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General NLG Chat => General Chat, Slot Shop **Tech Talk** Welcome wagon and other stuff. (Off-Topic Post Welcome) => Topic started by: rapidroy on August 15, 2014, 07:40:46 AM
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when I go to the Las Vegas I always see ads for the "looses slots in town" what does that mean? can they change the payouts or something.
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It's a matter of perspective and opinion. When a slot is installed, the installation and setup is overseen by the local gaming authority. The casino will set a payback percentage (the theoretical percentage that the machine will pay back over a long period of time) and it is recorded by the gaming commission. There are laws in most states governing the minimum payback, the higher the payback the higher the payout. So if the payback is 92%, the machine will pay back 92% of what it takes. So a "loose" slot" should be one that theoretically will payback more than the average machines in the area. In Nevada the minimum payback on a machine is 75%, but casino's rarely go that low. In most cases they are 88% for pennies, 90% for nickels, 92 for quarters, and 94 for dollar. In the really high denoms you will see some that are 98% payback. So sometimes, you will see a bank of machines with a 9x% percent payback sign, usually higher than the average.
It is important to understand that modern machines are designed to be very volatile, that is, it has high swings between losses and earnings. You could hit a really big payout if you are lucky, but most of the time, the machine is just going to eat money, but in one spin, it could return everything it took in. So even if you sit on a 98% payback machine, you could play hours and not see a good win, but that is just the nature of statistics and the way the machines are designed. In the end, even on 98% machines, you are still loosing 2 pennies out of every dollar you play. And keep in mind, that a big chunk of the payback % is calculated including the super rare to hit top prize.
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Also keep in mind that a machine that is set with a 98% pay back.......that pay back is based over the LIFE of the machine. The machine even though will never remain in the casino for 20 year, that could be the estimated life of the machine, and may never hit the big while on the casino floor.
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when I go to the Las Vegas I always see ads for the "looses slots in town" what does that mean? can they change the payouts or something.
It means that a casino will say anything to get you to play their machines. A slot is loose when you are winning and tight when you are losing. Everytime you play a slot, by law, you have a chance to hit every possible winning combination and every possible losing combination. Casinos cannot make a slot payout or not payout, that is determined by a Random Number Generator in the machines program that stops on an outcome when you hit the spin button.
I would not be too concerned about payout percentage when going to Vegas for a weekend. Your either lucky or not. Over the course of years the percentage payout would start to matter. My advice is play what you like, spend what you can afford, and only spend money you won't feel bad about losing!
Now when it comes to video poker and keno I look for the better paytables as often times the frequent hits like flush and full houses are the payouts affected.
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Also keep in mind that a machine that is set with a 98% pay back.......that pay back is based over the LIFE of the machine. The machine even though will never remain in the casino for 20 year, that could be the estimated life of the machine, and may never hit the big while on the casino floor.
Are you guessing on the "life of a machine setting" is 20 years/???? Or do you think that it is written in the codes, that it must hit that x% by this amount of time and/or # of pulls.....???
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there's no requirement that the machine eventually get to the stated percentages. It is enough for the gaming commission that through a simulation of statistically significant data, that the payout will eventually get there. So the manufacturers provide simulations of Millions of game plays and display a statistical summary of all winning combinations and their frequency in order to prove their holdback number. That is the requirement by the gaming commissions.
Think of it this way. There's a 50% chance of getting heads on a non-biased coin every time you flip, so if a payout happens when head comes up, this event has a 50% payback rate. Obviously, you could flip a coin 10 times and only get heads less than or more than 5 times, but if you flip the coins 200 Million times, statistically speaking you are going to be very close to the 50%.
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If you were to look at a 100% payback, not every player would be a winner.
The size of the paytable would make a difference.
If you had a simple slot that took 1 coin and had 3 lines of paytable, the first with 1 coin, the second with 2 coins, and the three with 3 coins.
To get to a 100% payback you need to have 3 losses before you could have a 3 coin winner or you could never have a 3 coin winner but lots of 1 coin winners.
Since it is potentially possible to have a winner each time as 3 random numbers are drawn the manufacturers create a reel table of winning combinations that have more frequent wins at the lower end of the paytable. The higher the %% payback the more frequent the wins (particullary at the lower end).
Its often stated - which does not make it true - that higher denomination slots have better paytables than low denomination slots. The inferrance is that if you are playing a slot that doesn't kick back occasionally it gets pretty boring and expensive, and even those who are prepared to risk a higher $$ per pull will get bored and move on. So a higher paytable is likely to have more rich paytables. The current trend is the multi-line video slots. You bet 10pennys per line and play 10lines. You are then re-inforced as you frequently get a 30 - or 40 coin wins. Even a 80 coin win is still a 20 coin loss in that scenerio.
From a players card perspective if you put $20 in to the machine, you typically play until you have either doubled your winnings or have lost the $20. Due to the little wins you may have actually been credited for as much as $100 in play. You can then trade this for status entry at the buffets....in this respect slot players get treated a lot better than table players.
From a mathematical basis if there are 256 reel stops - and three reels and 1 top award in the reel table the odds are 16,777,216:1 that you will hit the top prize. It doesn't matter if the slot has a 75% paytable or 99.99% the odds of hitting a specific combination remain the same.
I have long been an advocate that the Casinos should state what the % payback is on every machine. If you have a jackpot reset key you can get the machines to display this information. Getting caught doing this will get you kicked out of the casino. There was a high profile case where a person from one casino chain was sent out to a competing property to check out their odds. The person was arrested, but as no play was conducted there was no advantage information gathered and the actual practice is technically not illegal. The casinos however do have the right to ask you to leave the property and a return is considered an act of trespassing. The judge repremanded the casio for having a common key - almost all slots use the same key and any home owner would have said key.
SO - if your after the top prize - any slot will do - the odds are the same - progressive or not ......
If your all about making money play the tables.
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Yes the 2341 key is now to be locked up and no access to the public in Casino's per Gaming in Nevada but it is all over Ebay
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A machine that pays off is a loose slot.
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A loose Machine will not remain on the Casino floor for very long.
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Seneca Niagara Casino has signs posted above certain 25 cent slot machines that says "97% Payback". I stick to mainly those slot machines which seem loose to me (they pay well). They used to have some signs with "98% Payback" on a handful of $1 and $5 machines but those have been gone for several years (Oddly enough, there was usually no one playing them when I was there :Scratch-Head: ). Considering the payback percentages listed for slots in Indian casinos and AC which typically range between 90-92%, I would consider 97-98% very loose for a slot machine.
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Interesting read in this thread. I had most of this stuff as a gut feeling already, but it's good to see some numbers posted. Even if it is just word of mouth.
Someone mentioned you can see the payback rate by using the jackpot reset key? Can I do this on my Universal slot? I have so far only used the jackpot reset key to clear errors.
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Are you guessing on the "life of a machine setting" is 20 years/? ??? Or do you think that it is written in the codes, that it must hit that x% by this amount of time and/or # of pulls..... ???
The life of a machine simply means that every single possible combination e.g. reel stop (regardless of whether it wins or not) has been used at least once.
So for example, if a video slot had 5 reels with 25 symbols in each reel and no bonuses or free games etc., it would be at least 9765625 spins. Of course though, no machine would finish even close to that since the random number generator will eventually pick the same reel positions multiple times while randomly not picking another at all in those 9 million spins, or even a hundred times that amount of spins (just like roulette where you might see on a screen that a "cold" number was last called 177 spins ago yet a "hot" number has come out 9 times in the last 50 spins, despite each number only being 38 to 1 odds on a double-zero table). Adding in free game features, and random bonuses (for example, a win multiplier that might be randomly x2, x3, x5 or x10 in the free games, which might have weighted odds so that x3 is actually the most common, then x2, then x5 and finally x10), that makes it more difficult to guess what the theoretical life of the machine is without a PAR sheet on hand.
Basically, the theoretical life of some machines could be 10 or 20 years, while others could be upwards of 300 years. :)
The RTP of a game is based on the fact that it can theoretically stop at every position and pay every single random bonus and free game possible while landing on every single position, not that it actually will in its lifetime. Some games might literally have billions of combinations. I have seen at least one slot with a maximum non-feature win having nine-figure odds of triggering despite that win paying well below $10000 (the machines in Melbourne Australia actually have the odds displayed in the help screen, but only for the top five and bottom five wins e.g. on one side of the screen it will show the odds for 5 wilds and the four next best things to it, and on the other side it shows small wins like two 9's and the like).
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Someone mentioned you can see the payback rate by using the jackpot reset key? Can I do this on my Universal slot? I have so far only used the jackpot reset key to clear errors.
Depending on the machine, when you turn the reset key a menu should pop up. Usually under "Accounting" or "Game settings" you will find the Pars, percentages. You will also find things like coin-in, coin-out, denominations, etc. Also, you may have to access this settings to complete a RAM clear or install.