Definitions:

Average Daily Theo (ADT): Average theoretical loss per day the customer gambles in the casino

Theo: Theoretical loss (calculated by multiplying average bet, house edge, hands per hour and hours played)

Back-end comps: Money taken off your hotel/F&B bill at the end of the trip, based on actual play

Trip value: Theo or actual loss across all days of a casino stay

Coin-in: Total amount staked on slots (or ETGs)

The basic process for rating players, to determine comp value and promotional offers, hasn’t changed too much over the last couple of decades. The information-gathering process sure will do in the next few years, as AI player tracking on tables – and facial recognition pinning sessions to player names on all games – gather pace. But what’s done with the data has, consistently, been pretty stable.

In most operations, it’s just a case of focusing on some combination of Average Daily Theo (ADT) and trip or lifetime value. Historical ADT might drive pre-offered room rate, while that allied with trip, demographic data and a ton of algorithmic CRM stuff will decide who gets what kind of offers for future trips. Back-end trip comps will generally just be a factor of trip theo.

The missing metric

But are we missing another, fundamental metric? My operational experience has mostly been in the UK, and in most sites we’re limited to 20 slots per casino (or were until recent legal changes – but the busier sites are still capacity constrained enough that the point below stands).

I get that what follows is an extreme example, but the principles below apply to every casino – in the sense that if your slot floor is at the optimal size, you’ve ample capacity much of the time but capacity constraints at peak times.

The point I’m driving at is this: not all £100 ($133) theo per visit players are the same; speed of play makes a difference. As an operator with a very low, artificially restricted slot allocation, I’m at capacity or certainly comfort capacity a lot of the time – and the guy who racks up his £1,200 of coin in in 30 minutes (£5 a spin, rapid spins) is materially more valuable to me than the guy who plays at £1 a spin and takes his time, needing five hours to hit the same coin-in and theo.

Player one is out of his seat and makes it available to the next player (who, in many UK casinos at peak times, is pacing up and down looking for a spot to play). But in every marketing programme I’ve ever seen, the two players are dealt with pretty much identically.

The same theory applies to low-demand periods. If player three is worth £50 per session, and plays Tuesday afternoon when there are only five players in the room, but player four has the exact same spending profile but only visits on a Saturday night, player three is obviously materially more valuable. She’s not taking up a seat someone else wants – but we treat them both the same.

What about the daytime slot player?

It’s certainly fair to say operators incentivise players to visit at quieter times – triple points Wednesdays and so on – but the base player who chooses to play at quieter times doesn’t generally get assigned any value for it.

As a side note, it infuriates me how poor we sometimes can be at servicing daytime slot players, with this in mind. In a sleepy daytime, some operations fall into something of a torpor; they forget that people visiting at these periods absolutely have added value, just by virtue of being there when those seats aren’t in huge demand.

There’s clearly going to be a safer gambling element to the speed of play question – we certainly wouldn’t want to be pushing people to play faster to increase their value directly – but it’s high time we recognised the value of players who choose to play in a way that’s more optimal to the house.  

The principle applies in all operations. The UK slot market is obviously an extreme case, but all playing positions have a cost to provide. The shorter the time that ADT takes to generate, the less resources are used to secure it, and that matters to all casinos across slots, tables and Electronic Gaming Terminals.