CASINOS TRENDS OF THE FUTURE

Your casino player’s card – or your online site play,which is easily tracked by any Internet gambling site – can get you lots of benefits, based on your gambling patterns, but what if you could also get points by shopping and eating? If, as with the debit gambling card concept above, you could also use your player’s card to hook up to your bank and credit cards, you could buy and eat and get comps or cashback rewards for those as well. And really, if you think about it, there’s no reason the same concept couldn’t be extended online, via links.

Looking for even more ways to use your card? How about as hotel room key? While security and access could again be a concern here, realize this also would give a casino’s marketing department specific information on exactly when you entered your room each time you do.

All this information would benefit you as a player via more rewards, and also give casinos the specific and targeted marketing info to keep you coming back time and time again. Win/win.

Obviously, a big expense for casinos is switching out slot and video poker machines for new ones. One future trend would be a universally configurable machine that could simply download new gaming software like a computer. And with the obvious savings in personnel and equipment wear-and-tear – not to mention less potential for cheating by manipulating dice or placer balls – even craps and roulette may start to be electronic; test versions are already up in some European casinos.

With digital technology moving forward faster than any of us can keep track of, no doubt all of this is just the tip of the gaming future iceberg. Casinos, whether land-based or online, are always in the business of offering a better product, because if you’re not gambling with them, they’re not making money.


Casinos know that the more your winnings look like Monopoly money, the easier it is for gamblers, from a psychology standpoint, to keep on playing and possibly lose it all back (which, let’s face it, is what keeps casinos in business). On top of that, the fewer personnel required to handle money -always an internal security issue, for obvious reasons, as well as salary expense – the better. So tickets and vouchers for winnings, with “ATM”-like machines dispensing actual cash winnings, minimizes losses for the house on several levels.

Always looking for ways to help you lose more money more easily, it’s also won’t be much of a stretch for casinos to set up links on your existing player’s card to connect to your bank account, so that you could automatically and directly transfer funds right onto a slot or video poker machine for more play. The big issue will be security, as people lose and leave their player’s cards behind in casinos constantly. No doubt passwords and maximum withdrawal limits will be established before this technology comes on board, but we bet it won’t be that much longer till it does.

And with online poker and casino gambling becoming legal in Nevada and New Jersey, with more states following suit, using a bank card online probably isn’t way off in the future either.