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Comment by reverend_gonzo | Hacker News Reader

Every single industry that can will do this, especially those that make most of its money from a small number of its users.

The interesting part of the article was where they specifically targeted one of their whales. They found out which American football teams he liked and introduced in app items that matched those colors so he would buy them.

Casinos are well known to get as much information about their players as possible, and to get their high rollers to keep coming back.

Retail stores have done the same. (See How target figured out a girl was pregnant [1]).

With technology providing more and more information and indirect insight into our lives, it's only a matter of time until everybody does the same. The only way to prevent it (as best as possible) is simply to not play/not link to facebook/etc.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

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I've often theorized that casinos could have highly accurate scales in the chairs to keep track of people.

Hypothetically (but I've seen it in action): I don't necessarily sign up for the players club yet, I walk in and walk up to 3 machines and put a dollar in. Lose -> lose -> minor win. Then I say "oooo I'm going to keep playing with this money!" then I end up losing more than I originally had on hand.

I guess it could be as simple as they're watching you but it's got to be fairly easy to automate. "Hmm this guy weighed 215.3lbs when he came in, that's guy id 1528." then just have a small window. I'm sure there are other 215lb people there but it's not that vital... lol Anyone have any insight as to whether or not I'm just insane?

Weight is way more variable than that. Every one of these scenarios affects your weight: Spend some coins at a slow machine? Holding coins compared to putting them on the machine? Holding a drink? Eating or drinking something? Holding a purse? Leaning on something? Talking animatedly?

It's easy to weigh a few pounds differently between waking up and going to sleep. Much of that is lost through breathing.

Well the idea would be to get an average or something a "baseline" to filter leaning/talking animatedly/etc. Obviously it's probably not how it's done I'm just speculating. Obviously the coin difference would be something but that is something that can be within the margin of error. You give it a ~4lb window or something and all of that's covered. 10 quarters in a pocket is .12lbs.

Besides all of that, we're talking about within a few hours here not day to day. I just mean to give the person that beginners luck then drive them to keep playing. Obviously the accuracy wouldn't be all that vital but it could save the casino a lot of money if they're keeping track of that kind of stuff even if they only have a 50% accuracy.

Keep in mind leaning on a counter or table, putting a leg up, eating and drinking. In the end, you are also putting weight sensors, which are fairly notorious for being fiddly, in a bunch of chairs. The wider you have to make the margin or error, the more false positives you'll get. I imagine an a medium size casino there's a lot of people that weigh ~180 lbs. In the end, it's a passive tracking system, where you get data events and then try to classify them, which I think is more error prone than actively tracking the people themselves through other means. With as many cameras as they have, it probably easier (at this point) to just make sure they always overlap, and have a motion tracking algorithm track people across the video feeds.

If you're saying to use things like "140.2 pounds plus or minus 4 pounds" to try and differentiate among the many, many people in a casino... no, that's not really going to work.

More feasible might be gait analysis, since they've already got cameras all over every inch of the place

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gait_analysis#Biometric_identi...

I was under the impression that Vegas had already implemented facial recognition with their "eyes in the sky" to ostensibly identify cheaters. No reason it couldn't be repurposed to identify whales, too (if it hasn't been already).

Someone I know had a missing relative in a Vegas casino. He enquired at the front desk. They asked for a pic and replied a minute later that "he is not on the gaming floor".

So cool!

Actually it would probably be easier to just track your cell phone, and have a profile for each individual phone they've seen. Lots of stores already do that. I strongly suspect casinos do as well, since they have more to gain by doing so.

Honestly, it's far simpler than that. Most casinos these days have player cards that every machine accepts that from the players perspective can store money on, but is really just giving them the ability to keep perfect tabs on player habits. Combined with fully networked machines, it's seems futile to move between machines just to try and throw the odds around, as they're most likely tracked and adjusted in real time.

I did mention that but that's good to mention anyway!

They log every single button press you do, but they don't change odds on the machines in real time; that's illegal. When you setup a slot machine you have guards and cameras watching your every move. Software is validated with checksums before it is put into service. The exact settings you put in are in some states pre-approved by the local jursdiction for that machine for a certain time period (X years).

Changing the odds of the machine is a ton of work.

> they don't change odds on the machines in real time; that's illegal.

Oh, that's illegal :-)

Algorithms for determining wins are highly regulated by the gaming commission and the source code must be certified before being deployed. You can't get away with the juicing of stats in IRL gambling that you can with online F2P games.

> Every single industry that can will do this

Which is why it is illegal in the EU.

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