Casinos are places where people play to win money. Every game involves randomness: shuffling cards, rolling dice, spinning wheels. You could try to calculate your chances — counting cards at blackjack, for example — but that doesn’t guarantee a win. More likely, it will get you banned.
Gambling (that’s another word for playing with money) can cause bad consequences for the player. You could simply lose all your money. That’s why it’s restricted by age and often heavily taxed, much like alcohol or tobacco.
A casino makes money because it slightly manipulates the odds in its favor. To further increase profit, casinos have employed a number of manipulative tools. A rather cheap trick is to serve free alcohol. A more elegant one is to use fake money. The French call these jetons, from jeter, which means to throw. You literally throw it around. Research suggests that using toy money instead of real money makes people more willing to take risks.
In English, a jeton can also be called a token.
Tokens are often used for gambling. (Movie still from the Card Counter © Focus Features)
The factor of randomness in most casino games is obvious. Take roulette — its centerpiece is a large spinning wheel. A slot machine, in contrast, hides how it operates. You probably suspect it was designed to make more money than it pays out. If you’re particularly savvy, you also know that it rewards you every now and then in small doses to keep you playing.
Do slot machines operate with fair randomness (like a dice) or are they rigged? (Movie still from Hard Eight © the Samuel Goldwyn Company)
Gambling can turn people into addicts. Feed the machine just one more token, pull that lever one more time … and you’ll finally hit the jackpot! Such delicious promise, amplified by a manipulative setting, bears a great manipulative force.
Let’s imagine for a minute you and me decided to create a new business. We apply all the tricks we learned on our trip to Las Vegas, but instead of making people addicted to playing games, we build machines that make them dependent on their output.
These machines are magical, seemingly capable of doing all the work humans can’t be bothered to do. Like writing text. Or programming code. Or thinking for themselves. They answer every question. The first few rounds are on the house. Then we hand out tokens in exchange for real money. And people pop those tokens right back into our machines.
But I am hones with you, we have a problem: magic does not come for free. These machines are expensive to build and even more expensive to operate. That’s why we slowly increase the price of tokens. But this still isn’t enough to cover our costs. We haven’t even made a profit yet.
Now that everyone has forgotten how to read, write, and think for themselves — don’t you think we should pull one more trick? Why let our machine spell out the correct answer on the first token? How about the third, or fourth or … tenth? Like a slot machine.
We have a solid business here. Trust me. The house always wins.