Tracking Every Table Bet
- Casinos can see (and record for later data analysis) every bet each player makes and the amount of each bet, chip by chip.
- Casinos can analyze hands-per-hour for each Dealer, and compare Dealer performance, both in terms of when (for example, fresh early in shift vs. tired late in shift) and in terms of performance compared to other Dealers.
- Overall performance of table games by time of day, day of week, etc., to identify best mix of games to offer.
You can see more of the gory details here.
Has anyone seen this at casinos where they play table games? Dealers, how do you feel about this level of micro-management? No more rat-holing chips without the casino knowing. Past-posting (not that any WoV members would) becomes a sure ticket to big legal problems, which is OK with me. Of course, I'm not so excited that the casino can "drill down" into the data for each player to determine every aspect of how each player plays each game at every visit to the casino. However, I can sure see how it might excite casinos.
I suppose it had to happen eventually. Is this the casino of tomorrow next week?
It all starts with someone knowledgeable in management. We found a decent location for some table game plays a while ago. We played these locations and we only ever had to worry about 1 person being on duty. He was knowledgeable and able to spot the things we looked for and correct them. More to the point he didn't correct them just because that was the rule, but he understood what they meant and why they needed to correct them. When he wasn't around, we were able to do what we wanted and have a ball doing so. Eventually, he corrected all of their games and thus we stopped playing there. So think of how this applies to this garbage above. If you actually have someone with competence you can achieve the above without purchasing any "system" or "software" from an outside company.
All it takes is a manager saying, we need to collect some data. Don't tell the employees. Have someone go to survailance and get set up with their own monitors. Then go table to table at different intervals of the day and do the counts/checks for internal data (dealer stats/etc).
Next your pit bosses. These are the people responsible for tracking average bets, chip counts, etc. I've seen the gambit of them... good ones that track everything from buy in to cash out correctly, and I've had others I've had to complain about because I'll play for 4 hours with an average bet of $500 and they have me for 2 hours at table min $10... clearly just not doing their job. Your pit bosses are the ones that keep 'good enough' track of all of the chip data.
Performance is nothing more than a qualified estimation of hands dealt, average bets, and EV... same as an AP does. Sure, some could say "you must buy our software to get max EV!" but I've never bought any kind of software for AP'ing, and I think I've done just fine.
I get the merits of doing more, but casinos are so engorged with penny pinching due to the corporate bean counters that they often bury themselves in a hole then need to find a way to get that extra money back, so low and behold what do they do? They slash benefits, such as free play and comps. They start charging for parking. They start charging resort fees... Then the math works out, but the reality is you pissed off all your customers and you lose more money in the long run due to the stupidity.
Quote: RomesThe whole thought process is really just a bunch of more 'corporate' AP's taking advantage of the casinos. Any company that sells stuff like this, card counter propaganda, etc to casinos is just really hustling the casino.
It all starts with someone knowledgeable in management. We found a decent location for some table game plays a while ago. We played these locations and we only ever had to worry about 1 person being on duty. He was knowledgeable and able to spot the things we looked for and correct them. More to the point he didn't correct them just because that was the rule, but he understood what they meant and why they needed to correct them. When he wasn't around, we were able to do what we wanted and have a ball doing so. Eventually, he corrected all of their games and thus we stopped playing there. So think of how this applies to this garbage above. If you actually have someone with competence you can achieve the above without purchasing any "system" or "software" from an outside company.
All it takes is a manager saying, we need to collect some data. Don't tell the employees. Have someone go to survailance and get set up with their own monitors. Then go table to table at different intervals of the day and do the counts/checks for internal data (dealer stats/etc).
Next your pit bosses. These are the people responsible for tracking average bets, chip counts, etc. I've seen the gambit of them... good ones that track everything from buy in to cash out correctly, and I've had others I've had to complain about because I'll play for 4 hours with an average bet of $500 and they have me for 2 hours at table min $10... clearly just not doing their job. Your pit bosses are the ones that keep 'good enough' track of all of the chip data.
Performance is nothing more than a qualified estimation of hands dealt, average bets, and EV... same as an AP does. Sure, some could say "you must buy our software to get max EV!" but I've never bought any kind of software for AP'ing, and I think I've done just fine.
I get the merits of doing more, but casinos are so engorged with penny pinching due to the corporate bean counters that they often bury themselves in a hole then need to find a way to get that extra money back, so low and behold what do they do? They slash benefits, such as free play and comps. They start charging for parking. They start charging resort fees... Then the math works out, but the reality is you pissed off all your customers and you lose more money in the long run due to the stupidity.
Wow that was 6 paragraphs of nonsense. Analytics our part of life and getting even more detailed and better every year. NFL teams are relying on this type of thing, top corporations use it to improve systems and service.
A casino knowing what bets players are playing, how fast or slow a peeler might be dealing and other bits of information could be important factors for them to know.
Just because you are on the opposite side doesn't mean they should not improve their technology. 99.9% of gamblers would not care about any of this. You are in a very, very small group.
ZCore13
I agree I might have word vomited a bit, but I still attest my points are in there. I'm not just looking at it from the other side, but if I owned a casino myself. I was simply relating the similarities between the sides. The casino thinks they have the edge, they want to know hands per hour, average bet, expected value, etc. AP's think exactly the same... with my edge I need to increase my hands per hour, my average bet, etc, because then I can increase my expected value!Quote: Zcore13...Wow that was 6 paragraphs of nonsense. Analytics our part of life and getting even more detailed and better every year. NFL teams are relying on this type of thing, top corporations use it to improve systems and service.
A casino knowing what bets players are playing, how fast or slow a peeler might be dealing and other bits of information could be important factors for them to know.
Just because you are on the opposite side doesn't mean they should not improve their technology. 99.9% of gamblers would not care about any of this. You are in a very, very small group.
ZCore13
I also get your next point (if you get my first one now that I've rephrased) that a casino is a lot larger than 1 person (or even a team) so they might need better measuring tools. I'm not saying there isn't some merit at all in spending money to do this. Hell, as an AP I've done this. I've played hands and kept track of how many hands per hour we were getting. I've put COUNTLESS hours in to excel sheets calculating EV's, simulating hands per hour, and trying to combine aspirations with reality. I'm simply saying that if a casino wanted these metrics, all they'd have to do is maybe once per quarter do the work themselves. Sit someone at the monitors and count dealer hands (beginning of their shift vs end... day vs night... etc). That was just one example, and others could be done similarly.
Mostly I was pointing out that casinos jump on this crap like a dog in heat... from analytics to counting propaganda and 90% of the time (see sometimes it does help them) it ends up hurting them to the point they need to make the extra money elsewhere to pay for it (re:cutting benefits, new charges, etc). Apologies for not re-wording and formatting my thoughts better, but again, I still feel the points are in there and are valid.
How many times have you been upset that your average bet was incorrectly calculated. With systems like this (and I know exactly which one you are discussing), there is no longer a need to track average bet or time played. The casino will know the exact amount you bet and the total number of hands you played. You can then get offers that are exactly based on your worth as a customer.
Now, if you are used to slow playing, rat holing chips, and over exaggerating your average bet, then you will get less than you have been getting previously. How is this a bad thing from the casino's perspective, or the player's perspective?
Whatever your day job, if it's working for a company of any significant size, you know who the empty suits and bean-counters are - folks who know not so much about the nuts and bolts of the business, but can do accounting or time/motion studies, have been to business school, maybe have an MBA, but have not spent any significant amount of time building, cooking, writing, or "widgeting," Millenials who have grown up with the attitude that "there's an app for that."
Maybe they are part of the conglomerate mother-ship that bought your company to add to their empire. Maybe the offspring of the founder. Offshore investors. Liquidators. Managers that think they can manage without knowing a thing about what the people they manage do. People who know absolutely nothing about the business, but simply want to make money, or more likely, make more money than the guy who had their job before them.
Spend time watching or learning the business? Not gonna happen.
Instead, drink the snake oil that's being offered that will allegedly track what's going on out there on the shop floor, the kitchen, the assembly line... or in the pits.
Romes mentions that he came to know that he should avoid one guy at a casino who knew what was going on, and then the whole casino when that guy's expertise floated to the top so as to influence the way the whole place tracked Romes's activities. Software? Metrics? Analytics? Not likely.
This is the wave of the future, but it's happening everywhere, not just in the casino.
Quote: ZenKinGCasinos are brain-dead. No amount of technology will ever replace a 'smart' and 'educated' person about game protection. Just look at the casino floor and it will tell you all you need to know about who's running the show upstairs. I even got called on 'checks play' recently at 2x100 on blackjack LOL. I nearly had a stroke at the table of the stupidity I'm surrounded by. Whenever the casinos want to hire me, Ill teach them how to double their profit instantly. Until then, I need to go back to puking after that checks play, I'm still not done.
You are hilarious. Do you even know what cheques play means. You'd be better off doing less posting and more playing. Your posts never help your case about being able to handle playing as a profession.
ZCore13
Quote: Zcore13You are hilarious. Do you even know what cheques play means. You'd be better off doing less posting and more playing. Your posts never help your case about being able to handle playing as a profession.
ZCore13
Yea when you 'jump' your bet to a much higher amount than previously played and it's also to get the pit bosses attention to start looking at me closer. You obviously missed the point and started to assume I dont know what it means. The point is 'checks play' shouldn't even be called if the jump is only to 2x100, give me a break. Even if I went from $1 to 2x100, it's still an irrelevant wager. Are casinos scared of losing $2 in EV that round to an AP? You can't make these things up.
Quote: ZenKinGYea when you 'jump' your bet to a much higher amount than previously played and it's also to get the pit bosses attention to start looking at me closer. You obviously missed the point and started to assume I dont know what it means. The point is 'checks play' shouldn't even be called if the jump is only to 2x100, give me a break. Even if I went from $1 to 2x100, it's still an irrelevant wager. Are casinos scared of losing $2 in EV that round to an AP? You can't make these things up.
As I expected, you don't know what it means, which is why you are confused by it. Cheques play is when someone increases their bet to $100 on a hand, even if they've been playing $75 a hand previously for an hour, using multiple color chips besides black. If the bet is a black chip they will call out black action.
They will call this out the first or first few times you bet $100 or more and then will usually stop until you decrease your bet and hit the threshold again.
It is to alert the Supervisor of an increase in bet to $100, but not necessarily to alert them of a large increase. Like I said, cheques play will generally be called on a $10 increase from $90 to $100. It's standard procedure taught in every dealer school in the Country.
ZCore13
Quote: Zcore13As I expected, you don't know what it means, which is why you are confused by it. Cheques play is when someone increases their bet to $100 on a hand, even if they've been playing $75 a hand previously for an hour, using multiple color chips besides black. If the bet is a black chip they will call out black action.
They will call this out the first or first few times you bet $100 or more and then will usually stop until you decrease your bet and hit the threshold again.
It is to alert the Supervisor of an increase in bet to $100, but not necessarily to alert them of a large increase. Like I said, cheques play will generally be called on a $10 increase from $90 to $100. It's standard procedure taught in every dealer school in the Country.
ZCore13
That's funny, you never hear 'cheques play' in baccarat or any other table game. Hmmm. Nice try. Many stores call cheques play under 100 so you're wrong. It's simply to alert the pit drone critter of a big jump in your bet because of the possibility of a pesky card counter that is gonna bankrupt the casino with his sub $1000 bets. So laughable.
Quote: ZenKinGThat's funny, you never hear 'cheques play' in baccarat or any other table game. Hmmm. Nice try. Many stores call cheques play under 100 so you're wrong. It's simply to alert the pit drone critter of a big jump in your bet because of the possibility of a pesky card counter that is gonna bankrupt the casino with his sub $1000 bets. So laughable.
Why do they sometimes call it on games that are not Blackjack, then? I don't know where you are getting your opinion that they don't call it on, "Any other table game," as I've certainly heard it called.
Quote: ZenKinGThat's funny, you never hear 'cheques play' in baccarat or any other table game. Hmmm. Nice try. Many stores call cheques play under 100 so you're wrong. It's simply to alert the pit drone critter of a big jump in your bet because of the possibility of a pesky card counter that is gonna bankrupt the casino with his sub $1000 bets. So laughable.
No, it is not. It is to alert the pit that someone is now betting over a certain amount determined by the casino. I know plenty of casinos that call it out when someone starts betting over $25. You need to be a little more open minded when someone with experience working at casinos tries to tell you something (Not everyone, most people both in and out of casinos are still morons).
It does NOT necessarily mean that the person is an AP.
I am not a bean counter, but someone who has been in Table Games in several different jurisdictions over the past 32 years.
Quote: FCBLComish"Checks Play" is called to alert the Supervisor that there is action that needs to be monitored. If a Supervisor is watching 6 or 7 tables, or busy putting a fill on a table, or one of a number of other tasks they have, it is very easy for them to completely miss that there is unexpected action at one of the tables until after the player has finished play and is coloring up.
It does NOT necessarily mean that the person is an AP.
I am not a bean counter, but someone who has been in Table Games in several different jurisdictions over the past 32 years.
'Action that needs to be monitored' = Exactly what I said. Why would they need to 'monitor' something? Maybe because they're scared of someone beating them? And which game can be beaten? BLACKJACK. Ding ding ding. Looks like your little superiors gave you a bunch of hogwash and you blindly accepted it just like Zcore.
Let me know when they yell out 'checks play' on roulette. Hmm. Ive seen plenty of players go up to the table and start betting 100s on red or green or after 30 min or an hour go from minimum to betting 100s and never once heard 'checks play' or 'cheques play', but we all know its spelled 'checks play' because a possible counter is 'checking his play' and 'jumping' his bet aggressively.
Lastly if you want further proof, lots of casinos such as the sweaty ones, they call 'checks play' for bets under 100 if you jump up your bets aggressively so that's nonsense that 'checks play' is only for 100 or higher regardless of table game. Dealers are trained to yell out 'checks play' for people that jump their bets in blackjack. I wonder why... ding ding ding
So much for those theories. Nice try guys.
Quote: DRichNo, it is not. It is to alert the pit that someone is now betting over a certain amount determined by the casino. I know plenty of casinos that call it out when someone starts betting over $25. You need to be a little more open minded when someone with experience working at casinos tries to tell you something (Not everyone, most people both in and out of casinos are still morons).
Yeah so why dont they yell out 'checks play' at roulette? Never heard it in my life. Ill wait....
Quote: ZenKinG'Action that needs to be monitored' = Exactly what I said. Why would they need to 'monitor' something? Maybe because they're scared of someone beating them? And which game can be beaten? BLACKJACK. Ding ding ding. Looks like your little superiors gave you a bunch of hogwash and you blindly accepted it just like Zcore.
Let me know when they yell out 'checks play' on roulette. Hmm. Ive seen plenty of players go up to the table and start betting 100s on red or green or after 30 min or an hour go from minimum to betting 100s and never once heard 'checks play' or 'cheques play', but we all know its spelled 'checks play' because a possible counter is 'checking his play' and 'jumping' his bet aggressively.
Lastly if you want further proof, lots of casinos such as the sweaty ones, they call 'checks play' for bets under 100 if you jump up your bets aggressively so that's nonsense that 'checks play' is only for 100 or higher regardless of table game. Dealers are trained to yell out 'checks play' for people that jump their bets in blackjack. I wonder why... ding ding ding
So much for those theories. Nice try guys.
Wrong. It's a set amount being bet. 90% of places it's $100. At a small casino with only a few tables and mostly regulars it could be as low as $25. It has nothing to do with bet spread. Dealers do not care what you spread. They call it out at the dollar amount threshold they are told to.
ZCore13
FWIW, my experience is limited enough (only been playing blackjack for about 20 years) that I haven't yet concluded that my experience is all-inclusive when it comes to what happens at all the blackjack tables in all the casinos in all the world.
If that were true, why would I bother coming to this site? I'd already have all the answers.
And miss all of Nathans's posts?Quote: racquet
If that were true, why would I bother coming to this site? I'd already have all the answers.
Automatic dealer stats is all fine and dandy for those bean counters, I doubt the dealers like them but at least a mass of data is better than an arbitrary sample for timing the dealer.
I think the floor and pit personnel hate learning new software input pages and hate using tiny screens.
Is it all a wasted effort? Probably not but some casino management types react to "card counter' as if its a deadly threat. I've posted before about that downtown club that used to have a dealer who would call out the count at a low limit table. It sped things along and the casino made more money that way.
