Casino Player Rating Systems
Posted on 21st Oct, 2009
Years ago Casino Managers decided that they could stimulate play by offering; “free” trips, room, food and beverage deals to specific customers. They “knew” they held between 20% and 40% of the average front money or bankroll brought by a customer. So if a player was willing to bring $10,000 to gamble they based their decision on how much to provide in complimentary benefits on that basis. So depending on the policy of the Casino they might have given 10% of the players bankroll back to them in complimentaries. So, if you bring 10 grand we might have given a $500 airfare, 2 nights accommodation, show tickets and paid for their food and beverage during the stay.
Well you don’t have to be too bright obviously to use such an arbitrary system to your advantage. The more you bring the more you get and you don’t have to play any differently.
So, Casino Managers moved from what were relatively arbitrary systems often based on personal contact and knowledge of players to more mathematically based criteria for establishing a customer’s value. To do this, however, you need to determine average bet levels, type of game played and length of period played. So for example, we know that a player plays $500 a hand at Baccarat for 1 hour. Based on other surveyed and statistical data we also know that on Baccarat we have 45 resolved hands per hour and that the house advantage is approximately 1.25%. Therefore, the player’s theoretical loss will be around $280. Again, depending on the individual Casino’s policy we might provide between 25% and 50% of that back, to the player, in complimentaries.
To work this through and collate this information for a large number of players, Casinos turned to computers with significant processing power and the ability to manage large databases. But there are still “holes” in this system. We still manually estimate average bet levels and manually input the data. Also, we use system averages for various factors which may not be representative of the actual play.