Many casinos now operate under shared ownership nowadays, vs. an earlier time when there was a lot more diversity in ownership. This can mean some consolidation in things like management and business decisions. A player was curious:
Do different casinos within the same resorts group, such as MGM or Caesars, have a different return to player (RTP) for the same games? For example: Does Huff ‘n Even More Puff at Luxor have the same RTP as the Huff ‘n Even More Puff at Bellagio? If I’m loyal to one resort group, is it more advantageous to play at their cheaper properties and earn the same tier points?
Henry
We would expect in an example like what you’ve outlined that the RTPs would be set up the same, particularly common ownership in the same market like Las Vegas. And, through some conversations and other notes out there, we’d also anticipate similar settings throughout the country.
Two data points: During an industry convention a couple of years ago, we spoke with someone at a company with multiple casinos across markets, who noted that they maintain RTP across properties, so the feel is familiar when you step into a different property, as opposed to encountering different conditions in each property a player visits.
Another example was cited in a pretty famous book about how Harrah’s (now part of Caesars) operated. An executive was in an elevator listening to a couple complain about how the payback at the property they were at was worse than the one that Harrah’s owned in a different market. But that executive knew the payback at that casino was actually higher at the time.
It led to a national approach to evaluating payback (and a lowering of payback) that Caesars, rightly or wrongly, still carries a reputation around by some to this day. (It’s also led to a spirited debate over whether players can tell the difference around machines set to higher vs. lower paybacks, with research being presented on both sides of that fence ever since.)
Specific to your example of MGM, their tier credit earnings structure is actually based on theoretical loss, which is why since the switch from Mlife to MGM Rewards you no longer have a clear answer on how much in wagers gets you X tier credits. Games with lower RTPs earn tier credits faster, because you’re expected to lose money faster on those machines over time.
Conversely, those who tend to play higher limit machines which have a more generous RTP will earn less tier credits per dollar wagered, because the percentages returned over time is higher. (They will likely make up for it by wagering more dollars in total with those bigger bets.)
So if they did happen to set one higher or lower, your tier credit earnings pace would differ. By comparison, Caesars has a mostly universal dollars per point policy, with exceptions on certain machines, but we would there too anticipate consistency across the machines in a market.
Now, there may be scenarios where they do have differences. One would be regulatory minimum payback percentages. Let’s say casinos in Vegas have some machines set to an 85% RTP. But they also have a casino in Maryland, where the minimum is 87%. In those cases, they’d have to offer a different option to meet those minimums.
The other is that different jurisdictions tax gambling at different rates. We’ve seen examples in the online space where RTPs may differ in jurisdictions with high tax rates vs. lower ones because the casinos get to keep a different amount based on the tax rate. A higher tax rate may encourage a casino to pay players a bit less to make up for that higher tax requirement. And so we’d presume that may be factored in to the financial calculation.
But overall, we wouldn’t expect a drastic difference, and the data points we’ve heard about RTP consistency leads us to think the differences will be more likely seen or felt in independent casinos trying to compete with the bigger corporations.
For many years El Cortez advertised on their website how much looser their paybacks were than the strip, and that was likely by design to give players a bit of confidence to drift off the more obvious paths. If you’re gambling within a bigger corporate umbrella to take advantage of multi-market perks and so forth, we wouldn’t expect you have to seek out one casino over another from a payback perspective.
But that said, and turning back to your question, table games do show some differences in things like limits and rules available within the same ownership structure, and you might find denomination choices to differ based on what they think a player’s average budget will be, so from a betting vs. bankroll perspective, so a bit of shopping for a casino that fits you is never a bad thing.
Other things like host availability and such will be impacted by this too, so it’s those sorts of things that may be impacted more. And so sometimes it makes sense to select a casino that better matches your bankroll, especially if you’re in that camp that may qualify for a host at Luxor, but not at Bellagio.
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