least $20k/yr (asuming you have enough cash to ride out a losing streak) (Oh and don't believe what you hear on Travel Channel or ABC about casinos and resorts, they are designed to bring in customers
I hate to tell you this, but most casinos already track what you play in the slots. But as far as I know, they use it to give you bonuses to play at the casino. They track how much you play and how much you win, and the more you play the more comps (bonuses) you can get.
:-) So take off the tin foil hat since as far as I know, they can't legally skew the slot machines either for or against you no matter how much you play.
For example, I play at Casino Niagra once or twice a month on average. (I live in new york, so Niagra Falls isn't that far away.) Every month the casino sends me a mailing that has 2 $10 coupons in it. I have heard that other people can get either 2 $20 or 2 $50 coupons for the casino each month depending on how much they spend in the slots. And how do they know how much they spend? By inserting a card and being tracked at the slots basically. So if you spend more, you're rewarded with more freebies. While on the other hand, if you don't use your card they think you don't play and stop giving you the coupons as a result. But honestly, for $20/month for free, I'm willing to be tracked.
Now I assume that the same type of thing is done in Canada that's done in Nevada, though I can't say for sure. But in Los Vegas, a machine has to be random to be legal. A casino can't skew the results of a machine to play out better to one player or another. It can control how likely the machine is to pay out as a whole (usually the more a machine costs to play, the more likely you are to win, though the odds are still in the house's favor), but it's illegal to change it from person to person. (if someone wants to correct me on this that's fine. I since live in NY I could be wrong about this.)
As for the printed slips, those are annoying. We have 3 casinos within about 2 hours from here. Casino Niagra, Seneca Niagara, and Turning Stone Casino. I like Casino Niagara the best since it uses both coins to play, and that's how you get your winnings. It's tangeable at all times, instead of only getting money when you visit a cashier. Turning stone I like next because it's completely electronic. Your winnings/losings are all stored on your casino card which you take from machine to machine, so it's easier to carry around. Seneca Niagra uses the printed slips and they're a bit annoying because if you win, you have to take your slip to a cashier to collect your winnings. You can't just go from machine to machine as easily. It kinda sucks that way but there's nothing you can do about it.
So in closing, don't worry. The casinos aren't out to get you. They are just after your money, and you pretty much turn it over freely when you play the slots.
-Through the server, over the router, off the firewall... Nothing but 'Net!
The one time I've been to Vegas and on a few trips to Atlantic City as a kid, I've always noticed how excited people can get by the sound of plinking coins.
The old ladies spending their social security check on the one-armed bandit will hear a neighbor get a big payout and start playing more fiercely. When they do win they have a crazy Golumn-like look in their eye as they're filling up that bucket full of winnings.
Is the cost of handling coins so high that it's worth forfeiting the extra revenue from that psychology? Even if the machines make an electronic plink sound when you win (along with the bells and sirens) I can't see the alure being the same.
Of course, maybe it's just easier to hit the '$5 bet' button if you don't have to load 20 quarters into the machine.
Personally, I think the best games in Vegas are in the basement of the Excalibur.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Just a little FYI on the slot machines actually work. Many people have the misconception that each time you pull the lever the slot machine moves onto it's next random number in line. Therefore it is possible for someone to "steal" someonelse's jackpot by pulling the lever right before them. The way slots actually work is while they are sitting idle, thier random number generator is actually pumping through numbers like crazy. It only stops when someone pulls the lever, and this is the number chosen for that particular pull. This means it is possible to miss a big jackpot by a fraction of a second.
Er, no. The piggy has a per-machine progressive - when a certain random event occurs it "adds a coin to the piggy bank." When you get the "break the bank" symbol it pays you whatever is in the piggy bank. The bank starts out at a value of 5, 10, or 15 coins, and on average the bank generally breaks at around a value of 19 coins, making this bonus neutral with respect to payout. Sometimes, through random chance, the bank happens to get very large before it breaks. If you happen upon a very large bank, you aren't in any sense "due for a win" - you still have to wait the same average time before the break-the-bank symbol appears as anybody else would - but you are guaranteed that when you get it, your payment is larger than average. The larger-than-average expectation from this one bet makes up for the generally negative expectation of the machine as a whole.
There are other games for which your "the machine is DUE for a win" does apply, though. On machines with the "diamond mine" bonus, for instance, you might find a machine that is likely to pay out sooner than its neighbor, because the nature of the bonus is that the payout comes when a mine fills up, and you can see how close that is to occuring.
Those who want to exploit such opportunities are well advised to read this book, but I'll warn you in advance the pickings are pretty slim. There are enough knowledgable professional and semi-pro advantage players around that the opportunities don't persist long. Everywhere that profitable slot machines exist, there are people lurking in the background waiting to play them the moment they show a tiny profit opportunity. If you wait and only play slots that show a $20/hour ROI, you'll never get to play because somebody else will have jumped on the opportunity the minute it was a $2/hour ROI.
I play Nerd-Folk!
I work in the Slot Technical department of the first casino in the world to have a 100% ticket-in/ticket-out floor. I can tell you with absolute certainty that your fears are completely unfounded.
There are many advantages to using tickets instead of coins. The primary reason is that it saves us a ton of money. A stack of 200 tickets sitting in the printer can last for days. If the same machine has coins, it might have to have its coin hopper filled multiple times a day. The labor savings from just that are incredible. It also prevents people from having to wait for an attendant to fill an empty hopper when they cash out. Happier customers stay longer, spend more money, and come back more often.
Coins have to be collected, counted, wrapped or bagged, and redistributed, and they are very heavy. My casino has two people to handle the paper distribution. It would take 40-50 additional people to do all coin handling.
Contrary to popular myth, we can't change what a machine does on the fly, nor do we need to. A slot machine has a theoretical mathematical hold percentage that is in our favor. It varies from day to day and week to week, but over the life of the machine it almost always comes very close to the theoretical. We don't need to cheat. We can give you back 99% of what you put in and still make money. Most of the time you'll take your 99% and put it in again. Then we'll take 1% of that. And you'll do it again. And again. That's how we make money.
We don't need to track you with barcoded tickets, we do that with player's club cards. We entice you to use cards by giving you comps based on how much you put into our machines. You don't have to use a card if you don't want to. The only reason the tickets have barcodes is so that the bill validator can read it. The unique number on the ticket is there so that the machine can query the back-end system to validate it as a good ticket. Nothing more.
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
While I don't doubt that the bar-coded tickets can be used to track players, I can guarantee you that they aren't used in a way that can affect the odds for the player.
Each slot machine is equipped with a chip that determines the payout for that machine. The gaming control board of each gaming jurisdiction usually requires that the casinos register each machine's payout with them. If the casinos want to change the payout, they have to notify the gaming control board of the change, and then manually open all of the machines and swap out the chips. There is no such thing as dynamically changing the odds on a machine.
The bar-coded tickets were primarily introduced for two reasons:
#1. Players won't have to haul around buckets of coins and don't have to feed coins into machines, which soils their hands and also means that they'll play fewer spins in a given period of time. Fewer pulls of the handle = lower profits for the casinos.
#2. "Administration" costs for the machines go down for the casinos with the ticket-based systems. They no longer have to employ as many change people to fill the machines, or employ as many people in the cage because they won't have to count the coins that players bring up to cash in. In addition, I would guess that the type of tracking you talk about is also possible. When a machine takes in a ticket that was printed from another machine, I can start developing a relationship showing which machines are frequented by the same type of player.
One drawback of the ticket-based system (for the player) is that it is a lot easier to lose a paper slip worth $600 than a few buckets filled with $600 in coins!
Five Dolla Moddy-Moddy?