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.

Doesn't work like that

[mike_lynn]

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.

The casino doesn't care whether YOU win or lose

[GlenRaphael]

When it comes to games where luck dominates, the casino fundamentally doesn't care whether you in particular are a winner over any specific period of time. They have no incentive to modify the odds in the way you suggest.. Why would you assume they do?

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?)

working systems aren't always complicated

[GlenRaphael]

If there were a reliable way to exploit any "edge" in a casino it would go out of business in a week.*

*And yes, I've read all the stories about people with fiendishly complicated systems who do actually make shitloads of money, but not only is this very difficult in the first place, it's getting harder. The complexity of the exception proves the rule in this case.

Actually, some of the systems that work to make money are simple. And a casino can easily absorb the losses from a few profitable players here and there. But you are correct that systems that work tend to be short-lived.

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 work in a casino...

[NickDngr]

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.