Since the recession hit, the casinos have ramped up their advertising by a factor of four, it seems. Every commercial break has at least on casino ad. Many of them mention “slot tournaments.” How can you have a tournament in a game of chance?
Is it just that whoever has the most $$ at the end of the event gets more money? Isn’t this just a really tranparent way for people to shove as much cash in the machine as fast as they can? What am I missing here?
Obviously, I am not a casino gambler.
You don’t put your own money in the slot for the tournaments, and they are often free.
It is entirely random, but the people who hit the buttons fastest do better. The point is fun, not the winning, and there are usually raffle prizes, too.
I witnessed one of these once out in Vegas. It looked like a roomful of people sitting in front of their chosen machine smacking the spin button as fast as they could. It was amusing to watch for about 2 minutes, then I went off to play a table game.
Most of the time ,they set the slot machines to pay out more so the scores are real high…but they are boring as hell to watch.I worked in a few casinos and have seen many of them…just a promotion to draw in customers really.
And the ones I saw were sometimes 10 minutes long. The key is to slap your machine as fast as possible to get as many plays in during the allotted time. Can you imagine rapidly pounding the “spin again” button for ten minutes? It looked like torture.
To riff a line from St Louis Ren Faire…
A slots tournament would be more interesting if the slots machines were fighting each other.