Finding a Video Poker Bug Made These Guys Rich—Then Vegas Made Them Pay

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13. Not quite

http://casinogambling.about.com/od/slots/a/percentage.htm

Most slot players have seen the advertisements or billboards proclaiming that the XYZ casino has the loosest slots in town. These ads may even say that the machines have a 98 percent payback percentage. In the casino you may see a sign reading that machines in a certain carousel have a guaranteed return of 99 percent. While all these claims may be truthful, they can be deceptive to the average player.

Payback is the overall percentage that a machine will return to the player in the long run. These figures are programmed into the machines computer chip and are set by the manufacturer to the specifications that the casino wishes to use for that machine. This may be anywhere from 75 to 99 percent. Some states regulate the minimum payback that a machine can return.

Many players believe they will win more on a machine that pays out 99 percent compared to a machine that pays out 94 percent but this is not necessarily true. The payback percentage is the profit that the casinos can expect to earn over the lifetime of the machine. The average player will never play long enough to see the overall return. Just because a machine has a payback of 99 percent that does not mean you will win back $98 for every $100 you play through the machine.

You might play $100 through a slot machine with a 94 percent payback and win $5,000 and then sit down and play $100 through a machine with a 99 percent return and lose it all in a few hours. There is no way of gauging the overall return if you only play a machine for a few hours or even a few days a year. The casinos can do have a way of checking the long term payback because they have access to the coin meters in the machines.

All of the slot machines have meters that record every coin put in and every coin paid out. In the new coinless with machines with bill receptors they would count the “credits” played through the machine. It all works out the same. If you receive a hand paid jackpot these meter reading are recorded on the pay voucher that the attendant takes to the cage when they get your money. Most casinos now have automated computerized systems that track all of this information from the machines into a central database. They (the casino) can look in any machine and determine the payback for any given period of time but you as the player will never be privy to this information.