Originally Posted by
jdog
Yeah I don't think that this is much of a news flash. I'm sure lots of properties have been aware of these vulnerabilities and it's a pretty simple matter to see which customers you're not making money on over time. But I think the author is exaggerating a bit, saying a group was moving $2B... 2 billion?? Maybe coin in, but profit in a year, or even a few years... give me a break.
And it's getting more and more difficult to find 99% VP games, they act like they're everywhere?
And how much is slot APing really costing them? Maybe it lowers the perceived RTP so less ploppies play them, but if you had under-performing games, then you'd get rid of them, right? So what's the problem?? It all seems overblown.
Sure if a gaming outfit really wants to reduce freeplay vulnerabilities, they can. But it will ultimately cost them recreational player revenue if they take it too far so I am of the opinion there will always be opportunities for those willing to work hard.
This is a good summary of the situation.
The article acts like it is exposing a shocking truth of which most casinos are unaware, but that's not true at all. The casinos are very aware, and have been for a long time. It's just been a matter of whether doing something about it would have too much collateral damage against the business of legitimate recreational gamblers.
There's also the matter of how deep the pockets are. Large casinos or large casino groups can take some losses to APs without blinking, as long as it doesn't either become an epidemic or start interfering with their other customers (such as slot hustling or vulturing). Smaller operations can't take the beating as easily, and will sometimes shoot off their foot in the process of trying to stop it.
Aside from the eye-popping "$2 billion group" claim, which I find doubtful, the only really noteworthy part of the article involves AP pattern recognition. Similar to how blackjack counters were largely thwarted by watching betting patterns, the same could be done to a lot of slot advantage plays and new card plays.
Say you were hired for a lucrative consulting job with a casino to thwart advantage play. Let's also say you instantly forgot all the names and faces you got to know over the years within the AP community, and had to go strictly on data and play patterns. Let's also say you were not allowed to re-infiltrate AP communities to find out people's identities.
Could you identify APs this way, using data/patterns only?
I easily could. I wouldn't be able to catch all of them, but I'd catch some of them.
The "new card" plays are especially easily to catch, as those fall under a clear pattern.
Slot plays are a little tougher to identify, but if you had data as to which machines were being played, for how long, and the win/loss/jackpot data, you could again deduce who is an AP and who isn't, with a reasonable degree of certainty.
There's also the simple method of pushing out all low value players. If someone signs up for a new card and sticks to the very best paytable VP, it can quickly be inferred that this is either an advantage player, or a low value player who will end up generating little money for the casino once it's all said and done. So you can safely give these people shit offers, and not be losing much.
Of course, any countermeasures will result in APs catching on, and some might start engaging in different patterns to throw the casino off. But if the engagement in these patterns costs too much in EV, the APs won't do it, and will not bother with that particular property.
One area where I feel casinos are currently lacking offer-wise is doing some better number crunching to figure out the gamblers who have almost no chance, and the ones who almost always walk out of the casino a loser. There are plenty of players like this, but they get under-offered because their coin-in isn't good enough, or they play table games which move too slowly. They should be rolling out the red carpet for players like these, especially ones who have a long history and clearly aren't doing it to fool casino marketing.
Finally, we're in 2024, and casinos could easily get with slot machine makers to do better play analysis. There's no reason that casinos shouldn't be able to see which players are running money at completely idiotic times (such as a $5000 must-hit with the counter at $4100), which seem to be running play with an edge, and which seem to be in between. Given the day's AI capabilities, there should be an easy way to analyze all of this data and figure out pretty clearly who is there with an advantage.
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