Most casinos monitor how much you’re betting and only start comping you if you’re above certain minimums. I don’t think any of the major ones on the strip comp the penny slots.
My guess would be learning curve. You can start playing slots in a few minutes or seconds, but it takes at least an hour or two to learn the rules, and many more hours to learn the strategy, of table games. Some people just don’t want to learn.
Bet me. That’s all we play. In January we spent three nights at the Wynn. Free room and $450 gaming credit. Totally comped. In March we’re doing the same at M Resort. Totally free.
At silenus, how many times did you have to go to Vegas and pay the penny slots to start receiving this frankly hard-to-believe special treatment? I mean I do believe you but it`s just pretty incredible. It’s made me consider actually vacationing to Vegas someday.
We joined the old Imperial Palace Players Club about 7 years ago. When it folded into Harrah’s, we started getting their offers. We hit Vegas maybe 4 times a year. Never take more than $400 to gamble with, but we do enjoy the restaurants and shows. Hilton wooed us rather heavily a few years ago, with free tickets to Fleetwood Mac and Jimmy Buffett in addition to free rooms, but they dropped us quickly when they realized we spent most of out time elsewhere. But Wynn and M have been fantastic.
I’ve never been to Vegas, but I routinely get free rooms/meals/gambling credit from Tunica casinos.
This is actually one of the interesting things about slots. The house has the edge over time, but due to progressive jackpots it’s possible for a particular machine at a particular time to be positive expectation. (Obviously, once the jackpot pays out, the advantage goes back the casino, and when you total up all the books they come out way ahead.)
Many people, especially women, find table games intimidating. Slots feel safer.
I will go ahead and say it.
Price of admission is easier. I only felt comfortable playing cards at Slots A Fun, given how cheap they were. Blackjack has no right being 10-20 a hand.
And yes, attention span does have to be taken into consideration.
I hit a jackpot on a Wizard of Oz slot machine. Granted, the sensory feedback was dialed in, but the experience of “winning” at a slot machine is light years better than winning at a table.
Ended up buying a Japanese “” skill stop “” slot machine with my winnings. Go Figure.
I was wondering this too… I’ve been to Vegas a couple of times and never received any freebies; My parents visit almost every year (and I know Mum likes to play the pokies [slot machines] when she’s there) and they’ve never mentioned getting any freebies either. I’m not doubting they exist but I always thought you had to be playing $100-a-hand poker or blackjack to be getting that sort of stuff.
Nope. Player’s Clubs are the way to go if you want free rooms and the like. Example: The last time we zipped off for a weekend getaway we stayed at the new M Resort. Free room (Strip view), 2 free buffet passes to the second best buffet in town, and a bunch of swag: bottle of wine, sweatshirt, wine bag, gym bag and a couple of logo pint glasses. All for the price of gas over and back and a $5 tip to the valet when we left. I must have swilled at least a case of Sierra Nevada Pale while playing the new “Lord of the Rings” penny slot. They even have a gas station next door that you can redeem your slot points at for gas home.
Every time we stay on the Strip at the Wynn, they offer us a upgrade to a mini-suite at the Encore. No swag, but we usually get a gaming credit as well as a free room for the weekend. All because we are Red Card members and are “semi-locals,” meaning we can be induced to come to Vegas fairly often by the offering of free rooms. I’m sure they offer different levels of inducements depending on where you live and how often you visit.
Ah I see. Being currently based in Japan might put a damper on the swanky treatment. Nuts.
Most of the folks I see when I go in at older people-this is their big day of excitement. They might not know or understand the table game,s but they can socialize, have some fun, maybe hit it big. At the tables people tend to be intense and serious. Now, the idiots I see who sit down and just feed in $100 bills all day, maybe win, then feed them back in…But yeah, it’s easy, fun and nonthreatening, earn some quick cash for not much effort. What’s not to like?
Also, in games that have strategies, you can make the wrong decision. Even if you educate yourself, there can be the nagging feeling that it’s your fault that you lost. With slots, when you lose there’s no way it was your fault. Less pressure.
I’ve been in a casino less than ten times in my life. I’ve dropped a minor amount in slot machines, and tried roulette once when I was with someone. I wouldn’t play poker, blackjack, craps, or any game that required decisions (including playing roulette on my own) unless I did the homework first. That’s work I’m probably not going to do any time soon.
Even if I did the work, I’d assume that there would be a learning curve to applying what I’d learned. So I could do the homework, play badly for awhile as I got up to speed, and then worry that there was something I was forgetting or missing - or I can push the buttons and watch the lights. I probably don’t want to do either for two hours.
This is also incorporated into almost all ‘video’ games, especially the FB type games.
I get preferring slots. I just dont’ get how you can spend so much time on them. That much time without even the intellectual stimulation of strategy or a story just doesn’t makes sense to me. I get zoning out on a TV, or video game. I get getting wrapped up in crap that doesn’t matter.
If I wanted to play something without having to get involved, I’d play video poker. That requires no skill other than reading what to shoot for (which is on the box). Or, more likely, I’d try to find an arcade. Heck, if they had those ticket based games, I’d be set for quite a while. That’s intermittent positive reinforcement, but at least I’m actively doing something. There’s at least the illusion that I could have something to do with what’s going on.
Slots are by far the worst way to gamble in Las Vegas. Why do you think the casinos push them so hard? They’re a gold mine.
There are two reasons why slots are terrible: one is that the house advantage is generally pretty big compared to other games - anywhere from 2% to 8%, depending on the limit you play. The other reason they are terrible is because they are fast.
The amount of money gambling costs you is the house advantage X the price of your average bet X the number of bets you can make. So a game with a high house advantage but slow play (i.e. bingo and keno) doesn’t cost you very much, and a game with a lot of speed but a low house percentage (i.e. pass-line craps) also doesn’t cost you very much. But when you combine high speed with a big house advantage, you’re dead.
For example, blackjack has a house advantage of somwhere between .2% and .8%, On average in Vegas it’s probably .5%. You can play about 75 hands per hour on average at blackjack. Let’s say you play at a $2 table, and play the minimum bets:
Your cost of playing blackjack is .005 X 2 X 75 = $.75/hr. Seventy five cents per hour is very inexpensive entertainment - if you’re getting an hourly drink comped, you’re making money.
Now, let’s take a dollar slot machine with a 2% house advantage. You can get in about 400 spins in an hour on one of these machines:
Your cost of playing the dollar slot: .02 X 1 X 400 = $8/hr.
However, with the dollar slots, the house odds include the payouts of the huge jackpots. If you don’t hit one of those, the house is probably taking more like 5% - 10% of each wager, in which case you could be spending as much as $40/hr on average playing those slots. That’s more than fifty times the hourly cost of playing $2 blackjack. But even considering the big payouts, you’re still paying 10X more per hour to play the dollar slots than you would pay to play $2 blackjack.
It gets worse for slots - when the house has the advantage, the player needs to get ‘lucky’. The chance of getting lucky diminishes with the number of trials. So the chance that a blackjack player will come out ahead after a weekend in Vegas is much higher than the chance that a slot machine player will come out ahead.
Some slot machines are much worse in some areas. Here in Alberta, the government fixes the payout of our video lottery machines at an 8% house advantage. At a dollar a spin, these games are costing the players $32/hr. Most of the players are lower income people.
As for why they are so addictive, BF Skinner showed why with his pigeon experiment: Put a pigeon in a box, and provide a lever that, when pecked, always produces a morsel of food. The pigeon will learn to peck it, and once it knows how to get its food, it will pretty much ignore the lever until it’s hungry. Then it will peck it to eat, then ignore it again.
However, set up the lever so that when pecked it produces food randomly. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. The pigeon will become obsessed with the lever. It will peck at it constantly, even when not hungry. That’s the power of intermittent reinforcement, and that’s what slot machines do.
There’s a hell of a lot of research into human psychology that goes into a slot machine. Everything is maximized to trigger compulsive behavior. For example, modern slots don’t need reels at all, but manufacturers go to the trouble of making mechanical wheels and having them slowly stop rotating to build up anticipation and the sense that you almost hit the jackpot. In reality, the result of the wheels was determined before they ever started spinning - the computer inside already knew the result based on a random number generator, and it’s using stepper motors to simulate a mechanical process. It’s all fake.
Also, notice that slot machines make a racket when money falls into the hopper? They’re designed that way. It would be trivial to make bins that are dampened to prevent the clanging, but they’d rather have everyone in the area hear it every time money falls out of a machine.
If you play the slots for more than the odd dollar here or there as a lark, just remember - you’re a pigeon in someone’s experiment, and they’re cackling evilly while they watch you give them all your money. Learn to play a cheaper casino game.
Oh, and you don’t actually save much money by moving down in limits on the slot machines, because the machines with the best odds are the ones that cost the most to play. If you move down to the quarter slots, nickel slots, or penny slots, the house advantage goes up.
I believe it when silenus says they’re getting comped playing the penny slots. Last year, the average hold on the penny slot machines in Vegas was 12%. Assume a penny slot machine with a minimum of 30 cents. Apparently, you can get in about 14 spins a minute on those machines. So if you’re sitting there playing robotically, you’re going to do about 840 spins an hour.
Cost of gambling: .30 X .12 X 840 = $30.24 per hour. They’re making more money per hour off the penny slot players than they’re making off of blackjack players at any limits up to about $50 per hand. It’s a total sucker bet - they’re made to look inexpensive because hey, they’re ‘penny slots’. Much cheaper to play than the dollar slots, right? Wrong.
I work in a casino in I.T. I deal closely with the Players Club and matters involving comps, etc. Presently the casinos have been giving away a huge amount of stuff to get people in. When the economy tanked casinos got hit hard. Available room inventory was way high. Basically no one was coming to play. Everyone loosened their comps and started giving away tons of stuff to get people in. Now that things are picking up they are starting to tighten up the comps a lot.
If you have a players card the casino knows pretty much exactly how much you spend. They have software that crunches the numbers and what you get is based upon what you put in. If you are playing slots, they know your coin in vs. winnings, how fast you play, what you like to play. If you play table games the pit staff enters your card info and how much you bet per hour. Why do you think they want everyone to have a card? And why they usually ask for it when you go anywhere?
If they give you something for free it means that, generally, they are getting more out of you than they give away. There are exceptions, for example a high roller may come to town broke and not spend very much. If that happens, that player will get knocked down a level or two. If it continues very long the comps stop.
The M was hit pretty hard. I sit in on meetings where the numbers from various properties get analyzed. Almost all the properties in town got killed. Ours was one of the few that actually made some money (not very much, but some) in the last year or so. The strip got totally killed. So, to get people to come in, they started giving away a lot of stuff.
Upgrades and the like are based upon occupancy and who spends the most. High spenders, of course, get all kinds of stuff. It basically costs the hotel nothing to upgrade you to a nicer room if that room is empty. Food is cheap and they give that away. Side note, a couple months ago my casino did an insanely cheap buffet promo. The idea is that if you get people in to eat they will play. Usually that works. The last couple didn’t so they stopped that promotion really quick. They analyze covers in the restaurants vs. the head count and coin in at the slots/tables and know really quickly what works and what doesn’t.
The free credits to play on slots or whatever also work for the casino. Over all the players lose what they were given plus some. Most players add cash to the credits they were given.
The casinos also give away stuff from the players club and analyze those promos vs. cash in. (Side note, I take really good care of the players club folks 'cause I get all kinds of free loot from them. Shirts, hats, and other assorted swag). My casino has given away booze recently from the players club. The lines for that have been insane and so has the cash in.
If you are going to play, definitely get a players card. You’ll get some stuff back. But that stuffs value will not be greater than what you put out overall from the casinos point of view. You may think you are getting a deal but the casino is making a profit.
Oh, and Sam, the executives don’t cackle evilly when they watch people give them money. They are in the back of the house figuring out what they can do to get people to give them more money. And they are damned good at it. They cackle evilly after work. Sadly, every time the execs decide to do something to increase play I get more work. On the bright side I like my job.
Slee
I think this is a big part of it. When I went to Foxwoods (which is, or was, the world’s largest casino), I figured, hey, when at a casino, play blackjack, right?
Cheapest table: $10/hand. And they only had a single $10 table; you were pretty much stuck playing $15/hand. Its shocking how quick you can lose $300 at this rate – I actually think I would have been sucked into losing more money if each hand didn’t feel like that much of a chunk of change.
Note: this was late at night, possibly during the week – so there may have been fewer tables going. But still, fifteen bucks minimum?
I should probably thank 'em. I’ve never been inside a casino since 