I want to talk about land based casinos (big casino operators, to be precise) and their “habit” to keep track of players. A registration, ID cards, 24 hour sign-up period in the UK, cameras….Every regular player is in some kind of database. His gaming history is always up-to-date (or this is paranoia?).
To give you the "inside" perspective on this:

Yes, casinos keep track of some of their customers and this is for a few reasons. See those clipboards inspectors have? There is a sheet for recording buy ins/cash outs, the same at the cage. However you need to be either a big or suspicous player. Big means big. There is no point spending man hours recording a player who only buys in for a few hundred quid. Its not cost efficient. We dont care. Suspicous is different.

Regular players at blackjack (and i mean daily not weekly players even if they are small by cash standards) may be tracked to see if they are either bucking the statistical trend or to monitor the amount of cash leaving/entering the casino. Remember a casino is a business. We have to account for where we are losing/winning money to higher authorities. If one big player gets lucky and takes £100,000 off a roulette table this needs to be taken into account when looking at the figures to give a true idea of how a table or casino is running. Again this is not just about cheating but whether dealers are too slow or which parts of the room get good customer play, which dont, and why.

So yes, checking for cheating/counting is a part of it, but only one, rather minor, consideration. It is also much easier and accurate to check for cheating/counting by reviewing tapes of someone's play than running a 6 month evaluation of their deviance from statistical norms. It is much more likely the records will be used in any eventual court case/ police investigation.

So, if you play less than a grand a week and are honest, dont worry, the casino probably doesn't care. You are a minnow to them. This may seem insulting when you are putting what you consider large sums of money down on the felt but realise that that is relative to the billion pound business this is.

If you are a big player you will be tracked. Again lots of reasons. Casinos like to know who their big players are so they can be mollycoddled. More money played (and notice i dont say won/lost) means more personal attention from senior personnel, more "comps" and other general love to keep you coming. There is probably also a book saying you like the ass of dealer such and such and you only smoke blah and like 3 ice cubes in your Scotch. Its not sinister, its called customer service and again, emphasis on big player.

Again it is also because of general accounting and book-keeping. Some players will cash out their chips for cash every 10 minutes and then rebuy chips at a table. I have seen occasions where a "small" player has bought in for a few thousand and done this so many times that the cage has actually run out of cash needing either a "loan" from a sister casino or some of the drop boxes being removed and counted and the cash put back into circualtion. That player may have bought in for a total of hundreds of thousands of pounds when in fact they have only actually brought a grand through the door. Again this distorts the figures. The company will want to know why every thursday the "drop" shoots up tenfold yet there is never any increased profit.

There are also extremely strict laws regarding money laundering. There are fixed points at which forms need to be filled out, and procedures gone through. Records must also be kept for use by interpol, the inland revenue and other interested relevant parties upon request. Fines are huge for transgressions against this and a casino may have years of scrutiny from the commission and police if this is not adhered to religiously. I dont think i can say any more about that as it could be considered "tipping off", an offence which carries a prison sentence. To give you an idea of how serious and unyielding the law is in this regard, a dealer must report any and all suspicions of potentially suspicous activity. If not they can be retrospectively charged. Best case scenario would be permanent loss of your gaming license. Worst case a heavy prison sentence.

It is also about dealers. The casino likes to keep track of its big chips. A chip is a small thing and a dealer has many orifices and items of clothing this could be concealed in. A big player at the table means big chips and the opportunity to steal. If the casino knows how many big chips have been bought and cashed out any discrepancies are obvious.

So wow, after that essay i suppose the conclusion is: yes some players are tracked. However it is for many different reasons, most of which have nothing to do with the actual customer themselves. An average customer will only have the record of their membership details and a photograph. It is in the casinos interest to let you keep playing, win or lose, as long as you arent outright dodgy. phew.