RFID Casino Chips 271
scubacuda writes "Could casinos be the next Gillette or Wal-Mart? New Scientist and others report that casinos could soon start using RFID tags to spot counterfeits and thefts, and also to monitor the behaviour of gamblers. Embedded RFID tags should make the chips much harder to counterfeit, and placing tag readers at staff exits could cut down on theft by employees.
(With companies like Infosys helping clients identify and plan pilot RFID projects, we'll no doubt be seeing more and more companies dabbling in this area. Those interested in reading objections to RFID use should check out the position paper issued by CASPIAN, EPIC, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Junkbusters, ACLU, Meyda Online, EFF, and PrivacyActivism.)"
wont stem employee theft. (Score:5, Interesting)
rfid is not a theft prevention solution for small items.
I wonder what took them so long... (Score:3, Interesting)
Private property (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Link me to them... (Score:3, Interesting)
Casinos will love this! (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to work doing data visualisation for casinos - nice pretty visualisations showing slot machine usage. It was a huge hit with the casinos that used it. Most casinos use customer cards you see - you earn bonus points for awards if you put your card in the reader of the slot machine while you play. That allows the the casino to track your slot machine spending. More importantly it allows you to create visualisations of slot activity broken down by demographics (of course they collect a few personal details when they assign you your awards card...) so that they can better direct promotions, reorganise the slots on the floor (knowing where to place a bank of new slot machines can be worth a few million dollars!) etc.
The big problem was that while you could track turnover volume on the gaming tables, you just couldn't track the movement of players very well - there was just no information on that. With this they can have you swipe your awards card when you collect your chips, then watch those chips disperse about the tables. More importantly they can track the ebb and flow - movement vectors for the chips about the floor - that can be very useful information.
This will be a huge boon to the casino industry, who are always lookign for that new way to fleece a few more dollars of the statistically ignorant.
Jedidiah.
Missouri laws (Score:3, Interesting)
RFID tags won't be much different. Who cares really?
Re:Ouch for card counters... (Score:1, Interesting)
The difference in casinos is whether they have to let you play or not. In Vegas, they can ask you to leave at any time for any reason and charge you with trespassing if you come back.
In Atlantic City (as far as I remember -- its been awhile), they have to let you play. But they can instruct their dealers to do a lot of things to make your life as a counter quite miserable. Like only work very shallow into the shoe, for starters.
IMO not like Gillette or Wal-Mart. (Score:5, Interesting)
RFIDs can be used for good. My Ford Focus ZTW has a RFID chip on the key. If the correct ID isn't there the car won't (and shouldn't atleast) start. Adding extra keys and programming them is a simple task too.
IMO this shouldn't raise the same concern that the Wal-Mart problem does, which could be a real nightmare.
Re:Link me to them... (Score:5, Interesting)
People whose gambling experience consists of losing a roll of nickles in a slot machine, don't get it: You don't really want anonymity. You want the casino to know you're there, that you're playing, etc. You want to play in tourneys. You want comps. You want them to know you played, win or lose. If you're not picking up comps, you're missing half the strategy.
You don't want anonymity, you want them to notice you and say "Hello mister TGF, can I get you anything?"
Re:Link me to them... (Score:4, Interesting)
Excellent point that sums up the whole thing. After all, the entire point of a casino is to prey on peoples' willing suspension of disbelief.
How can anyone who walks in and puts their cash on the table think that the casino companies [lasvegassun.com] aren't going to fleece them from the moment they enter? That those ridiculously overdone venues with their flashing neon lights [allvegasreservations.com] just built themselves out of the Nevada desert [greenworks.tv]?
On the other side of the roulette wheel, you have people who *do* think they can beat the house... the people who buy lottery tickets [txlottery.org] at home in blissful ignorance of the laws of mathematics.
Neither of these groups is going to care about RFID. One group knows that they're entering a fantasy world [tvland.com], and the other wouldn't believe you if you told them [rottentomatoes.com].
Just another way to track your play (Score:2, Interesting)
Those gamblers smart enough to play with a players card (slot club) so that they can earn comps and get a slight percentage higher in returns know that they're being tracked. Of course, it's easier to do so at the slot machines where the computers can determine your exact coin-in and convert that to a specific number of points to throw into your club account.
At the tables, the casinos still track an individual's play via the pit bosses. While it's now a fairly automated/computerized instant process, it used to be done all on paper and entered into a system later. Regardless, pit bosses would still evaluate what your average bet was, determine the approximate number of hands per hour that you were playing, and then give you a rating. I don't foresee this process changing, as this allows the casinos to use a bit of fudge factor to favor some guests more if they're tipping, friendly, and happy versus the mean grouchy players.
What other benefits can the casino do by tracking individual chips? What about being able to monitor how a chip moves from game to game? Will it allow casinos to cut down the number of pit bosses? (probably not, for other reasons such as security) Are more chips moving from the blackjack tables to the pai gow poker tables? Would this affect gaming decisions that the casino makes regarding the blackjack rules, so it keeps players at the table longer? How about making the whole betting process more automated by being able to verify the total amount of money in a stack of chips? And, it's one more way to prevent cheaters from late-posting bets on the roulette table.
As others have already said: casinos are one place where you can expect to be watched no matter where you go or what you do. You already sacrifice some amount of privacy just by entering a casino in the first place.
Re:Link me to them... (Score:2, Interesting)
The best that could be hoped for is to maybe see a flow of chips. What I mean is for example: maybe they see that poker players prefer to play craps and not blackjack while they wait for a poker table to open up. So then the casino could decide to shift some craps tables over near the poker room.
I just don't see how this could help with missed payouts or monitoring bet size or things like that unless the chips were "checked in and out" to individuals as bets were won or lost. And I can't see casinos implementing something like this because it would slow the games down (and would slow down who quickly the casino would be winning money).
So other than to prevent stealing and counterfeiting of chips I'm hard pressed to see too many other uses for this technology in a casino, either benefical or harmful to gamblers.
Re:That's too stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
If, as you seem to suggest, you compile a list of valid ID numbers, they can still get you because they could store data on where the chip is located. If the computer tells the cashier that half the chips you're turning in are supposed to be in the vault, you're busted.
Re:Ouch for card counters... (Score:4, Interesting)
Something that can fail isn't the customers fault...if it was proven otherwise to be genuine.
Re:Link me to them... (Score:3, Interesting)
This has existed in casino chips for a while (Score:1, Interesting)
This French company controls both the Paul-Son and Bud Jones (the two largest US casino suppliers)
Quote:
"After more than five years of research, development and day to day practice, Bourgogne et Grasset(R) has mastered the mass production of gaming chips with Philips' exclusive "Vegas" Hitag transponder and has developed several data collection devices based on Philips' exclusive Vegas Hitag readers to be used by casinos to authenticate their chips and feed their computer system for efficient table operation management. Other applications are available or are to be developed."
Re:Ouch for card counters... (Score:5, Interesting)
He had a good point, but the next year I went back and they had installed continuous card shufflers at most of their tables. You can't count cards against these machines since there is no beginning or end to the shoe.
Re:wont stem employee theft. (Score:5, Interesting)
I honestly can't think that employee theft of chips is really that huge of an issue since the ammount of money that each cashier has is counted at the end of shift and if you are off enough money to make stealing chips worth it, say $500+ then they will not let you work there long if you are off that much very often. They even went so far as to make us use clear cups with clear liquid in them in the cage so that we could drop things in them.
Dealers are under a lot more scrutiny from the cameras than cashiers. There are dedicated cameras looking at the chips on the table.
At the casino I worked at, chips in the chip bank, (in storage) are supposed to be counted and verified every shift so a theft there would be caught fairly easilly.
When I worked in the cashier cage and was the banker in charge of the cashiers in the cage, it wasn't uncommon to call down to the vault and have half a million dollars in cash delivered. So with that kind of money floating around, if I was going to steal, i wouldn't have been chips. If, as an employee, you are going to steal from the casino, you need to go big becasue if you do it multiple times, you will get caught.
Re:Link me to them... (Score:3, Interesting)
Good point... for all my ranting about mathematics, I still like to play the ponies [lonestarpark.com] on occasion, for the same reason. There is a large enough mass of people who play based on the horses' names, random numbers, or the color of the jockey's silks to overcome the house and state's cut.
In fact, I could be accused of not having a dog in this fight... I've never been to a casino! The closest I've come was playing Video Poker [littlecutie.net] in a Shreveport truck stop (put in two quarters, lost one hand, won two quarters on the next, cashed out). Who knows, I may go in, be seduced by das blinkenlichts, and join the other beginners at your table...
why play if you can't win? hope it's fun... (Score:3, Interesting)
RFIDs in this case are reasonable because:
1) information of the movements of their chips on their property is reasonable -as long as they don't track my movements elsewhere I'm OK with them.
2) this is similar to data they already acquire and use (it is no worse than other things casinos already do).
3) the chips have legitimate uses in thwarting people who cheat (by most people's definitions, not just the casinos) - they can stop people from increasing bets late, etc.
The game is not much more rigged against you than it was before, and your freedoms outside the casinos haven't be eroded by this use of RFIDs in this context.
I probably should have made this a reply to the topic rather than you in particular, but I agree with your sentiment for the most part. If I had fun at casinos or betting, I might go, but I don't, so there's no point. Playing a rigged game and expecting to get paid is transparently stupid - it's little like going to your local mob boss to be a better criminal. If you're no good, he'll take your money. If you are good, you won't get paid, other than maybe in concrete blocks and small lead weights.
they've been working on this stuff for years now. (Score:2, Interesting)
concept called safejack (safe blackjack)
since at least 1998. The idea there
was that special chips would "announce"
their value (1,5,25,100, etc.) to a
computerized table so that the back of house
systems knew how much was being bet.
Assuming they have any brains at all, mikohn
probably filed for a patent on this stuff
years ago. The gaming equipment industry
is one big bee's nest of predatory and
defensive patent plays. (I wish I was the
guy with the touch-screen gaming machine patent)
Incidentally, I recall the system also
had a mini-ccd camera under the shoe so it
could also "see" the cards being dealt to
each player.
Seemed like a pretty interesting idea, but
I don't think it ever caught on. Maybe it
was too expensive, or just too far ahead
of it's time?
--chuck
Re:Link me to them... (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't want anonymity
Yes, as long as you're interested in getting the comps. And, most casinos seem to respect their clients desire to be left alone, etc.
I'm not sure how it works when you cash in large quantities of chips (my best craps win was only $500 - a single bet).
But there is a threshhold where the cash transaction becomes reportable to tax authorities. In those instances it would be advantageous to cash-out incrementally to avoid the trigger threshhold.
RFID chips might make this more difficult.
Re:Ouch for card counters... (Score:3, Interesting)
In Atlantic City (as far as I remember -- its been awhile), they have to let you play. But they can instruct their dealers to do a lot of things to make your life as a counter quite miserable. Like only work very shallow into the shoe, for starters.
They can also force you to flat-bet (bet the same amount every hand during the shoe), which pretty much defeats the main purpose of card counting.
Tax Implications (Score:3, Interesting)
Right now casinos have to report you if you win $1200 or greater on a slot machine, hence the myriad of $1199 jackpots on slots.
In table games they have no reporting requirement (save the $10,000 casino cage transaction report requirement), mostly due to the complexity of tracking wins vs. losses.
If technology makes that simple, does that mean I'll now be taxed on my table game winnings? That the casino will be obligated to report them? Yikes.
Re:Yes, privacy in a casino is highly sought (Score:3, Interesting)
Casinos do NOT lose money by people taking chips. In fact, they encourage it by making their chips flashy, and having periodic "souvenir" designs. Chips cost around $.55 IIRC in bulk (last time I checked many years ago) for a nice design.
Chips often have markings on the edges that are machine-readable, generally used to prevent counterfeiting and for counting.
Casinos are generally more interested in people bringing chips INTO the casino, not out. That could be indicative of a group of folks working together.
I'm mostly concerned about RFID encoded into legal-tender, not so much casino chips. This may appear to be a salami attack on the country, but I don't think it will lead to that slippery slope.
Re:Ouch for card counters... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ouch for card counters... (Score:2, Interesting)
Even then, they usually won't kick you out. When I was counting cards once, they switched to a new dealer who wouldn't talk to me, and reshuffled after every hand. I got the message and made my exit.
Re:Link me to them... (Score:4, Interesting)
If casinos starting ratting out the actions of the high rollers, highrollers would just go somewhere else.
I saw an interview with a guy who helps highrollers out (forget the "official name")....
it was deffinatly suggested that not only do the Casinos know about the girls, booze and drugs, in some cases they faciliate it.
In your example, if they found that the high rollers chips were getting spent by a women of questionable employment, they'd probably just check to make sure the high roller was happy with the "Services rendered" and make sure he wasn't robbed.
Re:Well.. (Score:1, Interesting)
I went to Vegas for one of the Defcon conventions with $2500 to gamble. I arrived on Wednesday,a nd was told the hotel only had a room for wed.thurs nights, and there were "no rooms available" for the weekend (Fri, Sat, Sun nights). I figured I'd find another hotel to stay in for those nights, so I took the room.
I went down to the craps tables with my $500 budgeted for gambling that day, and after a couple of hours I was up to $1700. Some casino employee (pit boss?) touched me on the arm and asked if I was having my playing tracked. I commented that I wasn't, and it wouldn't matter anyway, as I was only going to be there those two nights. Long story short (too late!), he gave me my room FREE for the weekend. Funny how they didn't even have a room available at all, but somehow I got one for free.
Indeed.... (Score:3, Interesting)
On the game. I also made out with 4 beers.
Of course, if I had lost $20, it wouldn't have been a big deal - same I would have paid for the beers had I not been gambling.
Casinos make money off of people who GAMBLE. Those of us who bet the minimum can have a good time on the cheap. After all, even on games that only pay out 95%, if you bet $300/hr, you're still only out $15/hr. And the chicks are hot.
Re:the trick is (Score:2, Interesting)
Faraday Cage is the answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Now who will be the new up and coming entreprenure who sells 'chip holders' for all those big spenders who want some privacy?