Computer evaluating your play

[Baberuth]

Some good games in Vegas have facial recognition and computer to evaluate BJ skills. Is this like a constant EYE on every player? I have read in some posts they can be thrown off with some different play. is this a game to only play anon and of course short sessions?
Thoughts: A short session still allows the computer to finger you after you leave, which is bad if it is a chain casino and they share info. Should you play anon there and they have facial recognition along with the computer, is it worth it anyway.
Since I am going to Vegas on my annual trip soon, I don’t want to make ANY mistakes that will end my fun because I didn’t check the game and store properly.

Baberuth

[bigplayer]

no, it's not constant. You have to do something that triggers a desire from management or surveillance to review your play either a buy-in more than a certain amount or a bet more than a certain amount. If you know the criteria you can intentionally trigger a skill check and then play like a moron for an hour to get some good remarks added to your account. You probably would not be re-evaluated again until you've had a big session or trip win against them. The bad news is that you'll never know when a 2nd evaluation is being done. The good new is that if you keep your sessions short you can avoid giving them a big enough sample size to make a determination. Some casinos you have to fail a skill check several times for them to take action against you. The quicker with the hook the casinos are the bigger their error rate and a 5% to 10% error rate can be a disaster for a casino so the sharper ones generally take the Zender approach and make you PROVE to them that you can beat them. The arrogant "know it all" casinos like Cosmopolitan confuse variance with EV and simply refuse to allow the possibility that a counter might get a big score against them and thus wind up backing off square players in the process. The result is often a somewhat above average hold percentage but a seriously reduced drop.

[WRX]

I'll add:

(1) The consensus is that facial recognition systems are crap. It's definitely not a case of some Big Brother computer system looking at every face that walks in the door and picking that face's identity out of a massive database. The situations in which a facial recognition system might help management identify you are the situations in which you'd be getting a lot of unwanted attention anyway.

(2) A thorough skills check is very labor-intensive. A lot of casinos are saving money by being short-staffed. Ergo, surveillance's capacity to conduct skills checks is limited. 100 hands or less might be sufficient to get a reliable read on counting skills, although at shoe games it could very well require more. (Think of the times you've sat through two or three shoes with the count never rising!) For other plays, in real-world situations, it very likely takes a much larger sample size.

[Gamblor]

As usual good advice from bigplayer and WRX.

bigplayer mentions a 5-10% error rate can be a disaster for a casino, barring MANY MANY more non-counters than counters. Even if they are better than that, and lets say close to perfect in identifying counters, like a 0.05% error rate, they are still much more likely to throw out a non-counter than a counter (would depend on what % of the players are actually counters, but 1 in 10,000 seems plausible as in the second example cited in the link). I am certain sweaty casinos are shooting themselves in foot, for this and other reasons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_paradox

But of course many employees at sweaty casinos could care less for the long term health of the casino, just like to look good to the boss or bean counters saying they threw out a "card counter".