G2E: Preventing free play abuse from a particular type of video poker team

I attended the talk “Inviting Vulnerability: Promotional Advantage Play”, presented by Darrin Hoke, Vice President of Operations Protection at L’Auberge Casino Resort Lake Charles.

There are LOTS of kinds of advantage players, loosely defined as players who play with an edge over casinos. This talk focused on one type of such players — namely video poker players who form teams, using lots of different IDs and player’s cards, and capitalize on casino mail offers.

In this scenario, these players play a certain amount on each of dozens of cards; that generates mail with free play offers over the next three months. The players store up their free play offers, but don’t play, as the number of mailers drops off. Then they play again, earning more mailers.

This is a threat to casinos because casino mailers are designed with certain expectations:

1. Only about 20% of mailers will be redeemed, rather than the 100% rate used by these teams.

2. A players will arrive at the casino with only one card.

3. Most players will play more (with their own money) after they have used up their free play.

Personally, I would categorize this threat particular methodology as cheating, rather than advantage play. Using fake ID to obtain a player’s card in order to take money out of a casino is fraudulent behavior in most jurisdictions.

But whatever you call it, this is a real problem, and Hoke offered suggestions on how casinos can protect themselves. A lot of his suggestion a result of his obtaining a copy of the “manual” for the W56 team, based in Washington. The manual tells team members to do such things as never cashing comps, never playing even one penny more when than the amount of free play, picking up 100% of the free play, and not going to the same machine twice in a row.

(Hoke obtained this manual from a player’s car. Surely the player didn’t turn it over voluntarily. How Hoke got a copy of this manual, and whether it was obtained legally, was not discussed.)

Reverse engineering the manual’s methods, Hoke was able to query his player club database and identify suspicious players. When a group of these players all came in on the same days and played essentially back to back (as would be the case if one player were using several IDs), Hoke would make sure that player was photographed and remembered.

If the same player did this another time, he was frequently detained and arrested.

This procedure might work if members of this particular team were exploiting slot promotions in your casino. Every team, however, has its own ideas of how to go about this; the strategy described by Hoke may not work well against other teams. Nor will it work against advantage players who do not use multiple player cards. Still, it’s a strategy worth adding to a casino manager’s inventory of measures to detect those trying to take advantage of a casino  beat his casino using illegal means.