The purpose of Mindplay and none currently in Vegas
Mindplay was easily sold to a few casinos because Mindplay appeals to the two basic needs of a casino, greed and paranoia.
The purpose for inventing Mindplay according to the patent application is the reduction of pit and eye salaries and beneifits, the reduction of comps, a contro against cheats and the ability to evaluate play and catch cardcounters.
The reality of Mindplay is that it does not do what it was sold to do.
You can not expect game supervisors to be supportive of a machine in their pits designed to take their jobs. They will complain about it and in fact had good reason too. It slows the game and the biggest thing the casino execs did not think about, IT CHASES AWAY THE AVERAGE LOSER!
Sure the machine will only pay comps based upon the exact amount the player bets. So no comps for bathroom breaks etc. But what good is cutting comps when your players will not play and leave to go to other casinos.
The machine is capable of catching bet cappers but so is a dealer following procedure and how big of a problem is this anyway?
The machine is capable of counting losing and amatuer cardcounters but has proven to be very beatable by good counters and teams. Put it this way, it will result in the backoff of some guy who recently bought a book on cardcounting but would never catch the MIT team. Not a good investment.
So the result in Vegas was part of what has been termed casino suicide by the Hilton. The Hilton was a place with a good 6 deck shoe and probably the best double deck game in Nevada not long ago. The destruction of blackjack profits at the Hilton was not because some cardcounters feared Mindplay, the Hilton did not make money on them anyway. It was the average losing player. You know him, the guy worried about the flow, the guy with loads of superstitions at the table. These execs who purchased Mindplay were so distant from their own customer base that they actually thought that putting this strange all knowing table in their casino would not effect the number of players they had. It is history now, the players left for other casinos. Hilton rid themselves of the Mindplay devices and tried to lure their old, once loyal customers back. The problem was the Hilton is nothing special and when many of their customers got a taste of other places, they refused to return.
So not getting enough new customers to replace the old loyal ones, Hilton has followed the horrid example of downtown and began to ruin the rules on blackjack to the point where there is no real reason to go there anymore.
Mindplay can work in a areas where you have enough gamblers and an isolated casino. Where competition is heavy, expect it to fail because it is developed with no consideration for the most important factor in developing these things, the ploppy. If the ploppy will not play it, it will fail.
ihate17
Or Mindplay if it's older.
