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?"
While tracking is probably legal (Score:1, Interesting)
Doesn't work like that (Score:5, Interesting)
working systems aren't always complicated (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Slot machine odds (Score:3, Interesting)
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 ya this.... (Score:2, Interesting)
For example, I play at Casino Niagra [discoverniagara.com] 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 [discoverniagara.com], Seneca Niagara [senecaniagaracasino.com], and Turning Stone Casino [turning-stone.com]. 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.
The way slots work. (Score:2, Interesting)
"due for a win" isn't quite right with piggies (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [amazon.com], 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.
Re:The casino doesn't care whether YOU win or lose (Score:2, Interesting)
Base payout rates can be known or roughly guessed at through a combination of public and private (insider) knowledge. Having somebody who maintains slot machines or runs a casino in your circle of acquaintances helps a lot. :-) The Piggy bonus came around often enough that people were able to could calculate its frequency and average value just by careful observation. Note that you don't have to lose any money to do a statistical study of payout frequencies; you can just camp out at a casino and collect statistics while /other/ people lose money on the game.
People like Stanford Wong [www.bj21] worked out the odds and/or sanity-checked the odds calculations of others, with help from various high-powered connections. In some cases the calculations were based on recordings of actual play; in other cases it was more of a back-of-the-envelope rough guess.
Advantage bonus-slot players get their edge entirely at the expense of the losing players. Naive players play when the bonus is low or far from paying off; smart players play when the bonus is high or close to payoff. Piggies were so obviously and consistently profitable that some pro players would pay off casino guards, get in fistfights with other pro players ("I was watching that machine first!"), and hassle other patrons for the right to play them. Other games since then (including later Piggy incarnations such as Big Bang) have been tweaked so as to reduce the profit potential considerably.