Casino Player July 2022

PLAYING THE MACHINES

REEL DEAL

The Payback Conundrum High returns are good, but enjoying the game is important

➤ by Frank Legato

F or more than three decades, Casino Player has been advising players to go for the“loosest slots”—meaning,the best gamble on the slot floor is the game with the highest payback per centage. This magazine, in fact, invented the term “loose slots,” when the early issues of the magazine—which debuted in 1988—began collect ing publicly reported statistics from casinos on what’s known as the slot “hold.” Slot hold is the amount of all wagers “won” by the casino—in other words, lost by players. Our early editors decided that players would be more interested in the converse of those statistics—the portion of wagers won by players. So they took those hold statistics and flip-flopped them, creating the payback charts you will still find at the back of this magazine.Now,play ers could see which casinos returned the most to gamblers in slot wins. Casinos wear the“loose slots”designation as a badge of honor, advertis ing in this magazine and even on billboards their recognition,via actual statistics, for offering high payback to players. This magazine has tried to boil those statistics down to individual slot choices. Sometimes, we flip-flop the numbers back the other way to show the “hold” of a particular game.Too many players sometimes misunderstand the concept of payback percentage as it pertains to an individual machine:“If this game has a 95 percent payback percentage, why did I lose? Shouldn’t I be winning on 9.5 out of every 10 spins?” Well, no.That 95 percent statistic is a theoretical number applied to all the spins on a given machine. It is created by an engineer manip ulating the number of winning symbols and losing symbols in the pro gram. Each symbol is given a number in the game program.Low-paying symbols and blanks get a lot of duplication—more numbers that corre spond to that result.The highest-paying symbols get very few numbers. That math determines the theoretical payback percentage,which is tested by simulating literally millions of spins. In reality, the number represents the percentage of all wagers,by all players,on a given game. That’s why it can be confusing to some players. It’s easier for players to understand the converse,casino hold, in the same terms that table-game players use:house advantage,or house edge. A 95 percent payback—also known as return to player,or RTP—means that game has a 5 percent house edge. For years, we’ve directed players to the traditional reel-spinning slot games if they wanted to play a game with a low house edge.We’ve told you to seek out high-denomination mechanical reel-spinners for the best payback percentages. A traditional reel-spinner in a denomina

tion at or higher than dollars will typically have a house edge below 5 percent. If you want to go for the $2 or $5 denomination, you’re down to an edge of 2 percent or less in many cases—that’s on par with the top table games. This advice remains valid today, but today’s slot f loor is totally different than it was when the first issue of Casino Player came out in 1988.What has turned player choice on its ear has been the penny denomination. After slots stopped taking physical coins in the early 2000s, the multi-line video slot became the prominent game style. Because of the low denomination, a lot more volatility could be built into the programs—in other words, a lot more huge credit awards.

1 8 J U L Y 2 0 2 2 • w w w . c a s i n o c e n t e r . c o m