Truth or Fiction?

[Countgr8Participant]

Someone that I trust from an information standpoint told me that there are casinos that have 50% RTP below the legal limit and they just pay the fines. Juristiction being New York State specifically. Has anyone else heard about this?

[Ben RosenthalKeymaster]

Oof! I’d think a figure that extreme would be hard to pull off for long. I can’t say I’ve heard of such a thing, but color me curious to hear other replies.

[NickelsParticipant]

I would very strongly doubt that assertion.

Most manufacturers have minimums that their games must return that are usually even higher than a given state’s RTP minimum. If you’ve ever had access to PAR sheets, it’s somewhat common that a given game will not even have an option for something below 87%. Most game cabinets are also leased instead of owned.

In order for this to be going on, these would need to basically be bootlegged or tampered with devices. Which again, isn’t impossible I suppose, but it would be a lot of work to go through for something that would only hurt the business by running would-be repeat customers off.

[Countgr8Participant]

No option for below an 87% minimum seems odd as the minimum payout in the state of Nevada as allowed by law is 75%.

[Countgr8Participant]

https://www.newsnet5.com/news/unlv-study-nevada-slot-machines-hold-percentage-increase/

[Ben RosenthalKeymaster]

“Despite this, there is a growing sentiment among gamblers that slot machines have tightened up, offering fewer returns than before.”

I’d probably attribute that mostly to the high number of advantage players already in Las Vegas. Regular folks are losing faster than they’re probably used to.

[NickelsParticipant]

“No option for below an 87% minimum seems odd as the minimum payout in the state of Nevada as allowed by law is 75%.”

You’re falsely equating the state minimum to the manufacturer’s minimum…when the two things are designed with very different things in mind.

The state’s goal was to set some number for consumer protection, to make sure consumers aren’t getting blindly robbed by the gaming establishment…they don’t want people getting scammed by virtual three card monte.

The manufacturer is in competition with other manufacturers in the marketplace, they need consumers to want to play their games, so that casinos will pay them to carry their games. IGT, Aristocrat, Konami, etc. do not want to put games out there that get the reputation of “wallet vampire” and don’t get any play…if their games don’t get enough coin-in, then their customers, the casinos, get soured on them and are less likely to buy more of their product in the future.

You offer a 75% return game…it might get an unwitting tourist to play occasionally, but in any market that relies on repeat business the regulars will learn to avoid that game. They might not know the numbers, but they know that their money doesn’t last as long as it does on other games, and that isn’t fun for them.

The message board wasn’t cooperating with this link earlier, so I’ll just tell you, you can find slot payback statistics online with a google search, even the Las Vegas Strip, the tightest market in Nevada….has penny slots averaging returns of over 88% and if you go up north to Reno, again these are the penny slots…return >92%.

…and the very article you linked, quoted 86% as about the lowest return on machines….

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Nickels.

[Ben RosenthalKeymaster]

I was looking for something definitive for RTP at each casino, but it seems it really varies by state as far as reporting. Perhaps also with Native versus non-Native casinos. I was finding a lot about online casinos, but I didn’t find any one-stop shop kind of place where I could search for a brick-and-mortar casino and find the current RTP.

[NickelsParticipant]

Yes, reporting varies by state.

iirc, you can actually find it by casino for Missouri. For the purposes of the point that the jurisdictional minimum being separate from the manufacturer minimum I only cared about the average.

[FrankBParticipant]

In the past, the requirements for doing business in Nevada for a device supplier

was that they did not have machines in operation in other locations that did not

conform with NV regulations. I don’t know if that still applies.

[Author]

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