When it comes to casinos and gambling, there are some players who believe that casinos favor newer players, and don’t care about their longer term players. I’ve seen this most recently in a variety of contexts, both physical and online.
STATUS: A slot machine doesn’t know how many times you’ve played it. Casinos do offer perks to their new players card holders, mostly to be able to get data on them through their players card. But veteran players get steady offers, which likely balances it out.
Most often this conversation comes up with players who complain that they see new players posting that they’ve had great success, while they, a veteran player in a certain casino, aren’t getting the same success.
Slot machines have no memory. They don’t know if you’ve been in a casino before. Players card systems are not allowed to interact with slots in a way that impacts their payouts, and there are people who play without their cards at times anyway for other superstitious reasons (a friendly reminder that you should (almost) always play with your card).
So under the topic of payouts, casinos don’t favor anybody more than others when it comes to visit frequency or anything like that. Someone coming in for the first time will have the same offerings as someone who comes in for the 100th time.
If you’re a new player and have never signed up for a players card before, there is some benefit given to new players, usually in the form of a sign-up bonus and/or a teaser offer after the first visit. In this, the casino is investing a bit of money in exchange for data on your casino play.
They want to know what type of player you are, so they can assign you to a grouping and send you offers. To do so they need to see a couple of sessions of what your wagers are, how long you play, how much you’re willing to potentially lose, etc. That’s got value to the casino, as those offers can keep you coming back again and again. So they will favor players on that basis.
But in reality, the offers themselves, sent to veteran players, tend to have the most value. And as such, it’s established players with a history who tend to make out best. So in that way everybody gets something, and it’s unlikely that casinos favor those newer players accordingly.
