Cash casino earn free game

At precisely midnight on Oct. 11, 1991, an obscure Chicago neurologist slipped behind a row of quarter slot machines at the Las Vegas Hilton and switched on a homemade contraption of cardboard, black metal and old fan parts. For the next 48 hours, the hidden device pumped a pleasant-smelling vapor into the stale casino air.

The neurologist was not an intruder but a scent expert invited to the Hilton by casino manager Lee Skelley to test whether certain smells can subtly influence slot machine players to wager more. Over the next two days, Hilton gamblers poured thousands of quarters into the 18 nearby slot machines--45 percent more than usual for an October weekend.

The days of shaved dice, missing face cards and rigged roulette wheels are long gone. But the pursuit of profitability in the corporate era of gambling has turned the average casino into a financially hazardous place for bettors. In Nevada and Atlantic City, for example, confidential documents reveal that five casinos now pump Chicago neurologist Alan Hirsch's secret scent--Odorant 1- -into the slot machine pits 24 hours a day. (The Las Vegas Hilton never took the idea beyond the testing stage.) Some casinos have even studied how the controversial psychologist B.F. Skinner altered the behavior of rats and pigeons. But of all the tricks in the casino manager's Psych 101 handbook, the subtle manipulation of time is by far the most common.

In 1980, a math whiz named Jess Marcum spelled out exactly how time affects a gambler's odds. Marcum, who helped to develop radar and the neutron bomb before becoming a casino consultant, figured that a craps player who wagered just $1 every bet for two months straight would have only one chance in 2 trillion to win $1,000 before he lost $1,000. On the other hand, by decreasing his exposure at the craps table to just 25 minutes and wagering $200 every bet, that same gambler would increase his odds to 1.15 to 1. Even the lowest-ranking casino official knows the concept: Since all casino games give the house a mathematical edge, the longer a player gambles, the greater the house's chance of winning.

That helps explain why gamblers frequently get lost in a maze of slot machines and why down-home gambling halls offer free "Ladies Breakfasts" at 6 a.m., a slow point in the casino day. Over a year, a special promotion or interior-design element that somehow keeps gamblers at play for just five more minutes a night can add millions to a casino's gross, or "hold." The Harrah's Casino spends tens of thousands of dollars a year studying whether fresher air, wider aisles and even back supports on slot-pit stools will make customers comfortable. And slog it out longer, too. "We're now developing technology that's just lighting the felt" on blackjack tables, says Harrah's president, Phil Satre. "We're trying to keep [light] off the forehead of the customers, which is draining on them from an energy standpoint."

Hidden purpose. Such sensitivity to customer comfort abounds. For example, nearly all new slot machines sold in the United States have built-in bill acceptors. Gamblers like the devices because they no longer have to wait in line for change, and casino managers love them because they keep slot hounds glued to their stools.

Like car plants, casinos also stress productivity. The hidden cameras above the casino floor scan for fast-fingered dealers and card cheats. But the ubiquitous "eye in the sky" also enables casino officials to conduct regular "game-pace audits." At the Aladdin Casino in Las Vegas, blackjack dealers are instructed to deal at least 75 to 80 hands per hour. They are also supposed to shuffle six decks of cards in less than 80 seconds. The reason: Shuffles can eat up eight rounds of playing time an hour. In a year, the Aladdin could earn an extra $1.2 million if its blackjack dealers never had to shuffle.

Penny-pinching casinos set faster production schedules, especially when the nightly cash hold tumbles. "We don't instruct people to deal faster," says Bob Stupak, owner of the Vegas World Casino in Las Vegas. "They better deal as fast as they [expletive] can or they're gonna work someplace else."

Casinos have become pop-psych laboratories. When a player at a low-limit blackjack table flashes a $100 bill and asks for chips, for example, dealers at many casinos are under orders to dole out chips of the lowest-possible denomination. Partly a convenience for gamblers, the practice also is meant to discourage low bettors from pocketing higher value chips when they leave the table. Such players are likely to blow all 20 of their $5 chips one at a time, the thinking goes, but might hold onto a $25 chip and never gamble it away. "Psychologically, casinos don't want gamblers to realize how much they're losing," explains one Atlantic City dealer.

But slot pits are the true training grounds for casino mind games. Deep, dark colors like black, red, purple and blue trigger a strong response in slot players, research shows. So, slot machine manufacturers like IGT, based in Reno, Nev., prominently feature those hues. IGT North American President Bob Bittman says research also shows that gamblers no longer associate winning with the cherry and plum symbols on many slot machine reels. Poof, they're gone. "Fruit is a dinosaur. Ninety-nine percent of the machines we sell now will not have fruit," Bittman says.

Some casinos go to even greater lengths to exploit gamblers' subconscious preferences. Casino consultant David Britton says that after surveying dozens of Nevada-based slot players he confirmed a hunch that they are drawn to bright-red machines. But after several minutes, the players subconsciously tire of red and seek softer hues. Since casinos want to avoid "transitional periods," when players leave one machine in search of another, Britton devised a new system where players are now lured to the brightly colored machines at the end of a long row of slots. But the machines closer to the middle of the row feature softer colors, like blues and greens.

Sometimes casino operators look to actual psychology for inspiration. In 1966, University of Nevada undergrad Larry Andreotti was studying Skinner, one of the first scientists to demonstrate how positive reinforcement can influence animal behavior. Andreotti told his father, the late Rome Andreotti, who at the time was one of the rising stars on the operations side of the growing Harrah's chain. "A lot of the behavior I saw in the lab seemed comparable to the control one has over behavior in casinos," explains Larry Andreotti, who today is a college psychology professor and Skinner specialist in Canada.

Smart rat. In 1937, Skinner taught a white lab rat named Pliny to operate a rudimentary slot machine. After Pliny pulled a chain with its teeth, a marble would fall. The rat would then drop the marble in a slot and receive its reward, 1/20th of a gram of a dog biscuit. By tracking Pliny's reactions over time, Skinner learned that the rat became more motivated when he got a biscuit only occasionally, and randomly. Pliny would drop even more marbles into the slot, in other words, when he was not sure when the biscuit would fall next.

Rome Andreotti applied Skinner's findings to the casino. If most slots were set at about the same payout rate, recalls a former Harrah's president, Richard Goeglein, Andreotti would slip in a few machines with a much more generous jackpot percentage. The casino wouldn't indicate which machines offered better odds, but gamblers soon learned that there were a few ringers in the crowd. And the search for those machines sent gamblers into a Pliny-like, quarter-dropping frenzy. "Rome knew how to reward people for continual, consistent play," says Goeglein.

Coincidentally, slot machine makers have also put Skinner's theories into practice. Modern slots reward players with frequent, small payoffs--often as inconsequential as one quarter--that entice gamblers to keep chasing their dream. Thirty years ago, by contrast, small, frequent payoffs were unheard of, says slot machine historian Marshall Fey. The new payout system works. "It's like eating popcorn. It's very hard to stop playing," says Jeffrey Lowenhar, senior management consultant with the Resorts Casino in Atlantic City.

One firm took gambler manipulation too far. In 1986, Universal Distributing began selling slots that produced "near miss" combinations. Instead of running randomly, the slot reels often stopped so that players could see the symbols of a payout just above or below the pay line, giving the false impression that gamblers had missed a massive jackpot. Although the machines quickly became a hit with customers and slot managers, Nevada gaming authorities outlawed the near-miss illusion in 1989.