PREEMPTIVE READ THE TEXT DONT JUST BLURT OUT THE ANSWER AHEAD OF TIME LIKE ITS A GAME SHOW
Okay, i understand in the old days you didn’t want seats in a casino because the only places you wanted people to sit in a casino are either in front of a slot machine or at a bar and either way they’re making money off that.
But for the past decade when I’ve gone to casinos legitimately half the people I see now seated at slot machines aren’t even playing, they’re just sitting down and texting on their phones for extended periods of time, usually sitting and blocking the one slot machine I want to play. This can’t be good for business if even at a busy casino most of the people aren’t actually playing but rather just being space fillers opposing people who actually want to play.
Why aren’t there more general seating areas in casinos now to accommodate the sheer number of texters I see in public now?
The ones here in Michigan definitly have lounge areas where people can sit without gambling, you can also smoke anywhere except a few non-smoking areas. They also have a food courts where you can sit and phones are allowed, just don’t use them behind the card players or you will be asked to move along.
Not trying to thread-shit, but what’s behind this thought process of which machine to play? When I’ve been to Vegas, there are multiples of the same machine. The payoff is no more likely at one machine (with the same betting rules and bets placed) than any other, even if the graphics make it look different.
There usually are multiples of the same machine but not always. Something I’ve encountered more than once is there is a bank of the same machine and all of them are being played except one - and a companion of one of the players is sitting at that one. Not everyone is comfortable asking that person to move.
You can’t at the tables - but you can at the slots or the sportsbook or keno area, which come to think of it is a good place for texters to sit if it’s not crowded.
Most casinos I’ve been to don’t have any actual lounge areas where people can sit without gambling or buying food or drink (except for the ones that have bus lobbies) but I also haven’t noticed lots of people just sitting at a machine and texting instead of playing for extended periods of time. It might just be because I don’t watch for a long enough period of time to determine whether the person just stopped playing and started texting.
From a purely technological point of view, it is certainly possible to set different payout schedules (probabilities for events and payouts associated with these events) for different machines, even those that are of the same make. From a legal point of view, this is not per se forbidden by gaming regulators, to my knowledge; it’s difficult to find reliable sources on this, because Google searches will invariably bring up lots of shady “How to pick the hottest slot machine” websites. FWIW, here is the Nevada regulation governing slot machines. Apparently, any modification made by a casino to a slot machine (and those machines are highly adjustable) requires prior regulatory approval, but the document isn’t clear on saying whether they will approve different payout schedules for different machines of the same make in the same casino.
Years ago I worked security in a couple of different casinos. The rumor was that slots near doors payed off more often (but not necessarily higher total payouts) than those deep inside the casino. I have no idea if that was true but it would make sense from a marketing standpoint. Anyway, every flat surface that would be capable of planting a butt on had pointy things placed to discourage said planting. Certainly, no chairs in front of slot machines. Things are very different now. At least, in Atlantic City.
One would assume they have done the cost benefit analysis. Even if someone is texting, they are still next to a machine. So temptation is close to hand. Any simple seating away from the tables or machines is occupying floorspace that could have a table or a machine occupying it.
Casinos where the number of machines or tables is limited for some reason may have the space to provide other areas. But overall they will optimise the layout for maximum benefit to themselves. People near the betting is always going to win.
I was in our local casino for the first time in about a decade recently. (It is interesting to visit every now and again. Something of a study in social science watching the crowd.) It was near impossible to find a bar with any space, let alone any sort of space to sit away from the proceedings. The place was just packed with machines and tables. There was a bit of a storm in a teacup recently when it became apparent that their license didn’t allow them to have poker machines on the external balcony/smoking area.
How long ago and where was this? - I don’t remember a time when I had to stand to play slots in Atlantic City and the first time I went was in the early 80s.
Considering their clientele sems to trend toward elderly, infirm, or obese - I have trouble imagining anyone running a casino thinking making the customer stand for long periods promoted any extra revenue.
Yeah. I was a consultant at a Indian casino under AML audit. There were seats at all the gaming.
Yes- by and large, "elderly, infirm, or obese " dressed in sweats, moo-moos, jeans and tee, etc. Not at all like the “beautiful people” crowd you see in all the ads- And most of them were smoking. The non-smoking areas only lacked tumbleweeds.
There was a gourmet restaurant (with a buffet), a nice middle- like a Denny’s but better, and a food court. The food in the “family restaurant” was quite good, and no smoking in the two nicer ones.
If it’s a progressive slot pool, and the progressive jackpot is high, people could be blocking seats intentionally to reduce the chance that someone else hits the progressive jackpot before they do. At high enough progressives, pros will even pay people to sit and block seats, or pay them to play the slots for an hourly fee. It’s the only time you can make money on a slot machine.
Or, superstitious gamblers who believe a slot machine is ‘due’ because it hasn’t paid out a jackpot for a while (or ‘hot’ because it did - go figure) might ask someone to sit and block their machine while they go to the bathroom or get food or whatever.
People might also take breaks from playing to save money, while not wanting to give up their machine.
My advice: Break the slot habit. They are one of the most expensive ways to spend your time in a casino. Vegas slots on average have about an 8% house advantage. On a dollar slot, you only get the best odds you play five coins at a time. You can pull the handle easily 200 times per hour, and fast players up to 600 times. At $200 pulls and $5 per pull, that’s $1,000 per hour put through the machine, and the house will take $80 of it on average. $80/hr is pretty expensive entertainment. And that includes the big jackpots, which you are not likely to get. so the variance is extremely high.
Nickel and quarter slots are somewhat cheaper, but the odds are worse so not as much cheaper as you’d expect.
Keno pits make great relaxation areas. Buy a $1 tocket and relax. Keno is one of the worst games for odds, but takes a while to play so it’s a fairly cheap way to get out of the gambling grind and relax in a comfy space for a while. If they don’t require you to buy a ticket to sit there, even better.
Sports books also offer lounge areas, and you can watch sports there if that’s your thing.
When I lived in Vegas (mid 80s-mid 90s) I played a lot of imaginary Keno while eating or drinking. Never won a single imaginary penny doing so. But it did add to the jaunty ambience of living there.
While traveling now I tend to wander through any casino I encounter just to “inventory” the place. Versus the old days I do see more people lounging at slot machines not playing, almost all engrossed in their phone or their cig. Clearly management tolerates that, as it’d be easy to detail security to ask those folks to play or move after a few minutes.
I don’t tend to visit at peak times where the fact some machines are occupied should affect other players wanting to play. Unless, as per the OP, they’ve decided that of the dozens or hundreds of unoccupied machines, only that specific one will do. I’m going to gently suggest the evidence is that management believes (rightly or wrongly) that folks of the OP’s mindset are very, very thin on the ground.
Some of the odds in Keno are outrageous - there are Keno bets with odds so bad that you could play once an hour and you are unlikely to,win if you played for the entire lifespan of the universe.
For example, if you play 15 spots and bet to cover all 15, your odds are about 428 billion to one. And you’ll get paid 50,000:1 if you are the luckiest person in the world and hit it. And that’s not even close to the worst odds. Betting to match 20 put of 20 spots has a probability of winning of 3^-19, or .000000000000000003%. That’s roughly 380 trillion years playing once per hour. On the bright side, if you could convince the entire population of Earth to play once an hour, you could hit that jackpot in a paltry 47,000 years. So let’s get started!
There are Keno options available and regularly played that have such high odds that they have never, ever been won. Winning one of these jackpots will almost certainly trigger a cheating investigation, because it’s just so unlikely that anyone would ever win one of them. And yet, they are allowed to offer the bet.
I had no idea there are slot machine pros. I understand poker, and perhaps even blackjack, but slots? I assume it involves monitoring machines and targeting those that are “due”? But they are all supposed to be random at all times, right?
It is amazing just how bad Keno is. I generally have a pretty good feeling towards Gaming Control. For sure they’d never permit it if it was invented tomorrow and yet it persists.
My imaginary game was simple. I’d “bet” the six-spot of 1 through 6. Easy to remember, easy to watch for, and since I wasn’t concerned with sharing the “payout” with others, the fact those’d be crappy spots to pick in the real world didn’t matter.
It’s pure math. Slot machines are random. But with ‘progressive’ slots the jackpot continues to grow until it is hit. There are times when the progressive jackpot is so large that the slots associated with it have a positive expectation. If it gets large enough that the positive expectation is worth a pro’s time, they’ll play it. If it’s really, really big they will sometimes bring in a team of people and have them occupy every machine, playing either for a cut or for an hourly wage.
This guarantees that the jackpot is theirs - eventually. They can still lose if the jackpot doesn’t hit in a statistically-likely timeframe, just as positive expectation blackjack or poker players can still lose money over a fairly long period, or for,that matter the casino itself can have the occassional losing streak.
The way a slot machine typically works is that there is a free-running random number generator constantly spitting out random numbers. When you pull the handle, the next number determines your outcome through a lookup table. The machine then spins the reels using stepper motors to make the numbers already chosen pop up. This has a number of implications:
Machines are never ‘due’, or ‘hot’. It’s not like you are guaranteed a jackpot every X spins and if it hasn’t come up it’s ‘due’. It’s all pure randomness.
If you leave a slot machine and someone wins the jackpot on the next pull, that doesn’t mean you would have won if you had stayed for one more. If your pull was a microsecond earlier or later than the other’s you would have gotten a completely different result. Understanding this would save a lot of players who won’t leave a machine, terrified of leaving when a jackpot could be waiting on the next pull.
If the reels stop just one symbol away from the jackpot, it doesn’t mean you were close to winning. What the reels do is irrelevant - they are just obeying a computer algorithm. Your result was set the instant the computer pulled the reel values from the lookup table.
I can’t remember if I heard it on a podcast or read it in The New Yorker, but they said that seating at the slot machines is intended to be so comfortable that you will never want to get up and leave. If they could get keep you in your chair 24 hrs a day, they would.
Plenty of seats.