Positively contributing to our collective illumination …
Casinos are all about odds. If a player has shifted the odds into his favor, he can be asked to leave. But if a player simply wins a ton of money through sheer luck even though the odds are against him, the casino will do everything it can to lure the player back.
To Jonas, the example that may describe this phenomenon involves a private jet.
“There’s this one casino, one of their high rollers beat them for US$18 million,” Jonas said. “That’s actually going to show up on quarterly earnings. So they left with US$18 million. The casino sent a jet to their town and left a limo in front of their house on weekends and said ‘you know just in case you get the bug.’ And they got the bug and they took them up on it and they came back and lost something like US$22 million.”
Great advice !
Everyone knows the house has an advantage. But most casino patrons don’t realize just how heavily the odds are stacked against them. Take keno, in which you pick a string of numbers, hoping to match them to what the casino randomly generates. The house advantage is at least 25%, increasing with the more numbers you pick, says John Alcamo, author of Casino Gambling Behind the Tables. The odds of hitting, say, the 10 spot — a string of 10 numbers — are nine million to one. (Getting killed by fireworks is nine times more likely.) Despite those odds, a $2 bet usually pays off at only $50,000 to $200,000.
