| My certainty comes from nearly a decade writing software for slot machines and consulting to various gaming firms in the United States. When you say your friend's casino "manipulated the environment" to extract more money from patrons, that's a bit vague. Is he referring to things done to patrons outside the domain of the slot machine (e.g. comped alcohol/rooms/food, awarding extra player points, show tickets, etc), or actually changing the performance of a machine while the person is playing? Because the NV gaming law (the one that most other jurisdictions copy when doing their own) has it plain and clear in Regulation 14.040 Section 6: "[Slots] must not automatically alter pay tables or any function of the device based on internal computation of the hold percentage" Now back in the day, the payout percentage target was fixed in an EPROM table, which the gaming board held a copy. Things are a bit more complex now with networked slots. The games are now downloading their code from a central server. A slot floor manager can load a new game into the cabinet with a different payout percentage, but it cannot be done while a player is playing and for a fixed amount of time afterward, and then the game must go offline (and say so publicly) for another fixed amount of time after the new game loads. This time is on the order of 10 minutes or more so a player is guaranteed to know that the game is being changed if a slot floor decides to do this. Really, a casino really doesn't need to play around with slots to make sure they earn money. The math guarantees it. The casino's job is to make sure the players come and stay as long as possible which seems like what your friend was involved with. There's serious work in collecting all that player data and trying to understand ways to maximize the handle. |