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Mrenda posted:I'm curious about the sports books in the big casinos, particularly what feeds they get and who decides what goes up? Here in Vegas most books have DirecTV. Most of the spots you go to will have full Hockey/Hoops/Baseball/Football packages, soccer would be spot specific, more obscure to america sports, not so much. They're usually not set up with streaming services due to broadcast rights fees since streaming services technically qualify as pay-per-view, so no ESPN+ or FUBO access. When it comes to books that have giant screens such as The Venetian or The Superbook, it's going to be whatever game is driving the most action that gets on the big screens. Baseball can be tricky though, with Nevada being subject to blackout on all California and Arizona team home games. If it's a slow night though, tipping your ticket writer will often nudge them into getting the game you want on TV if possible. As for Horse Racing, if they don't have a dedicated Horse Racing section, it's usually only going to be a screen or two dedicated to it, usually one on the popular tracks (Your Santa Anitas, Hollywoods, and Los Alamitos typically) and another just set on TV-G which may feature tracks that aren't bettable in Nevada due to The Hub's relationship with each track on any given day. Many books are just slowly phasing out Horses altogether.
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May 3, 2021 18:20
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ThomasPaine posted:I also guess this may be more a UK thing than a USA thing because casinos here are often marketed directly at the Chinese diaspora. I was a croupier in the UK for a while some 20 years ago. We had the Chinese come in every single night, but the people spending the most were the English people who usually came in just in Wednesday nights. One Chinese guy said they worked hard so that they could blow it all at the casino. They owned takeaways and the like which is where they would get their money. Finish work on an evening, then off to the Casino until 2am. The only gambler I specifically remember was on one of those Wednesdays. I was on the blackjack table with 7 spaces. This guy comes up and Max bets all 7 hands. He loses them all. So he plays them all again. He loses them all. He plays them all again, he lost every hand. Was about £5000 gone in about 2 minutes. He didn't seem even the little bit phased by it. I assumed to have this weird luck as a Croupier when on the blackjack table. I was forever drawing a 5 on 16s. They worked out out once that the house edge of I was dealing on the blackjack table was 20%. I wasn't doing anything that could have effected the game, it's just blind luck. It's safe to say though that I ended up dealing that game most nights.
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May 10, 2021 19:25
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Snazzy Frocks posted:Can they track specific chips around with the rfid or are they just used to validate the chips in the cage.
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May 11, 2021 16:49
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Strategic reader placement in doorways, decorative features, and exits coupled with time synchronized video could give you an idea of who's walking around with what in a crazy paranoia casino. It would probably be enough to wire up readers in the doors to the private or high limit areas in the real world.
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May 11, 2021 17:57
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There's scale problems too. Someone walks through a doorway with 1000 chips each with an individual RFID in it and you want to read all of them accurately immediately? And presumably write that data to a database? And handle high-traffic areas where multiple people are walking through every minute... Big data is definitely a thing, and a big casino could likely afford it, but it'd be a significant deployment of hardware and software with significant IT and DBA overhead to run and maintain.
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May 11, 2021 18:08
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Haven’t seen this asked yet. How true are the stories about casinos pumping extra oxygen in the AC to keep people awake?
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May 11, 2021 20:57
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Leperflesh posted:There's scale problems too. Someone walks through a doorway with 1000 chips each with an individual RFID in it and you want to read all of them accurately immediately? And presumably write that data to a database? And handle high-traffic areas where multiple people are walking through every minute... Not as difficult as you might think nowadays. I don't know about casinos, but there were plans in some UK supermarkets to add RFID to every single product. This was for the intention of when doing a stock check they could simply wheel a machine down the aisles and it would accurately count every item in stock. Could do a whole site stock count in about 30 minutes. After all this planning, they then figured that adding an RFID to items costing 20p was kind of pointless. Last I heard, there's still the plan to do this to high value items like steaks and alcohol.
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May 12, 2021 07:43
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smellmycheese posted:Haven’t seen this asked yet. How true are the stories about casinos pumping extra oxygen in the AC to keep people awake? In my experience, not true at all. Ignoring that our maintenance staff are probably not competent to do so without blowing the place up, the sort of customers you would keep awake with such a tactic are generally not worth the cost. All such a tactic would do is cause a lot of unnecessary violence.
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May 12, 2021 22:53
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they loving pump that fragrance into a lot of the LV casinos though... kinda annoying, especially when smoke mixes with it.
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May 13, 2021 05:48
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smellmycheese posted:Haven’t seen this asked yet. How true are the stories about casinos pumping extra oxygen in the AC to keep people awake? Total nonsense. People have no problem sitting at a slot machine for 36 hours without assistance.
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May 13, 2021 05:54
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JOHN CENA posted:Here in Vegas most books have DirecTV. Most of the spots you go to will have full Hockey/Hoops/Baseball/Football packages, soccer would be spot specific, more obscure to america sports, not so much. They're usually not set up with streaming services due to broadcast rights fees since streaming services technically qualify as pay-per-view, so no ESPN+ or FUBO access. When it comes to books that have giant screens such as The Venetian or The Superbook, it's going to be whatever game is driving the most action that gets on the big screens. Baseball can be tricky though, with Nevada being subject to blackout on all California and Arizona team home games. If it's a slow night though, tipping your ticket writer will often nudge them into getting the game you want on TV if possible. Why are they phasing out horse racing? The olds dying off or other reasons?
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May 13, 2021 15:44
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Sickening posted:Why are they phasing out horse racing? The olds dying off or other reasons? My 60something father in law has figured out the TVG site on his phone. He can watch and gamble the ponies from the comfort of the couch without dealing with much bullshit or convincing people to come with him. He likes it well enough. I imagine he’s not alone in that mindset.
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May 16, 2021 18:41
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Sickening posted:Why are they phasing out horse racing? The olds dying off or other reasons? Yeah, I go to the horse races once a year or so and the crowd is heavily geriatric. Horse racing got huge crowds before state lotteries and casinos were legal, since they were the only game in town. Once they had competition, it was basically a user-unfriendly ritual for the idle rich and a narrow slice of rednecks/grumpy old men. The animal welfare and cheating concerns are probably big factors as well. Here in PA, word is that the only thing keeping the lights on is the huge subsides horse racing got in the deal to bring in casinos, and those are getting controversial. The track I go to gets much smaller crowds and has lost a lot of amenities over the past years, while the attached casino has gotten a lot bigger and fancier.
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May 23, 2021 07:40
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I imagine horse racing has far higher operating costs (and lower profit) than a slot or table too, and the odds are hard to control so there's a risk that someone bets a fortune on an underdog who suddenly wins?
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May 23, 2021 07:51
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Collateral Damage posted:I imagine horse racing has far higher operating costs (and lower profit) than a slot or table too, and the odds are hard to control so there's a risk that someone bets a fortune on an underdog who suddenly wins? Horse betting is parimutuel, so winners are only paid out of losing bets. The house can’t really lose. (Not sure how things like simulcast/OTB betting works; if I place a bet at Laurel Park on a race a Churchill Downs, do all the tracks just settle up with each other at some point?)
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May 23, 2021 19:22
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While that is true, the house tends to be much more comfortable with controllable odds because it increases engagement and play. People who lose a bundle when a long-shot wins often stop betting for awhile. Sports doesn't have this problem so much, because of the greater pool of knowns and an implicit buy-in of the "any given Sunday" rule.
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May 23, 2021 19:37
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I'm just spitballing here but I imagine that human athletes are also much easier to advertise and build marketing campaigns around. A horse, even a really good horse, isn't going to give you good soundbites or a Pepsi sponsorship or tweets.
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May 23, 2021 20:02
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It's an interesting one as there are times when here in the UK we will do marketing around the Jockeys, who in the grand scheme of things are really just along for the ride. We get the build up of Frankie Dettori or Lester Piggott (I don't follow horse racing at all so don't know any past those two) when they win a bunch of races. They become household names even to those that dont bet at all.
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May 24, 2021 09:20
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CellBlock posted:Horse betting is parimutuel, so winners are only paid out of losing bets. The house can’t really lose. (Not sure how things like simulcast/OTB betting works; if I place a bet at Laurel Park on a race a Churchill Downs, do all the tracks just settle up with each other at some point?)  I knew that but it completely slipped my mind.How does the economic agreement between the casino and horse owners work? Do they get paid to race, or get a cut of the betting pool or something else?
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May 24, 2021 10:42
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Collateral Damage posted:
There is prize money, called a purse, for winning the race.
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May 24, 2021 13:10
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Is horse racing even interesting if you don't have any money on it?
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May 25, 2021 00:37
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:Is horse racing even interesting if you don't have any money on it? I love horse racing. It is not.
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May 25, 2021 00:44
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:Is horse racing even interesting if you don't have any money on it? Not really but you dont have to bet alot of money to make it fun.
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May 25, 2021 02:11
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I worked for a string of bowling clubs (lawn bowls) which had poker machines in them. in NSW Australia, basically every pub or club or RSL has a ton of Pokies. its their primary source of income. While I didnt work on the machines directly, I supported the infrastructure they used to function. all machines in the state report to OLGA (office of liquor and gaming). every single spin. Machines in the state must be configured for minimum 90% return. the 2 clubs in the group I looked after had 180 and 80 machines respectively. fun stuff - - at the smaller venue, the manager would make the pokie tech show him each machines return on a weekly review. any machine that was paying back higher than 92% got reimaged and recalibrated. - I looked after the members software/database/server. the all members cards (and non-members temporary cards) were in a database and every transaction made was recorded. the regulars/high rollers were all pretty much pulling back 90% of their wins - if they were putting in 50k/month, they were getting back 45k. the less you played (for example checking the non-member players cards) the less likely you were to be getting that 90% return. as mentioned, its calculated over thousands of spins. - we had a few MTGMs (multi table game machines, roulette, majong etc) in one of the venues. one day some guy came in with some kind of spreadsheet and was playing roulette. he cleaned us out, taking 60K in a few hours. he came back the next day, again with the spreadsheet. Our cameras at the time weren't good enough to pick up what was on the spreadsheet and floor staff were pretty clueless. anyway, he came back like 4 days in a row each time taking about 60k. suddenly, next budget I had 100k to spend on HD digital IPTV CCTV for the whole venue. the last time he came in, reception alerted management, who went into the maintenance room and tripped the circuit breakers for the MTGMs and told him they were broken and he would have to come back another time. - money laundering is a big thing. quite often we would have young people come in with stacks of cash, usually tens of thousands of dollars. Feed them into the machine and play 1c hits for hours. then they 'collect' and get a receipt on cash-out. Bing-bong Clean money. 30% tax on all gaming revenue in clubs, so the government doesnt give a poo poo as its the only way they get to tax crime syndicates. - drug dealers use the machines to avoid directly handling transactions. the dealer will sit in the pokie room on a machine, usually all day or night. someone will call/text them to make a purchase. he instructs them to come into the club and put the money into a specific machine (they are all numbered visibly for regulation purposes). they dont play the machine, just put the money in. a runner then goes and collects the money from the machine, and the dealer texts someone outside the venue to do a dead drop nearby. the dealer then gives the location to the buyer. the cops caught a few guys doing this with our assistance. - the member database was basically a default setting MSSQL DB. several times the server (which was configured/owned by the gaming company that ran the machines, and only supported/maintaned by me) got infected with Ransomware and had to be restored from backups, with some players losing the equivalent of a few thousand dollars in rewards points. They used Avast free edition AV because it was the only one that let their weird-rear end software packages work correctly.
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May 25, 2021 02:25
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Laserface posted:
Holy poo poo this is brilliant.
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May 25, 2021 02:55
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I wonder how that guy was able to game a video roulette machine. That seems crazy unless there was some kind of bug that the devs didn’t know about yet
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May 25, 2021 03:01
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TheJunkyardGod posted:Holy poo poo this is brilliant. not really, the gaming rooms are the most heavily CCTV'd rooms in the building. the gaming room was 20% of the total area of the club (including the carpark) and it had 70% of the cameras.
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May 25, 2021 03:03
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Tetramin posted:I wonder how that guy was able to game a video roulette machine. That seems crazy unless there was some kind of bug that the devs didn’t know about yet Sounds like he worked out how that particular prng did its thing, determined how to read its current state, and went to town on it.
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May 25, 2021 03:13
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Laserface posted:
Surely 92% or more return could be explained by random chance? Did you see that thing about crown workers filing/dremeling out a slot next to the buttons so people could wedge a bit of paper in the side for continuous play?
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May 25, 2021 03:19
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Surely someone putting money into a machine then taking off then another guy claiming the payout ticket after zero spins and cashing it out would quickly be pretty obvious and very suspicious? Here in the UK we have FOBT (fixed odds betting terminals) in high-street bookies. They're the main source of income for most betting companies now I think, and each shop has precisely four of them.* They usually have a few different games, mostly roulette, blackjack, and a few slots. It is apparently quite common for drug dealers to launder money through them, but the machine gets flagged very quickly if you put your cash in then immediately withdraw a ticket without playing. It's not hard to get round though, people now go in with their ill-gotten gains, say £100, and putting £47.50 each on red and black, and £5 on green. Most times they pay 5% for clean money, sometimes they get lucky and make an extra few quid. They're trying to prevent this but it's apparently reasonably hard to do. *This was based on some gambling legislation to stop bookies filling the place with the things, which I guess would have ended up with them buying huge premises and opening de facto casinos. It's pretty funny though because they're such a money-spinner they're often worth opening a full rear end new shop for the extra four machines. You quite often get ridiculous situations with multiple different branches of the same bookies within a few minutes walk of each other and in direct competition. The surest sign of a depressing UK town centre is a main street comprised almost entirely of bookies, charity shops, and takeaways. It's very sad really because they do prey on desperate people with very little to lose but the few pounds they get on unemployment, just looking for that one big win.
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May 25, 2021 03:24
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Tetramin posted:I wonder how that guy was able to game a video roulette machine. That seems crazy unless there was some kind of bug that the devs didn’t know about yet That was the case with a video poker machine a few years ago. There was a patch for one that let you change your wager at any point... including after the hand but before winnings were payed. They only found out after a couple players won around a million between each other. https://www.onlinecasinobonus.org/famous-gamblers/john-kane-andre-nestor/
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May 25, 2021 03:33
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TheJunkyardGod posted:Holy poo poo this is brilliant. My place caught lots of people doing the same thing. It seems smart but is real easy to see from security.
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May 25, 2021 03:56
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After the machines were 'broken' for the third time he stopped coming in. he wasnt tampering with the machine so we couldnt legally do anything. we had the techs reimage the machines after the first two visits, he came back in and his system was still working, so the GM escalated to turning them off. in total he walked out with about 200k for 4 days work. he didnt win every game, but he was winning significantly more than anyone should be on roulette. Im not into gambling so I dont know by how much/what odds. we were allowed to play in our own club, but we had to go home and return in plain clothes with a minimum of 5hrs outside the club before we were allowed to play. Alcohol was 3hrs. Counterfeit money was a big issue. despite having our special plastic money here in Australia, there was plenty of convincing (and not so convincing) fakes getting around. semi-related, the government was rolling out new designs of each note, usually one every 6 months starting with the $5. they skipped the $20 and went straight to the $50s due to the obscene amount of counterfeits that were getting around. some more stories: - besides gambling there was also the member rewards points which you earned on spend or on gaming turnover. the points initially could only be used for purchases in the restaurant or for renewing membership but expanded to include other services (and eventually gaming). You also got a voucher on your birthday for a dollar value. One of the larger clubs in the group (there was 5 total, I looked after IT for 3) had a number of small businesses inside, one of which was a post office, where you could spend reward points. the post office sold, among other things, prepaid credit cards. One of the executives of the club had a nice little grift going on. he had authority to re-print birthday vouchers, which was a feature because again, the company that ran the member software stuff was poo poo, their hardware was also poo poo, and vouchers would constantly be lost inside the machine or not print correctly or whatever. then, he take the vouchers to the post office and purchase prepaid credit cards. Never would have caught him given the club had something like 150K members or more and was constantly growing. how he got caught: he went on a golf trip with his mates and, despite being on over 200k a year thanks to being an executive, couldnt let the voucher thing go. He gave instructions to his mistress on how to run the scam, and she was doing it. the problem was, she was doing it every single day. by the 5th or 6th day, the employee in the post office said 'wow, you are having such incredible luck in there! winning all the time!' to which the mistress responded 'oh no, Im not winning, my boyfriend works here and told me to collect these random vouchers and then come and redeem prepaid credit cards' so not only did he lose a cushy rear end job, he also blew his marriage the gently caress up. ------------------- - OLGA dictates that all clubs need to have a minimum downtime of 6 hours. Our club operated from 9am to 3am, so they were only offline when they werent open. the club got notified by OLGA that there was gaming breaches - machines were being played outside of the permitted times (9am-3am) and each spin was going to be like a 10k fine if the breaches continued. this was weird because the club is closed, no one inside during those times. We asked for more info from OLGA and hit CCTV to see whats going on. I initially just suspected a machine with incorrect time. our storeman started at 5am each day to take deliveries (most of our food at the time was fresh, delivered pretty much daily along with beer kegs and everything else). he was playing the link machines while he was the only person able to in hopes of hitting the jackpots. Once we figured this out and he was pulled into a meeting, he went full sob-story. claimed he had an undisclosed gambling problem, which gov policy meant we then had to support him through that. he lost his job but had 10k or so worth of therapy and support provided by the club. ----------- - at my club they had a wheel-based game that you would earn entries for by gaming/club spend. gaming obviously got more entries, so it was mostly the high rollers that were getting drawn to then spin the wheel. Anyway to cut the boring parts out, 3 major draws running, 1 member is constantly in the final 3. this member also happened to be a local council member, in fact the elected member for the electorate the club was in.. Someone called bullshit on the guy, loudly and publicly and to the local media. everything was above board on our end - he was playing a lot. by this point he had won the major draw 3 times running, 20k each time. One day, detectives roll into the club. they asked us for all our records of club attendance (all visitors to the club were recorded, member or otherwise) and they pieced together a case of corruption against him. the money he was playing with, turns out, was stolen funds from the council that he had been funneling into his private enterprises on bogus contracts. I looked up how much money he'd been playing and it was in excess of 100k a month. --------- - towards the end of my time there, our front main entrance doors failed so the alternative entrance downstairs had to be used by all patrons. the majority of visitors were elderly. one lady in particular had a bad hip and needed some help using the stairs at the alternative entrance and reception asked me to help her out as I was on my way out for the day. we get into the elevator and when the doors close she asks me 'do you like coming here?' and I said 'well, it pays the bills and I like working with the people here' to which she responded with 'I cant stop coming here. I cant stop playing the machines. I spend all my money on the machines' and started sobbing. part of the company policy is to never pass judgement, good or bad, on someones gambling. Self-Exclusion is a government enforced service, but we cannot tell someone they need to stop gambling, only provide them with the (entirely for show and not at all effective) self-exclusion option - they have to sign up themselves, and it is entirely impossible to adhere to - it is simply a photo booklet of self-excluded members that sits at reception. no one checks it. ever. it is supposed to exclude you from other venues too, but each club has its own database of users so there is no central database to refer to. -------- - one Time I caught 3 guys doing cocaine in the toilet on a tuesday afternoon. While I dont mind partying and i believe what people get up to in their own time is their own business, I also didnt want to jeopardize my job, so I reported it. management sent one of the club supervisors to monitor who came out of the bathrooms to see if they were members. the three guys where all platinum level players (meaning over 30K monthly) and they just let it go because of their status. I cant think of anything else really specific to gaming/gambling that went on but it was absolutely one of the most interesting and depressing places to work. I miss the crew the most. e: I would blow Dane Cook posted:Surely 92% or more return could be explained by random chance? Guy was a loving tyrant. he had ridiculous staff turnover, wouldnt hire any female, of any age, that he determined to be 'less than a 7' and made numerous members of staff cry. story about that guy: they'd just purchased the club, and he was a new hire as the GM to manage it. many of the original staff stayed on initially. one lady who worked the kitchen had raised an issue with management after the kitchen area was remodeled. she was epileptic, and the LED lighting above her register was flashing due to lovely wiring. she raised the issue with him, saying that while she was medicated it was starting to impact her ability to work and he simply told her to suck it up and finish her shift. when she started visibly shaking and sweating and losing her concentration, he came out and started yelling at her that she can either work hard or not at all. I saw most of the incident so i told her to report it to HR and i would 100% back her up. she couldnt afford to lose her job so she didnt. he later fired her. Dude was a loving rear end in a top hat. he also hit on a bunch of the younger female staff after he got divorced from his wife. one of the women he didnt hire for 'not being above 7' ended up getting a job at my other venue. I saw her at a house party from one of the hospitality team, told her that, and last i heard she was taking the whole org to fair work over it. Laserface fucked around with this message at 04:24 on May 25, 2021 |
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May 25, 2021 04:12
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Laserface posted:
Here, the exclusion program is company wide, it is entered into the computer database, and it is treated as any other facility ban - if they swipe your ID and it comes back banned, you get arrested for trespassing. This is a legal requirement for operation in most of the states the company operates in.
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May 25, 2021 04:21
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ThomasPaine posted:You quite often get ridiculous situations with multiple different branches of the same bookies within a few minutes walk of each other and in direct competition. The surest sign of a depressing UK town centre is a main street comprised almost entirely of bookies, charity shops, and takeaways. This explains like a solid 75% of towns and cities I've been to in the UK. I always wondered why there were so many bookies. When I was in liverpool we went to put a bet on football for kicks at like 11am. There was a guy chatting with an employee asking to change a 20 pound note saying he'd already lost 100 that morning. 
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May 25, 2021 07:45
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good stories laserface. also this whole time reading i thought pokies, poker machines, were like video poker machines. but apparently its just australian for slot machines? TIL. 90% RoR seems incredibly low unless that's only the penny machines.
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May 25, 2021 09:19
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Pokies = slots Smokey pokies = the 'outdoor' smoking permitted slots (fully covered and enclosed but with ventilation outside) 90% return is all machines even the $1 bet machines.
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May 25, 2021 09:24
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Laserface posted:not really, the gaming rooms are the most heavily CCTV'd rooms in the building. In a small slot parlor yeah but in a bigger room it might take a while before anyone notices a pattern. I still admire the idea.
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May 25, 2021 14:07
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When I discovered a legitimate emptier on a quiz machine here in the UK, I made absolutely sure to not keep doing it to all the machines in my local area. I ended up going round the country doing it instead to keep it going as long as possible. Eventually, the gaming company banned my name from being on the leaderboards of the machines.
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May 25, 2021 14:17
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Tsietisin posted:When I discovered a legitimate emptier on a quiz machine here in the UK, I made absolutely sure to not keep doing it to all the machines in my local area. Pray tell more. What was the “legitimate emptier”?
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May 25, 2021 14:19
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