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The High Cost of Casino Paranoia



The High Cost of Casino Paranoia

Every casino game has a built in house edge. A house edge that mathematically guarantees that the house will come out ahead given sufficient time and resources provided that the game is played the way the game creator intended. It is left up to casinos to make sure that games are dealt in the way that the creator intended but few understand the mechanics behind every game and this is why Advantage Players spend as much or more time trying to find weaknesses in casino games as game creators spend creating casino games. Both can be challenging but lucrative enterprises. Since casinos understand little about the mechanics of every game, every time a game gets dinged by Advantage Play, casinos make knee-jerk procedural corrections to thwart future Advantage Play without considering the long-term cost of these corrections. Usually extra steps are added to the dealers' routine that cost resources, time and eventually money. Lots of money!

Slowing down the game, slows down the revenue stream and slowing down the revenue stream leads to increasing the house edge and increasing the house edge leads to burning out loyal customers and burning out loyal customers leads to finding new customers. Well, this is where the snowball stops and reality sets in. Finding new customers takes additional work and burns resources. Churning money out of your loyal customers does not take additional work or burn resources.

Paranoia is defined as "suspicion and mistrust of people or their actions without evidence or justification". Some forms of Advantage Play get 99% of the attention, have (relatively) minute edges and efforts to thwart them cost casinos BILLIONS of dollars every year not in lost revenue to Advantage Play but lost potential revenue and costly, wasted efforts to thwart Advantage Play due to paranoia. Other forms of Advantage Play get almost no attention, have huge player advantages and almost no effort is made to thwart them costing casinos mere millions of dollars every year in losses to Advantage Players. Paranoia fills your brain and clouds casino managers' judgment so instead of addressing individuals or individual issues, they punish everyone, including their loyal customers and themselves.


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