It’s been a long time since I set a new high point for my biggest casino win of all time. I achieved my latest win during a recent visit to MGM Grand Detroit. Here’s the video, for those who missed it:
Some players are dubious, though, about this win occurring. Here’s a comment from the video:
It’s great when you plan the visit, when they reserve and set the machine so you can win and play 6 figures. Then the casino banks that you are popular enough and the win that you stream to your fans will bring them to their casino. It’s not rocket science folks.
Salvatore C.
What’s always funny to me is how much people have to contort things to try to disprove something. Here’s what Salvatore gets wrong here, and why Authentic Play is important to me.
What is Authentic Play?
First off, you may wonder what Authentic Play is – that means what you see is the real deal. It’s my money, on an actual casino floor, publicly accessible. When I play in casinos, you can come up to me and see me. You can watch me put my money in, you can watch me get paid out (or not, as more times than not is the case).
I also do this with my online casino play, even though I don’t have to physically be on the casino floor to play online slots in states like Michigan. You can see exactly what’s happening, in person, wherever I’m filming at the time.
I lose hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, as this Wall Street Journal article previously shared. I choose how much to put on the line in each video and each machine. I also choose which machines I play, oftentimes right before I film or go live.
Casinos Didn’t Reserve My Machine
I was live with my Rudies fan club when I hit this amazing jackpot. There were plenty of people in the casino at the time I did this, including a crowd excited to see me, and no machines were locked or touched before I went up to them, partly because I wasn’t even sure what I was going to play before I started the live.
After winning that jackpot, I decided to play other machines in the bank. Once I got a jackpot on the second one, some of us joked it would be fun to try to lock the others up. A player was on one of them for a while so I almost wasn’t even able to try. If the casinos were somehow setting me up for a massive win, why would they be letting players play at the bank?
Casinos Can’t Make a Machine Jackpot
Players give casinos too much credit. They don’t have the power to decide when and who gets a jackpot. They can set a machine’s payback percentage but they can’t make something happen due to how the random number generator in a machine works – the outcome is only decided when I or any other player makes that wager.
Even if they set a slot machine to have over 100 percent payback (a setting that isn’t generally found on slots), there’s still no guarantee I’d walk away a winner, because these paybacks are determined in the long run. Short term outcomes can both overperform and underperform.
Casinos Don’t Pay Influencers with Jackpots
Casinos do use influencers like myself as a marketing tool, just as they do magicians, musicians, slot tournaments and other investments with a goal of driving people to the casino. They may pay an appearance fee or cover other costs (like airfare) to make that appearance possible.
They’re not going to pay casino influencers with jackpots that may or may not happen. Casinos will generally make money off the influencers over time anyway, because the slots have a house advantage, and casino influencers aren’t immune to this. So no, I didn’t get paid by the casino through the jackpot, although it certainly was a nice surprise!
Takeaway
We get the instinct to be skeptical, but slots on a physical casino floor in the US are highly regulated. Many scenarios players think are happening simply aren’t possible because of these regulations. I got lucky – just like many of the other winners posted on casino websites along the way.
That’s why Authentic Play is so important to me – you’ve seen the journey, through the wins and losses, to know this is an unusual moment, but by no means am I a winner across the lifetime of my channel.
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