How casinos thwart cheating, influence player psychology and work the odds to maximize profits.
Pay close attention the next time you step into a casino and you may find that every inch of your experience is being controlled or influenced by the house. From the rules governing the games to the music playing on the sound system to the colour of the carpet underfoot, casinos are carefully designed with the sole aim of getting customers to part with as much money as possible.
Catching
cheaters
Security is one
of the many aspects of a casino designed with this bottom line in mind. According
to the consultancy Worldwide Casino
Consulting, the casino industry loses tens of millions of dollars per year
to cheating schemes.
Earlier this month, Macau police arrested 17 people for cheating three casinos out of 90 million Hong Kong dollars. The alleged cheating ring, which included dealers at the casinos, used tiny cameras to take pictures of cards at the baccarat tables. Last year, a casino cheating ring which had operated for more than five years in at least 29 casinos in Canada and the United States was dismantled following an investigation by the FBI. Van Thu Tran, co-founder of the Tran Organisation ring, and her husband, Phuong Truong, were working as dealers at the Sycuan Casino on the Sycuan Indian reservation in San Diego, California when they initiated a “false shuffle” scam, in which dealers used sleight-of-hand to keep certain cards together in the deck, allowing players in on the scheme to track those cards. More than 40 people pleaded guilty to charges connected with the crime ring.
Although the
industry makes more than a hundred billion dollars each year, it still works
hard to crack down on cheats, immediately alerting law enforcement officials to
suspected wrongdoing.
When it comes to the design of modern casinos around the world, constant
surveillance is a top priority. Security has become so sophisticated that a
long-running heist such as the Tran case is actually quite rare.
To catch cheaters, casinos train dealers and other casino floor staff to watch
for signs, in addition to installing “eye-in-the-sky” video cameras in the ceilings.
Most gambling houses have hundreds, even thousands, of cameras, many of which range 360 degrees,
monitored live by security departments, some of which utilise face detection
software to track suspicious or previously-barred players. Newer casinos track
betting by installing radio frequency identification tags into chips, alerting
security when chips are not where they’re supposed to be (for example, if a
player is holding more chips than they have won, or if chips are missing from a
gaming table). In addition, visitors staying at the hotel where they are
gambling often have to register their personal data when they reserve their
rooms, information casino security has access to.
Getting you to stay and play
Interior design conventions in casinos may be evolving, but their objective remains
to get gamblers to stay and play for as long as possible. Traditionally,
gambling floors have forgone windows and clocks for controlled lighting systems
that confuse the concept of time. Many casinos look and feel the same at 3 pm
as they do at 3 am.
Casino design consultant Bill Friedman writes in the book Stripping Las Vegas: A Contextual
Review of Casino Resort Architecture that layout makes a big difference, too. He favours a “maze” of short,
narrow passageways with changing directions over long, wide rows of gaming
areas. The idea isn’t for players to get lost but instead to limit their line
of vision and reduce the scope of the gaming spaces they’re in. Friedman writes
that this motivates visitors to walk around and explore new gaming areas, each
of which feels like its own, intimate space. Intimacy may be the most important
concept Friedman promotes, calling for low ceilings and segmented gambling
floors (instead of what he calls an “open barn”), to increase players’ comfort.
Newer casinos build upon Friedman’s premise that a comfortable player is a continuous
player. Roger Thomas, head of design for Wynn Resorts, who was recently profiled in the New Yorker
magazine, applied this
principle to the high-limit slot machines room at the Wynn casino in Las Vegas. He was
initially designing the space for older men, with the aesthetic taking on a
dimly-lit clubhouse feel, but then he discovered that the most frequent players
of high-limit slots were in fact female. Throwing out tradition, he installed
windows pouring in natural light and created a “garden conservatory” room to
create a more inviting atmosphere for women.
Engaging players’ senses also keeps them gambling. Fast music, red lights and
pleasing aromas have all been shown to increase casino profits, possibly
because they heighten the perceived level of excitement. Add to this plenty of
free alcoholic drinks, (and for high-rollers, complimentary rooms), and players
tend to feel a lot looser with their money.
The house rules
Playing on psychology isn’t the only strategy the house implements to gain an
edge. Casinos write the very rules that gamblers have to play by.
Depending on where you are in the world, these rules may be subject to legal
regulation to ensure that casinos don’t overstep their bounds. For example, in
the game of blackjack, players may try to count cards to keep track of the deck
and determine whether the dealer or the player has the probable advantage. This
is a perfectly legal strategy, but that doesn’t mean casinos have to like it.
In the popular US gambling destination of Atlantic City, New Jersey state law prevents
casinos from barring card counters, while in the state of Nevada, home to the
quintessential gaming city Las Vegas, no such law exists, so they can ask card
counters to stop playing, or in extreme cases, ban them. As gaming author Frank Scoblete
explains in his video tutorials, casinos anywhere can take measures to hinder card counters, such as limiting
the amount of money they can bet. In Holland, many casinos use continuous
shuffling machines (CSM), so that dealt cards are shuffled back into the deck
after each hand, in order to fend off card counting.
In all casinos, the games have a built-in “house edge”, the profit taken from
each bet. Although it varies from place to place, lottery-type games such as keno
or slots typically have the worst odds, with the house advantage getting up to
around 35%. Players’ odds are better in card and dice games; for instance,
blackjack only has a house advantage of around 1% to 2% for skilled players and
a house advantage of up to around 20% for unskilled players, while craps has a
house advantage as low as less than one percent for skilled players and up to
around 16% for unskilled players. Casinos don’t typically disclose odds, but frequent
blackjack players have
reported facing better odds in Belgium, while in the Dominican Republic,
keno reportedly has even worse odds than other parts of the world.
At the end of the day, the house always wins because
casinos are businesses. They have to turn a profit to stay alive. While the
ecosystem of a casino serves the end goal of taking gamblers’ money, players can come out on top by quitting while
they’re ahead. That, of course, is easier said than done.
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