Not renew the contract - sure. But canceling an already scheduled event because of low revenue per guest doesn't seem very likely to me?

Or maybe it was some sort of ongoing agreement and canceling it was effectively "not renewing".

Not to be TOO snarky, but given how quickly corporate cancels employee labor despite rising revenue, it would not surprise me for other corporate to also cancel "low paying customers" for "high paying customers". Loyalty is beyond dead so cancelling a contract is just a cost of business if they feel the alternative gives more money.

At least going by all the entrepreneurship articles I've read over the decade, "firing your customers" is a term of art, and a recommended approach for dealing with unprofitable and/or annoying customers - so I guess this shouldn't be surprising.

> Loyalty is beyond dead so cancelling a contract is just a cost of business if they feel the alternative gives more money.

Not to be TOO snarky, but that's kind of the point of contracts - contract cancellation terms aren't an "or else..." threat, but rather an agreed upon exit strategy. Termination fines aren't punishment, they're compensation for inconvenience.

Repeating this verbatim in your reply means you are trying to be pretty snarky, actually.

The idea is to diffuse siutations like this before it comes about, but I guess nothing is perfect.

If they canceled a year or so before the con, I could see that. But to cancel seven month before the conference? There's no way they will get a decent-sized substitute in the space before then, so I don't see how this would be anything but a money-loser. Not to mention other conferences might be less willing to commit to long-term deals if they see that the contract can be canceled on a whim.

The announcement effectively calls it "no-notice cancellation" and overall it reads like they were already deep in the planning phase when it happened, which seems unlikely if a renewal was pending.

In all likelihood they ran the math and figured it was worth it to yank the rug out from under Defcon, penalties be damned.

1. https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/nightlife/2016/04/...

The problem with card counting generally is that the casino has infinite money and never runs out, thereby they can sustain large expected value swings... whereas you need an enormous bankroll to handle those swings, assuming they don't throw you out before that happens.

There’s a huge difference between: “if you do X, you will be asked to leave” and “if you do X, the police will arrest you”

Like, when I invite someone over to a dinner party, it is against my policy to insult my dog. If you do that I will kick you out (not actually, he’s a dumb klutz, you can insult him all you want), but that doesn’t make it illegal to insult my dog.

Regardless of the year I think you might want to reconsider your overly confident notions about fiction/reality or at least the condescending tone. I don't know what is institutionalized in what places, but have been threatened by casino security. Fuck around and find out I guess

From where I stand, you'd need to show it's systematic. One single instance is not enough for me. Because your claims are general, as if they applied to many casinos.

To be clear, if they tell you to stop playing, and you don’t, then they absolutely can call the police for trespassing, which is a crime.

I don’t think most casinos have private security that will beat you any more, since they can tell you to stop playing and enforce that with police.

Nevermind casinos, do people think every bouncer at every bar is merely for show? Since "management reserves the right", trespassing, threats and assault are not really a huge due-process kind of thing, and local establishments/insiders rank higher than outsiders. Within reason they know what is allowed and that isn't always going to be exactly and only whatever the law technically says.

Edit for even more context. For people that don't know already, not every casino or bar is owned by some megacorp who gives a shit about PR, has tons of cameras, has some HR department to educate staff on doctrine, etc. Many casinos are literally in sovereign territory of indigenous peoples also. Not that summary execution for offenders will be status quo there, but come on folks. The world is large and complicated, so simple stories about it are usually incomplete

I mean, I think you're making up blanket assertions where there are none. I haven't made a blanket assertion. I specified the difference between policy and legality.

I then said "I don’t think most casinos have private security that will beat you any more" That's not a blanket assertion. It specifically says "most casinos".

I have never asserted that it NEVER happens and can NEVER happen.

So, I think your confusion is a product of your own assumptions.

Statistically, it is not effective. Your card counting needs to be (basically) perfect, and you need very deep pockets to handle extended drawdowns.

I think the only ones who can make money are those playing poker and are really good at it. That's because they are playing against other players and not the bank. They still have to beat the rake.

I'm not even sure comp players, that is those who play to get non-cash rewards like travels, restaurant and hotel stays while minimizing their losses can still have an advantage. I heard that casinos calculate comps by expected losses, making sure they stay on top (statistically).

And they are cheaters, but it is like saying thieves can make money.

Absolutely not. Using your brains to keep track of cards is not cheating in any way, shape or form. They are simply using all the available information and some pretty basic math to them to gain an advantage.

Calling card counters cheaters is like calling chess players with better knowledge of patterns than their opponents cheaters. They are not cheaters.

The cheating it mentions at the bottom is not card counting (technically legal), but genuine cheating.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/04/the-man...

Even if you do get thrown out it is already after you have won some money thanks to your edge and therefore 'outsmarted' them.

…because it’s actually extremely difficult to do with the countermeasures casinos now use, more decks and random cutoffs. Letting you try is very profitable though.

The whole environment part is of course not useful. None of the monitoring happening where you can see.

Also a couple of video poker variants have actual positive (!) returns with perfect play. https://wizardofodds.com/games/video-poker/basics/#playing-s...

Taken with a grain of salt, as my only knowledge of this is via Hollywood movies. It does make sense from a game theory perspective though.

The only reason to kick you out would be if they believed you somehow have an edge on them.

The customer who got lucky at first and is willing to try to be lucky again and again is the best customer for the casinos.

The magnitude of entropy casinos require you inject into the system each round is quite low in practice.

Profiting off of that is all skill.

But even so we’re actually all net-positive on the city, thanks to a couple “lucky” craps runs.

And same. A couple of roulette results has us “positive”.

A large company has probably decided to move a conference to Caesar's during that period, and that got Defcon bumped. Especially because DefCon has become massive, so the RoI has shrunk due to staffing overhead.

> We don’t know why Caesars canceled us, they won’t say beyond it being a strategy change and it is not related to anything that DEF CON or our community has done.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Defcon/comments/1aj6ixn/def_con_was...

To avoid any legal liability. Stating a specific reason would open them to possible "breach of contract" depending on whether the act(s) were significant enough or justifiable, based on the contract terms. Just say nothing, part amicably, everyone moves on without drama.

With that said, they probably weren't lying. Most likely, months after ponying up $10 million to a sophisticated international hacking group, Caesars Entertainment probably doesn't want to invite some of the world's best hackers to stay and meet at its flagship resort.

This is how it works for at-will employment, but it would be a very weird contract that allows backing out only if you don't say why you're backing out.

How does making this statement this benefit Caesars in any way? Now DEF CON can demand some proof of this claim, or sue for defamation, or state that without proof, Caesars isn't acting in good faith, whatever.

Most Def con visitors would be white hats so that would be a bit disingenious. I would expect most attendees to behave (reporting issues after finding one)

Especially considering they just got hacked, a few pentests would be good for their business.

But in such a large group, there's always going to be some people who'll decide to muck around with their hotel room's locks or something like that.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-13/caesars-e...

https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/9/15/23875113/mgm-hack-c...

About a month after the conference would be enough time to discredit an obvious connection to the conference, while still making use of security breaches that might have been found during the conference. Most security experts know you have to abandon security hopes if you give the hardware to the user with direct access. And with a conference of DEF CON's size, you only need 1% malicious actors for 300 tragedy of the commons results.

MGM's not that far away on the strip for somebody to find a security exploit, and then start checking every nearby casino to see if it works at those casinos. Found a $1 million exploit? Might walk a few blocks to see if it can turn into a $10 million exploit. Non-negligible risk from a casino perspective.

Average casino-win per customer is usually ~$100/admission. [1] Three days [2] gambling for 30,000 = 9,000,000. Hotel stay revenue helps, yet it's usually only 25% of revenue per guest. [3] Casino visitation and attendance has also rebounded significantly in the last few years. [4]

So, higher than normal costs per attendee, attendees who believe they all spend less than normal conference participants, anecdotal stories of repeated high cost issues each year to resolve (ex: concrete poured in sinks on purpose, rooms broken into, satellite dishes stolen), increasing attendance numbers in Vegas, and a multi-$10 million slap a month afterward based on social engineering.

[1] https://www.americangaming.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/CG...

[2] https://forum.defcon.org/node/248358

[3] https://www.playusa.com/las-vegas-casino-hotel-revenue-numbe...

[4] https://gaming.library.unlv.edu/reports/national_monthly.pdf

If there's any place in the private sector where I'd expect security (including digital security) to be literally top notch, a casino would be it.

And casinos don't fuck around. If they catch some "uber haxor" laying a finger on their networks, you can bet they'd have him arrested in a heartbeat, regardless of whether he is a conference attendee or not.

I know why you'd expect that, regardless, you'd be very wrong

Most casinos rent their gaming equipment from IGT, who directly manage most of these systems. IGT also has a fairly robust security team, having worked with them back when I was still a PM in the space.

Organizations like Caesar's aren't the greatest security wise, but that's largely because they have low margins because they are primarily property holding companies that are operating Casino/Gaming that they rent out from vendors like IGT.

This has been changing after MGM, but I don't think I can discuss it deeply.

In practice the biggest abuse from Defcon to the venues is in the form of a subset of people constantly defacing casino property which no one reports because no one has sympathy for casinos.

My favorite trolling of casinos at Defcon is the people dumping prop money everywhere. Casinos do not -like- that and spend a lot of resources running around picking them up which is funny to watch.

You make it sound like it's entirely about money and the bottom line.

I have a hard time believing gaming doesn't provide _huge_ contributions to favorable politicians. I feel like you've got something to say, and maybe something really interesting. But what you've got if awfully vague.

If you've got the time or inclination, I'd definitely read an elaboration of your meaning.

Financially the strips have massive amounts of money flowing into it from every angle. Construction is booming and housing cannot keep up with the demand. If you view LV from the surface then it seems like the economy is trashed - lower travel rates, millennials are not into gaming as much, and the virtualization of gaming is competing. But the reality is business for "living" is doing better than ever before.

Because recent politics has changed ideologies with modern corporations several things have changed. For example skids were never part of LV ever, but that has changed in the last 10 years directly because of these ideologies. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-first-public-needle-vending...

Do you think these same Corporations look fondly upon DEFCON? They would push it out eventually as it's not safe-hacking.

I'm not so sure. There's a _lot_ of drinking at DEF CON

I'm sure their insurers might not be too happy about them hosting hacker conventions these days.

I accidentally bumped into a random guy there before the con started, and we ended up chatting and he bought me a beer. I saw him there the next morning. And that evening. And at 2AM. Almost every time I walked past, the same guy was in the same seat, enthusiastically laughing and drinking with his buddies.

Dios mio, amigo.

[1] https://investor.caesars.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...

The requirement is that the expected value for a play on a machine is >75%. And most are >90%. But that’s not a cap on profit margin, as 25% of the expense for a play may be more than the cost of that play.

Eg, having a machine that costs $1 with $0.75 expected return (and $0.25 revenue for the casino) may only cost the casino $0.10 a play — which would be a 60% profit margin.

Other businesses are treated like this too. If you are a high frequency trading firm and you buy 1000 shares stock for $99.99 each and sell for $100, you didn't have $100k of revenue - you had $10, and your profit is what's left after paying for staff and computers.

Yes, if your business was a supermarket, it would indeed work the other way, and it's not obvious to the literal- minded where one treatment should stop and the other should start.

And perhaps is more obvious when you consider what happens when there’s only players, eg, poker. The pot is held in trust, until the game ends and the losers forfeit their money to the winner. At no point does it belong to the casino.

That doesn’t change when the casino is also a player.

Now the casino has your dollar and it's "costs" were four cents in electricity/maintenance. A much higher profit tham 25%.

Gaming does have expenses -- labor (mostly dealers and slot attendants & mechanics), costs of purchasing and leasing the machines, and some other miscellaneous stuff... but profit margins on pure gaming are very high (and not limited in any way by the 25% maximum hold percentage that you reference)

So no, profit is more like gross revenue minus expenses and taxes.

You could easily have a machine with positive EV for the house that has negative profit.

There is the story that the American Physical Society was not allowed back after in 1986 Vegas supposedly suffered its worst week in history.

First of all there is no real evidence that this story is true and secondly it doesn't make sense to me that they would cancel DEF CON after so many years for that reason. They would have done so much earlier, probably.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/39668/did-a-cas...

My suspicion is that Caesars is trying to do something like play with headcount. Late summer is not just a weak time for conferences but DEF CON needs a ton more space and a ton more human babysitting across that space than any other conference. You don't see EVO or BlackHat getting cancelled (same exactly time window) because they're pretty contained in one place.

My guess is that Caesars needs to staff up a little for DEF CON or that they may even be considering reducing staffing in late summer. Con attendees are going to stay at their properties and use their bars/restaurants/tables anyway.

...although now that I think about it, EVO was moved up 2 weeks and has a new unannounced venue this year, so maybe this isn't isolated to DEF CON. ...and also the Venetian is having its convention space renovated until 2026...

I very much doubt there's any conspiracy here.

I never heard of this. Can you tell us more?

It's basically "a no harm, no faul" termination of an existing contract, and is fairly common in competitive markets where there is no long term strategic partnership to develop an unique product.

If it's the buyer terminating it's either because the product is either no longer needed or an cheaper supplier was found, and if it's the seller it's caused by all sorts of resource optimization reasons(aka someone being willing to pay more for the same limited resources, or an increase in cost making unprofitable).

https://qz.com/work/1249513/was-a-convention-of-physicists-r... (2018)

    1) Hacked the in-circuit TV system and broadcast their own pirate show
    2) Gained roof access and removed the satellite dish 
    3) Spilled hookah coals onto the bed starting a fire
    4) drove the janitor's golf cart into the pool

I've seen bottles of alcohol passed around doing talks and heard more than a few really off color jokes about criminal sex acts and such. Vegas waitresses have seen it all also but there was over the top behavior.

We're in a victim dominant culture now, "it's not you or what you've done, you're just a victim of evil or something" but at more than a few Def Cons and more than a few times, it was really uncomfortable to be there and see some of the stuff that was happening.

Worst case scenario is usually they tell people to disperse, but otherwise, they always seemed to laugh when they saw shenanigans (except for people fucking with Casino machines, thats a fast way to make them mad)

For example, the ATMs on casino floors are probably some of the most secure in the nation during the con. Harassment is also taken actually seriously.

I quit going after 7. It seemed like they partying had vastly I overtaken any actual technical content. I don't drink and I'm not super social, so it just seemed like it wasn't "for me" anymore.

Edit: It has probably changed in the intervening years but every time I looked into it it seemed like more spectacle than tech. DerbyCon filled the niche for me for a few years but then it got impossible to get tickets for and imploded. (I know there's a lot of backstory about DerbyCon that I don't know, too. For me it was just a fun way to feel a little of the DefCon 3 vibes again.)

DEF CON is a hell of a party, and I hope to go this year, but the attendees are a force to be reckoned with. Even I ended up fucking up a homemade badge, and tossing a failing lithium battery into the trash in the middle of a casino, only to learn later I created a trash fire, so I know firsthand that we're a problematic bunch.

Also, I was a 17 year old girl at the time, and I felt sexually threatened several times during the event. That is the only place I have visited where I would make a statement of that nature.