Can casinos change the payouts at will on slot machines? Can this be done remotely? How does it work if they can? Are the payouts different for different machines of the same game?
Thank you.
I live near Tunica MS which is home to many casinos.
They advertise their slot machines as being “loose” they advertise as paying out 98% etc. They claim to have better pay-out than their competitors as a marketing tool - so I assume they have adjustments on the rate of return.
Slot machine payouts can not be changed remotely.
Slot machine payouts are determined by a chip installed in the machine. The various gaming authorities audit them, and the casinos are not allowed to change out those chips without approval.
Yes, machines of the same type can have differing payouts.
You shouldn’t worry about this, though, because you shouldn’t play slot machines. They are the worst gamble in the casino. They are the most expensive way to spend your time. Slot machines are by FAR the most profitable things in a casino. They are also highly addictive, and probably 99% of all the problem gambling in the U.S. involves the slot machines.
Stay far, far away from slot machines. If you want to gamble, learn to play blackjack, bet the pass line in craps, or play baccarat. For the same wager, you’ll lose about 1/100 the amount per hour on average than you will at the slot machines.
So machines don’t get “loose” or “tight” while being played?
I’ve been told that you can trust the casino to teach you how to play blackjack, that they want you to win. Good for business, I was told. I’m just cynical enough to believe it.
Gambling, to me, is pretty boring.
Peace,
mangeorge
No, the payouts don’t change while you are playing it.
There is one exception: “Progressive” slots, in which the odds change as the size of the progressive jackpot changes. The odds of hitting the jackpot don’t change, but the size of the jackpot does, which changes your expected value on each spin. In extreme cases, the progressive jackpot can get big enough that it’s actually profitable to play the machines.
And before someone asks, let’s dispel another myth: Slot machines do not become ‘due’ to pay out just because they haven’t paid out in a long time. Nor do they get ‘hot’ or ‘cold’. Each spin of the wheel is an independent trial controlled by a random number generator within the machine.
Modern slot machines are not mechanical at all, even if the readout is mechanical. What happens is that there is a free-running random number generator in the machine, throwing out hundreds of thousands of random numbers per second. At the instant you pull the wheel or push the button, the next random number generated is used to go into a ‘lookup table’ of wheel combinations. That determines what the wheels will be. Stepper motors then cause the wheels to spin and stop on their pre-determined value.
So when you spin the wheels, it’s all an illusion. The millisecond you spin the computer already knows what the wheels will show - the actual rotation and slowing of the wheels is all an illusion, constrolled by the computer to make it as dramatic as possible.
This also means that you can’t determine the odds of a certain combination falling by counting up the number of spots on the wheel. You could have a machine with a single reel containing a cherry, a bell, and a bar, and the computer could still decide that you’d only hit the bar once every 100,000 spins.
The other implication here is that if you walk away from a machine, and someone else steps up and hits a jackpot on the next spin, that does NOT mean that you would have gotten the same jackpot. In fact, it’s almost certain that you wouldn’t, because you would have had to pull the lever at the exact same microsecond as the other person did. But the average player doesn’t understand that, and therefore they can be loathe to leave a machine that hasn’t paid out for a while, for fear that it will ‘hit’ while they are in the washroom or something.
This was such a problem at the Windsor casino that people were urinating in their pants or between slot machines rather than go to the bathroom. The casino had to institute a policy allowing machines to be reserved while patrons took a break.
Minor nitpick. Sam Stone is right on, except for this:
Actually, Keno and the Big Six (the “Wheel of Fortune”; that big wheel with the different denominations of paper money around it) both have significantly worse odds than the slots. Not to say the slots are a good gamble, but giving the house anywhere from a 2-15% advantage is still better than up to 24% (Big Six) or 25-29% (!!!) (Keno).
Slot machines can be fun. Simple, mindless diversion for a little while, with a very, very, very small chance of winning a lot of money. But don’t expect to play the slots and walk away with more money than you sat down with. As Sam Stone rightly says, stick to blackjack.
I gamble. I mostly play blackjack. I know who Lawrence Revere is and I read “Playing Blackjack as a Business.” I also, before Revere, read “Beat the Dealer” by Edward Thorpe.
That said. When machines are paying off - it is a good time to play them. I would play a machine that had been paying off before I would play a machine that hadn’t hit for a week.
Look at the lotto numbers -2,3,4,5 - 25,26,27 - numbers come in groups - shit happens randomly with a pattern.
Right on! I was in Las Vegas several years ago and a slot machine took 80 cents off me in less than half and hour!
Anamorphic:
Slot machines are worse than Keno, even though Keno offers worse odds.
Why? Because slot machines play faster. In Vegas, speed kills. The best chance to ‘beat the house’ occurs when you play the smallest number of trials possible. Your best chance to double your money in Vegas is to find the game with the lowest possible odds, and put your entire gambling bankroll on one bet. You’ll have an almost 50/50 chance of doubling up.
But slot machines play fast. You can spin 400 times an hour, or more. This means your chance of getting ‘lucky’ is very slim.
Another aspect which is important to consider is the size of the payout. Is it better to play a game which pays even money, with a 1% house vig, or a game that pays 10-1, but with a 2% house vig? If your goal is to win 10 times your money, the second game is ‘better’, because the first requires you to parlay your winnings each time, with the house taking 1% of each (successively larger) wager.
Expectation isn’t everything. There are many factors to consider when determining what the ‘worst’ game in the house is. There are plenty of games that have a higher house vig than the slot average. Hardways bets in craps, the money wheel, the tie bet in baccarat, roulette (usually - 5.26% is probably better than the quarter slots, and worse than the dollar slots).
But all of these games have other redeeming factors that slots lack.
county said:
You’re simply wrong. All you are doing is noticing a past pattern in random trials. It means nothing. But it is a hard feeling to shake, because our brains evolved to try to assign causes to observations. Humans don’t deal with randomness very well.
No. Random stuff, when examined in the past, APPEARS to have patterns. The key insight is that whatever patterns you see in observations of past historical data cannot be used to predict future patterns. It’s really that simple.
If you don’t believe me, go write a simple computer program to spit out random numbers. Now go through the list of numbers and look for patterns. You’ll see LOTS. But remember that the lack of a pattern is itself a pattern. 1,5,19,4,5 is just as likely or unlikely to occur as 1,2,3,4,5,6.
It’s just that when the first pattern occurs, we don’t notice it because we don’t see it at ‘meaningful’. In other words, our perceptions are biased.
All good information. It’s also true, with many modern video slots, that the programs in the machine can have several different payout rates, and depending on the policies of the particular jurisdiction, the payout rates can be reprogrammed without changing the ctual program chips. This is either by temporarily inserting “birth chips” to set some protected memory values, or by accessing some physically protected switches on the game motherboard. Can’t happen during play, in any case, as you said.
In as much as it’s profitable to buy the one-in-seven-million-chance lottery tickets when the prize hits $8 million. 
All good info. Except the throwing of the random numbers is usually 100 per second - that’s the requirement of the most strict jurisdiction.
True - with physical reels this “virtual reel” scheme is frequently used. With video slots, the reels are typically true, since there’s no physical limitation constraining you to no more than 26 or so symbols on a reel. A machine could have 1000+ symbols per reel.
Many jurisdictions have adopted policies and regulations against teasing the player with “near misses” - when you get a “lemon” it can’t show you the lemon next to the “super bonus” reel stop in unfair proportion.
Video slot machines made for the Australian market usually have a “reserve screen” feature for this sort of reason. USA market machines do not.
Have you experience in the gaming industry, Sam?
No, I’ve just been studying it for a long time. I used to be a full-time gambler (blackjack and poker), and I’ve written some articles on gaming. I did a lot of research a while ago because I was thinking of writing a book on general gambling topics.
Many of the table games take some skill and concentration to play, the slots are mindless entertainment. You may have better odds of winning the table games, but the last couple times I was in Vegas I saw dealers on roulette and craps cheating on the payouts in several different casinos. The casinos in Vegas DO NOT want you to win, they used to, but not anymore, competition out there is too high now. I quit going to Vegas after I saw them cheating on the payouts and badgering me half to death if I got up a couple hundred dollars playing blackjack.
I flatly do not believe that. The gambling industry is far too lucrative for a casino to risk it’s gaming license by systematically cheating players.
If you saw a payout shorted (and it happens occasionally), it was almost certainly just a mistake.
And no, most of the table games do NOT take skill and concentration to play. Blackjack does, but Roulette, Baccarat, craps, and other games do not. You put your money down, and you take your chances. Baccarat is essentially betting on a coin flip - the casinos try to make it look complicated, and provide little sheets to record your ‘strategy’ on, and people dutifully sit there and record all the past results for use in plotting their ‘strategy’ - and it’s all meaningless.
Craps requires that you know which bets to avoid, but other than that there is no skill. Play the pass/don’t pass line, take odds, and hope for the best.
But you may not realize just HOW bad the slots are. Let’s look at an example, comparing playing $5/hand blackjack with playing the $1 slots (a typical choice people might make).
In blackjack, playing basic strategy only, the house may have an advantage of about .7%. And you might get dealt 75 hands/hr. So in the long run, your hourly cost of gambling is $5 X .7% X 75, or about $2.62 per hour. That is very cheap entertainment. Cheaper than going to a movie.
Now how about the dollar slots? You can pull a slot handle about 400 times per hour. And the house edge is anywhere from 1% to 8%. Call it 4%. This game is going to cost you $1 X 400 X 4%, or $16/hr.
So playing the $1 slots will cost you about 6 times as much per hour as will playing $5/hand blackjack.
Also, because the slots have some of their payout calculated on the longshots, the variance is higher. Unless you hit a big jackpot, the house advantage is probably more like 8%. And, the higher number of trials per hour means that you are far more likely to be an overall loser after a weekend of play than you will be playing blackjack. Of course, the slots have that very small possibility of hitting a jackpot, which doesn’t exist at blackjack. Just be aware that you’re paying a HUGE premium for that very remote chance.
Quick hijack: I’ve heard that, to promote gambling, casinos install some slot machines with payouts of > 100 %, so you’d actually win money on those machines even on the long run (the trick behind that is, of course, that they don’t tell you which machines are those lucky ones). Is this true?
It sounds sketchy to me, Schnitte…
If I were a slot jockey, and I came across a slot machine that consistently won for me hour after hour, I would not tell a soul.
And if I did tell someone, or someone else found out, people would be lining up to use that particular machine, rather than take their chances with a machine of unknown odds.
Possibly. I have heard from an individual in the industry that certain machines will be adjusted for a lower payout rate where they are more likely to be played (near a restroom, food bar etc…).
It would be bold of a house to make the odds >100% on a few units, but if there are 300 other machines, I could see the rationale.
Sam Stone, if you are doing research on gambling then you must have heard of the late John Scarne. He really knew all aspects of gambling.
ccwaterback - I can believe that casinos cheat. Yes, the casino might be trying to increase its “edge”. Other times, it may be an employee, dealer, confederate, etc trying to make “extra” money on their own.
As John Scarne had warned many times, never rule out the possibilty of cheating.
The dealers are watched so closely. I don’t think they could get away with cheating very much at all.
The first time I played the slots was in a small town Elks Club. I put three coins in and got the triple bars. The payoff wasn’t much at all – it was a nickel machine.:o
But that much luck made me want to play slots a lot. My father-in-law worked for the American Legion and I played there as often as I could convince my husband to take me. He tried to set a low limit, but I would beg for more money. So I just quit going and playing altogether.
Twenty years later, I went with some friends to Mississippi to a casino. I headed straight for the slots. But they had no levers!! It completely changed my attitude. I continued to play out of boredom but I think I needed the sensation of having some control. (Either that or the feeling of throwing money in the toilet and flushing it down repeatedly.) I left with more money than I came with – but I have no interest in trying that again.
John Scarne is not thought of all that highly among gambling pros. He had a lot of wrong ideas about blackjack, for instance. In his first edition of Scarne on Cards, he advocated splitting 10’s against a dealer’s 5 or 6. This is absolutely horrible advice. He also claimed for a long time that blackjack could not be beaten, and then when Thorp proved that it could, Scarne claimed that he was the originator of the first count systems.
Scarne is a product of the very early Vegas years, when the mob ran things and the games often were crooked. This is no longer the case, especially in the major casinos.