The casino always screws you over. But at least it’s out in the open: The house has an edge in every game, and if you gamble enough, you’ll lose everything. Fair enough; we all signed that unwritten contract upon entering.
So if you’re playing a slot machine in a typical casino and the RTP (return to player) is in the standard 90% range, you might think, “That’s not so bad. If I bring $100, I’ll usually leave with $90.” That’s not how it works. It’s 90% per spin on average, so that $100 fairly quickly gets whittled down to $0, depending on how much you’re betting per spin. Although even if you’re betting 10 cents per spin, it will eventually become zero if you don’t get off.
But that’s not the point of this post, as even that should be mostly common knowledge. This is instead focusing on one of the less understood ways a casino porks the customer base at large, almost always without anyone having a clue.
As I explored in the video, sometimes advantage play machines need to be turned off or reset for whatever reason. That’s common enough and happens frequently with all types of slot machines in a casino. No problem, right? Turn them back on and they’re ready to go.
That’s all well and good with a non-advantage machine, where prior spins have no impact on the next spin. But what about machines that build from spin to spin? What happens to all of that money that was sunk into all of the different bets to increase something from the reset of five, for example, to six or seven or eight or 19 or whatever?
For instance, take a look at this Magic Treasures example that I focused on in the video:
You can see that this shows the green pot at five, which is what the machine resets to when it’s triggered. There are four different denoms and five bets within each denom, so each Magic Treasures machine has 20 different bets on it, all at various stages of the build. To get from five to even six on a bet, someone spent money to do that.
The highest it could get to, which you’ll almost never see, is 48:
As you check each bet on all of the machines, you’ll see plenty of fives, sure. You’ll also see some eights, some nines, some 10s, and so on. I usually will play when I see 14 or higher, but that’s not important for the point I’ll eventually make.
When the casino needs to shut these machines off, all of the “work” fellow gamblers have done is lost. Every bet on every denom will go back to five, as I demonstrated in the video. All right, but who cares?
You should!
By doing this, the casino is stealing money. The reset of five is the low point of the build. Can you ever win on this number? Sure. You could have a lucky line hit or trigger a different bonus in one spin and do quite well.
But remember when I said the average spin on a non-advantage machine returns roughly 90% to the player? With a five on Magic Treasures, it would be considerably less. It wouldn’t be 5% or something abysmal like that in this particular example, but it would be much less than 90%.
Now, you multiply whatever money was lost on 20 different bets across multiple machines in many cases? You’re talking potentially thousands of dollars vanishing into thin air. Not so innocuous, is it?
This happened to be one game on one cruise line, but this isn’t exclusive to Magic Treasures or Norwegian Cruise Line. I’ve seen it countless times in brick-and-mortar casinos on myriad games.
Is it possible that the lost money for the customer base is tabulated and paid back in other ways? I suppose anything is possible, but color me skeptical. I brought this up once to a slot attendant with whom I was friendly, not with any expectation that she would alert anyone or check on this. She looked at me like I had three heads, having no idea why this bothered me. It was nothing malicious on her partโshe genuinely had no idea what I was talking about.
Trust me. Someone up top knows what’s going on. And from my vantage point, it stinks.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.