How Casinos Can Find and Target Their Favorite Customers: The Biggest Losers | Hacker News Reader

How Casinos Can Find and Target Their Favorite Customers: The Biggest Losers

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

17 pointsnewmediaclay21 comments

The article does not actually say how (or did I miss that)? It is just saying "some researchers have tried to create a mathematical model for predicting who are the biggest losers", and taking several paragraphs to say that.

Casinos already have extensive systems for doing this through their loyalty card programs, where in return for getting comps (non-monetary incentives to frequent their casino, such as dinner on the house or a free hotel room) you give them observational powers over your gambling that resemble those possessed by the NSA in a Hollywood spy flick.

They're some of the most ruthless users of CRM (customer relations management) technology in the world.

See generally: http://archives.cnn.com/2001/TECH/industry/07/03/casinos.crm...

(Bonus points for being written back when a 200GB database was impressive. :) )

I assure you that they don't need academics to tell them who the biggest losers are -- theories are fine and dandy, SQL queries make the world go round.

I wonder whether the researchers have thought through the ethical implications of this.

I've worked in the gaming industry, and I'd consider this predatory.

By targeting the worst players based on information stored about them in a database, it seems that they are doing the same thing a player would be doing if s/he counted cards and bet high at a time when s/he was most likely to win.

No. The odds are already in the casino's favour, and the casino has more information than any of the players do.

What they're doing here is identifying suckers, and further exploiting them.

AFAIK, I don't know anyone with a gambling addiction, but when I hear the retarded ideas that people have about how probability works, it gives me pause.

We're a select group, here on HN. Many of us took math classes beyond the first couple of years of high-school, and a lot of us went to university.

The average person out there is at a severe disadvantage, especially when powerful corporate interests are exploiting well-known cognitive deficiencies.

Hmm, what would be the analogous strategy for dating sites? Finding the most unhinged desperate losers and the unacknowledged hookup junkies?

One of the most financially successful "dating" sites, Adult Friend Finder, targeted those very groups: unhinged losers and hookup junkies.

I wonder if those who so abhor paying for a social safety net secretly want life's losers to wither away and die? (But leave behind a lot of their money to bilkers on the way to the grave.)

Maybe they could get jobs.

And they can't whither away and die while having money for us to take. If they still had any money they'd buy food. No matter how few friends you have, and how socially awkward you are, people will be happy to sell you food.

In particular, I was thinking of the working poor. Many of those are still "losers." It's hard for many of those people to get other than crappy healthcare, crappy food, crappy housing, and crappy education for their kids.

It's interesting coming out with a thought 3 or 4 concepts away. It's interesting to see how people fill in the gaps, and what they project onto you.

The principle I was thinking of -- those willing to cause consensual suffering and misfortune. I suspect that some take the laissez-faire stance in order to ensure that they don't run out of downtrodden suckers.

I know many self styled libertarians who really do wish poor people would just wither away and die, yes.

However, pardon my density but I don't really understand how this relates to my previous comment (which I think you are replying to?)

On a semi-related note, does anyone here count cards? I'm slightly interested in teaching myself sometime.

Do you mean for Blackjack? I have done so, computing for myself first the optimal playing strategy (which mostly agreed with the published ones) and then running millions of simulated hands to see whether the assumptions made were sufficiently accurate. They were.

There's plenty of stuff on the net, and you can compute it for yourself. If you don't, then you're blindly following someone else's advice, putting your money on their advice without necessarily understanding what you're doing.

So, with that in mind, how can I help you?

Yeah I was thinking about blackjack. So what did you end up with for a profit margin with you strategy? Looking at articles it seemed like your advantage while counting cards is razor thin. And computing an optimal playing strategy just requires some basic knowledge of statistics, right?

Basically, BJ is around 50%. You win slightly less than half the hands, but some hands give you higher payoffs (doubling, BJ itself, etc). Card counting lets you move the odds by a few percent. If the deck goes in your favor, you then increase the size of your bets to recoup your losses and make a small profit.

The margins are slim, but real. The deck goes in your favor about 10% of the time, so you have to multiply your bets 10 fold to break even (ish). This gets noticed, they reshuffle, and you lose your advantage before you recoup your losses. You ened "social" strategies to beat that.

I've been meaning to write up my experiments for some time, but I've been reluctant 'cos there's already so much on the web about this.

Have you checked what others have said? Why are you asking? What are you trying to accomplish?

Computing an optimal playing strategy is simple with a spreadsheet, once you take into account all the baroque rules. Don't forget, different casinos have different rules. Some let you split multiple times, others don't. Some let you double-down on 8, some don't. Etc.

It all depends on what you're trying to achieve, and how much reading you've already done.

do the casinos make more off people who play slots or table games?

Look at what dominates the floor space.

So, which?

I would think it is table games not because of floor space, but because of high rollers. No one is playing slots for $50,000 a spin.

There's basically no labor component to slots (there's some maintenance I'm sure), making slots far more profitable on a $ take per square foot basis.

This is anecdotal, but I've never seen a casino tear out slots to put in table games (on a net square foot basis), but plenty of casinos in CT and NV have removed table games to add slots (frustrating as a poker player).

Slots, by about a factor of two.

http://pressofatlanticcity.com/business/article_c0ca05f5-ffb...

http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:L3TQaSi_1VAJ:www.state....

The reasons aren't too hard to fathom:

The expected value of a single spin is about 92% of what you paid.

The machines let people push money through them at high velocities.

Their effective "uptime" is much, much higher than table games.

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