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?"
Already done! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
you've lost before you started (Score:1, Insightful)
statistically speaking, you leave with less than you came in. it's like day traders.. occasionally someone has some good luck but the vast majority of small-time day traders and gamblers lose money. It's in the numbers and you can't change it.
So what if one machine pays out less or more than the other? They've got the system as a whole turning out exactly the profit margin they want. You think Microsoft and other monopolies have it nice because they can adjust fees and licenses until they get the revenue they need? That's nothing compared to casinos.
Hopefully you realize that gambling is a form of entertainment, and nothing more! In this case it doesn't matter which machines have bigger payout, does it?
Good luck.
a slot strategy? what? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Pointless (Score:3, Insightful)
The casino doesn't care whether YOU win or lose (Score:5, Insightful)
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?)
Tickets don't 'plink', do they? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
I work in a casino... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.