We’ve shared in the past that casinos will perform cash drops to remove the cash and tickets that have collected in a slot machine. One player wonders if that has an impact on play afterwards:
When they shut off the machines to pull the money out, does it change anything in the machine? Sometimes I wait and go right back to that machine. Just wondered if I should just move on.
Mary W.
The swapping of a full bill collector with an empty one won’t impact the game’s performance at all. It’s simply an administrative task taken to avoid the chances the collector is full, putting a machine out of service at a potentially busy time of day.
Similar to how slot machines are disabled, but not completely turned off, when a cruise ship is in port, the machine is still running, just not in a playable state. The RNG is still running in the background, and when the machine is put back into service, it only has to run a few checks, as opposed to when it starts up from being turned off, in which it has to perform a full boot up and security check cycle before coming back to life.
We recently encountered an issue where the machine was rejecting any bills or tickets, and the slot tech had to restart it. In this case it was a multi-game video poker machine, and the restart process was well into the 20 minute point when we left the bar area where it was recycling. Many single game slots can take 10 minutes or longer to boot up.
By comparison, when they open up the machine to do the drop, the machine will become disabled because the door is open, but it’s still very much on and operational, and when the replacement bill collector is inserted and the machine doors closed, it will do some sanity checks to make sure everything is working as it should, and the the machine will come back to life.
Most importantly in regards to your question, nothing else changes. The set payback is the same, the machine can’t treat an empty bill collector different than a full one in terms of how a machine’s payouts work, and so forth.
So ultimately you don’t have anything to worry about as far as how the machine will operate vs. before they took the money out. Your chances are exactly the same.
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Thanks for the answer. I have a question about the bill acceptors. I’ve noticed that a lot of the machines will not accept the older$100 bills. Is there a reason for that?
Newer bills have security measures added that older ones don’t, and as bill acceptors are updated to look for these newer features, older bills will sometimes get rejected. Older bills also just become harder to detect over time with wear and tear, where humans can do other manual checks that the bill acceptors cannot (think those bill testing pens, etc.)
If you ever watch a casino cashier handling $100 bills for payouts, you’ll sometimes see them setting older bills aside to try to save players the frustration of machines not accepting them.