It’s so annoying, and they are banking on people to do just that: think it’s too much of a hassle to turn them in. Then they’ll have slot attendants go through the casino and collect these discarded tickets, whether they’re left in a machine or left elsewhere.
You can donate your ticket as you cash out at a kiosk, and the cynical side of me figures that’s a nice yearly tax write-off for the casino. But if there’s a charity that speaks to you (sometimes you’ll have options), by all means.
These small tickets can be useful if you want to check for plays on games such as Phoenix Link or Buffalo Link (which you can read about on those linked pages).
If I’m not saving a small ticket for that, it’s going to come down to a few factors. If it’s greater than 50¢, I’m too much of a grinder to just discard that. I’m going to the cage. I don’t care if I’m wasting time and could make more money by checking machines in the time it takes.
If I’m in Las Vegas for a week, let’s say, and I have a 35¢ ticket from Aria and I go there multiple times per day, I am going to stick the ticket in the back of my wallet and use it later. It’s a pain to be sure, as sometimes I’ll have 10-plus tickets piling up in there, but it’s the principle.
If we’re talking about 12¢ or something, yeah, I’ll probably just chuck it. I’ve seen some folks give them to people actively on machines. That’s not a bad idea, either. I’d feel a little weird giving someone 12¢, but hey, it’s better than the alternative.
You can probably tell that I’ve given this a lot of thought over the years haha. It grinds my gears that they rarely just dispense coins from the kiosk.
Ben Rosenthal
