Big data can be expensive and difficult, but according to the team at Pechanga Resort & Casino, it’s well worth the effort. Pechanga Chief Data Scientist Stuart Kerr, who anchored a panel examining the pros and cons of big data usage at the Global Gaming Expo on Wednesday, said that the casino’s initial efforts produced outstanding results that returned five times their initial investment. He didn’t reveal the cost of that investment other than to say it was significant.
Kerr showed a series of slides detailing the difficulty of moving from today’s separate data applications, which he called “data silos,” to a new vision of a true shared resource. “The irony,” he said, “is that most of today’s relational databases don’t really relate to much of anything.”
While Kerr has been with Pechanga for several years now, he came from outside the industry, having spent several years in the defense industry. And his first impressions of data management in the casino world were not good.
“The picture many would paint would be that everything is fine and no one’s complaining,” he said, “But we all need to take off our blindfolds and start looking at everything, not just what we’ve done in the past. And that’s not easy.”
Interestingly, he said, “the relationship between data points are more important than the data points themselves.” Pechanga CFO Tjeerd Brink emphasized the importance of making it clear to vendors that the casino must have the right to own their own data. He cited an example of common parking lot software that utilized red and green lights to indicate unoccupied/occupied spots. He said the vendor was surprised that Pechanga wanted to have full access to all data collected and wanted to own it outright. The reason was made clear when Kerr said that their analysis of parking efficiency at the resort, which has multiple garages and huge surface lots, was one of the major successes of their big data analysis. Their efforts produced a 26% increase in parking efficiency.
Many of the details of their big data successes could not be shared, due to confidentiality, but Kerr and Brink said that they were presenting this panel to share the message that vendors and operators need to work together to make all data, and the teams that control them, more accessible. They stressed the need to get the information, and the owners of that information, out of their silos.
Kerr said that Pechanga had an epiphany when they discovered that many of their most complex queries could be greatly simplified by graphing the relationships and deriving solutions that way. This method was at the heart of his presentation. He said that when you visualized data in a graphed form, many questions could be quickly answered, and solutions became readily apparent. The process is similar to the drawings on a napkin that have famously launched many high tech companies.
Kerr showed one such example of the relationships between players and slot machines. The audience quickly saw on a diagrammed graph the difference between players who consistently played a few products and those who played in random patterns on various machines all over the floor.
This sort of graphing solution was also very valuable for Pechanga in identifying the specific table game players who Kerr called “the most influential players on your floor.”
“Table (games) are very social games,” he explained. “We were able to identify the communities in which players played. Google search returns are ranked, so we adopted that concept and ranked our table players. We have community touching algorithms so that we can quickly identify influential players and target our messages to them.” It has since become a highly effective marketing tool.
Pechanga CIO John Kenefick echoed Kerr’s comments, saying that “when you
start breaking down the silos, that’s when the magic happens.” He added that it is critical to have the right people on your big data team.
When asked why Pechanga was sharing their proprietary solutions, Kenefick said it was time for all operators to “put vendors on notice” about sharing data and data ownership. “The gaming industry has not been an innovator of shared data,” he said. “That needs to change.”
Kerr was very complimentary to the American Gaming Association for focusing on big data at this year’s G2E and cited a quote from departed AGA head Geoff Freeman that was made at last year’s NIGA Conference: “In the tribal sector you are an incubator for innovation, and we don’t see that in the commercial sector.”
Judging from the capacity crowd attending this session – despite the exhibit floor being in full swing on Wednesday morning – maybe things are changing.
