The link I posted upthread with the Doper who was/in the programming side of this industry should offer insight to those interested.
It may have been worthwhile to pay attention to old slot machines to see when they pay off. Did old slot machines dump their entire coin load in a jackpot? In “The Grapes of Wrath”, a fictional book about the depression, it mentions a cook in a diner who kept track of how often a slot machine had been played without giving up a jackpot. At some point he knew there was a good amount of money in the machine and he would play so he could win the jackpot.
Just for reference (and someone will tell me if there is a better cite, I’m sure) Regulation 14 of the Nevada Gaming Commission lays out the rules for “gaming devices.” Rule may and will vary elsewhere.
The rules around randomness are:
That is, you can’t change the odds of a specific displayed result based on previous games.
Here’s something I haven’t seen in the thread to this point.
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If you’re playing penny slots, that’s about the lowest burn rate you can have in a casino and still be actually playing.
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Every casino loyalty card I have personally used (AC, Native in the PA/NY/WV area) has based their comp accumulation on “hours spent” without tracking dollars spent or type of machine.
The upshot is that if you enjoy the casino resort atmosphere, there’s a yearly threshold beyond which playing penny slots earns you more than enough in comps to make up for what you’re paying out. My dad, who goes to the casinos about a dozen weekends a year, hasn’t paid for a casino hotel room or meal in a decade.
Las Vegas casinos use a different metric*, but it amounts to the same thing. I haven’t paid for a room in 7 years, and I get offers from maybe a dozen different casinos each month.
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- There are a number of different methods they use, but one factor is “amount put at risk.” The more money you give the casino a shot at, the higher your comps. This would seem to make penny slots a really bad idea, but with the bonuses and small pay-outs, you can easily get $100+ worth of credit for a $20 initial buy-in.
Definitely. I don’t see that the fun of playing more expensive machines is any greater than playing penny machines.
The Nevada ones I’ve had all accumulate points based on money through the machine, not time. It only stands to reason that the casinos want to reward those who pump dollars into the slots rather than those who pump pennies. But maybe the East is different.
NJ has a lot of stricter laws than NV, so I understand it–for example, you only see continuous-shuffle blackjack out here because you aren’t allowed to kick out card counters in AC.
When playing video poker/blackjack/keno etc. at a bar, they will comp your drinks usually. But this requires you to put in a minimum amount, usually $10. After that you can play as slow or as fast as you want, and the drinks will keep coming (faster if you tip). It’s kind of like what silenus is saying. Similar amounts might exist for slots.
As noted, I’m not talking about Nevada. In the UK, slot machines (fruit machines) have adjustable payout rates that can be set by the owner of the property where they are sited (such as an arcade, pub or fish and chip shop). Although the outcome of each spin is determined by a pseudorandom number generator, the machines attempt to maintain the set payout rate by dynamically switching between different schemes.
One very obvious way this can be verified: the coins paid out for winnings are ejected from stacks inside vertical tubes - those tubes have at least two sensors in them - one near the bottom of the coin tube, that detects when it’s empty, another on the overflow slide that detects when the tube is full and coins are being diverted into the bulk coin bin in the base of the machine.
The machine cannot pay out when the coin tubes are empty - so a succession of big wins means another big win cannot be imminent - or the machine would try to eject winnings from an empty tube. It won’t let that happen - and it achieves this by switching to a different, low-paying results algorithm. Later, to maintain the chosen payout rate (which cannot be lower than 70%), it will switch to a higher-paying results algorithm - and that’s the time to play.
(I worked for a short while in the repair shop of a business that rented out fruit machines to pubs, etc).
Give it to a society that helps pinched-faced puritan fun-nazies who are somehow deluded into thinking that they are funny.
I got free drinks sitting at the slots when I was last in Vegas–I seriously doubt the waitress had any indication if I was playing 30 lines at 5 credits per line, or 1 line at one credit.
Certainly, they came around a lot more often at table games, and I imagine they’re more attentive in the high-stakes slot areas as well, but I don’t believe there’s an absolute minimum.
Given the size of the drink glass and the amount of ice, it’s not like it took a lot of spins to make up for it 
All I know is (from experience and a hubby who lived there), if you sit down at a slot machine long enough and look like you are playing, you get free drinks. And they are stronger than the ones they give you if you actually buy them in the casino bar.
True story.
But smaller. My blackjack table gimlet was basically a shot.
True. I’ve got free drinks at penny machines - though things were pretty slow. But if you say is true about the bar, they must be serving water out of booze bottles. Let’s just say the drinks I got couldn’t have gotten a hamster drunk.
I had a great day playing roulette (had a “system” from a professor friend) and made some good money… but it took a lonnng time, and when I figured it out, I’d only made about $10/hr. And lost an entire day sitting indoors, sitting next to people that smell of stale smoke and Gold Bond.
So my first casino day was my last…
I can think of more pleasant ways to make money. Hell, I made more unloading semis, and got some fresh air!
You aren’t ordering the right booze. I can get Macallan from the cocktail waitresses at Wynn Las Vegas. Pints of Sierra Nevada are available to penny slots players at M Resort. If you tip well, the witresses will damn near hover around you while you play.
It varies a lot by resort. The Wynn and Venetian, for example, will give you good booze and plenty of it. Lower class places will give you 2 drops of ass gin.
Made from dingleberries instead of juniper berries, I suppose?
I’ll second this. Some of the games are entertaining and even amusing. Occasionally you can win some money on them. I won $1,250.00 once on one. My mom won $5,900.00 on another. We don’t do that well most of the time, of course, but then, we don’t expect to.
Will agree that the odds are pretty dismal. In all my hours of observation in my trips to Vegas, I have seen a grand total of two, maybe three players hit a jackpot on a slot machine, and they were wimpy four-figure deals. On my latest trip, one machine near the front had a completely maxed-out progressive jackpot ($9,999.99) as I walked in the door, and it remained unconquered the day I left.
Anyway, don’t really care for the new machines, but for a different reason than cmkeller. The stock market-esque lines are just a natural evolution from the boring 'ol one-line machines. In the old days, machines could only handle one line, and they needed a timer to stop the reels. Then they got more sophisticated, which led to three-line machines, and then five liners using the diagonals. The completely electronic ones, of course, don’t have reels at all; they can precisely determine which item goes in which space, so they can have far more permutations.
My problem is that once you take away the reels…the physical mechanism that once determined the payouts and odds of getting them…what you have is essentially an elaborate version of keno, where the number of “hits” dictates the payout. So why not make it keno? Island Fruit does something similar, with the different symbols paying different amounts, why not replace all the squiggly lines with simple numbers?
(This reminds me of that wheel above a Wheel of Fortune machine where there was a “90” on four of the slots, more than any other number. I think the wheel stopped on 90 1% of the time, if that. Pretense, pretense.)