It’s a lot easier to spend money than it is to earn it. That’s why casinos are so adept at keeping their customers happy and coming back for more. Here are three of the most effective ways that they do this.
The first trick casinos employ is by offering games with progressive jackpots. These are games where the jackpot grows as more people play them, up until someone hits the jackpot (a million dollars or whatever). If you’re feeling lucky, you can bet on these games for yourself — but if you’re not, then you can play in the hope that someone else will hit the jackpot. It’s a way for the casino to get you to play longer.
A player can plan to play the game on the online casinos. Most of the players who love to b eon the platform are the people from the chine. Their main motive is to increase the pengeluaran china that will be the source of earning. There are varieties of the games that are available on the online platform for the players.
The second trick casinos use is known as negative expectation. This means that they make certain bets seem less likely to pay out than other bets. For example, they might offer a game called “Craps” and say that it pays 5-to-2 odds. But if you bet on that game, you’ll know that the odds are actually 4-to-1.
This tactic works because there’s an inverse relationship between how much a person thinks something is going to happen and how likely they think it is to actually happen. So when someone says a game has 5-to-2 odds, they’re making it sound like it’s harder to win than it really is. The same logic applies to blackjack and roulette — the house always wins.
The third trick casinos use is by offering players free perks. This sounds pretty harmless, right? Well, it’s actually a very clever way for them to get you to keep playing. How? When you come into the casino, you go straight to the cashier and hand over your credit card. What happens next is that the casino holds onto your card until you leave. Then, they charge you thousands of dollars worth of stuff. You don’t realize it, but the casino is slowly taking away all of your money.
For example, I once played at a casino in Atlantic City. They had a machine called the Roulette Express. It was a $25 table game (so you could only bet $25) and it had a $100 maximum bet. But, at any point during my stay, I could have placed any amount of money on the table and left with no money. All they needed me to do was to place one dollar on the table. And every time I did that, they would take that dollar from me. Over the course of six hours, I lost about $800.
And that’s just one example of many. There are hundreds of different tricks casinos use to keep you coming back. In fact, some of them have been around since the beginning of gambling itself.
Here are three of the most effective ones:
- Negative Expectation
In the 1930s, the mathematician Edward Thorndike conducted an experiment. He took two decks of cards and asked his subjects to shuffle them together twice. At the end of the process, he gave each subject a card face down from one deck and another card face down from the other deck. He then asked the subjects to pick which of the two cards they thought was higher in value.
Most people picked the lower valued card. But, when Thorndike repeated the experiment several times, he found that the average number of times subjects chose the higher valued card increased by 10 percent each time.
Why does that happen? Because our brains have built into them a subconscious bias against losing. We expect to lose on low-value bets. As a result, we tend to choose low-value bets.
That’s what casinos are exploiting here. By giving you negative expectations, they’re getting you to choose low-value wagers. This keeps you playing for longer — even though it costs them money.
- Free Perks
As I mentioned earlier, casinos are experts at using free perks to entice you to keep coming back. Let’s look at one example — the slot machines.
You probably already know that slot machines are rigged. A computer randomly selects numbers and displays them on a screen. Each number corresponds to a spinning wheel — and each wheel represents a separate reel. If the numbers match, you win. If not, you lose. Sounds simple enough, right?
Well, the truth is that the wheels aren’t really random. Instead, they’re programmed to display winning combinations. To figure out which combinations are being displayed, casinos have built algorithms that predict which winning combinations are most likely to be displayed. But to do so, they need to run simulations of the entire game. In order to do that, they need to simulate 100,000 spins of the reels. That’s a huge task!
What casinos do instead is they hire statisticians who specialize in gaming theory. These guys build models that allow them to simulate large amounts of data (like the data generated by slots) quickly. Then, they compare those results to real data and tweak their models accordingly.
So, while it appears that the slots are completely random, they aren’t. They’re being manipulated. And that manipulation allows casinos to increase their profits.
Conclusion
Gambling is addictive. Casinos exploit that addiction with three very effective strategies. It’s a great business model that keeps millions of people addicted to gambling long after they should be.
Have you ever noticed that you can’t stop playing a video game once you start? Have you wondered whether or not that’s true for slot machines?
