Tickets for Tracking Players in Casinos? 157
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?"
Casinos Can't Change the Odds! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Naive? (Score:3, Informative)
(Why anyone considers casinos worth spending time/money at is a discussion left for another day.)
Re:Naive? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
edge?? EDGE???? (Score:2, Informative)
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% [lasvegasadvisor.com]
Re:Casinos Can't Change the Odds! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
As I sit here.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Casinos Can't Change the Odds! (Score:2, Informative)
9700 - no win
200 - 4x prize
80 - 8x prize
15 - 20x prize
4 - 50x prize
1 - 200x prize
After the pool is generated the system verifies there are no statistical anomalies and then makes it available for playing.
Newer machines do not get full banks, and they don't generate a random result at the time you press a button, they grab a pre-generated one. This is true for systems used in Washington state and Florida, I would expect it to be similar in Nevada.
Like the parent said, the casino does not care if you win. They actually like winning to be a huge event with lots of fanfare, it motivates other players. They make known profit from every generated ticket pool.
Re:I think ... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Already done! (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, you have to factor in the megajackpots into those odds, but they're not as bad as some forms of gambling.
Barcoded Tickets Are Beneficial To Both Sides (Score:2, Informative)
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!