Here’s another variation on the question of whether it’s better to play at certain times. In this case, the question revolves around time of year:
Is it true that at the end of the year slots pay off better before the New Year starts?
Michelle C.
We’ve also seen the opposite question – that casino payouts get worse at the end of the year, whether it’s because more players will be playing trying to tier up before the tier year resets, or casinos are approaching the end of the fiscal year and want to wring a few more bucks out of the business.
Neither is the case – payouts aren’t tinkered with on any regular basis for any specific reason. The general idea is that casinos have a level of performance they want the slots to do, and they’ll set the slots up to do that over time.
In the short run, any one slot can do better or worse because events like big jackpots happen. But most casinos have hundreds or even thousands of slots, and one doing better will be offset by one that does worse, and over the course of a calendar year it’ll get pretty close (although never 100 percent precise) to what the casino hopes to accomplish.
A typical slot machine might generate a casino a couple hundred dollars a day in revenue. Tweaking that payout for a few days by a percentage point or two isn’t going to make a massive difference, even if multiplied by the hundreds or thousands of machines on the casino floor.
Meanwhile, it’s not the simple process to update the payouts across the floor that many players think. For most casinos, it’s a manual process, observed by multiple casino employees, sometimes by a representative of the gaming commission, and generally has to be documented.
The cost of doing all that for what’s a few dollars per day per machine isn’t worth it unless the change will be semi-permanent. And so that’s what tends to actually be the case – if a slot isn’t performing the way a casino hopes, they might tweak it. Or they might just remove it. Those sorts of game swaps will often move the needle much more helpfully when taking a game that’s not doing well and replacing it with a popular one.
And that’s what many players have observed in recent years on casino floors – new slots are taking up more of the floors, and being updated more regularly, than in the past.
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