We get this question a lot. This one tackles it in the opposite direction of what we usually see – that the commercial casinos are more loosey goosey than the tribal gaming facilities:
Where I live, the only casinos are native owned. They are obligated to pay out a certain percentage of what goes in. I don’t suppose it is like that in Nevada or on a ship. Am I right or do you know?
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Regulations in Nevada do set a floor. The floor is not one of those things that’s ever really reached, though, because the games being offered don’t have paybacks that low, as a general rule.
Nevada’s floor is 75 percent. New Jersey’s is 83 percent. Maryland’s is 87 percent. Cruise ships agree to follow regulations in states like Nevada and New Jersey, so the floor will be somewhere in there.
The game makers of machines like slots make games that generally start with a floor of 85 percent, easily clearing the Nevada and New Jersey rules, and meaning Maryland they’ll start a step above that, if not more.
So there’s definitely obligations in many markets. There’s not a floor set in all markets, but the games themselves set the floor at that point, and more or less normalizes things across the country.
In a previous article we talked about how paybacks are set, and there’s three major levels really: The regulations level, the game maker level and the casino level. Each help support a certain level. And really, games that have too low a payback wouldn’t be considered playable by most players because it wouldn’t provide enough satisfaction to keep going.
So we can confirm there are indeed floors in many markets by regulatory design, and in others there’s other aspects that step in to help ensure a certain level of return over time. Of course, that return is averaged out over many, many spins, so that doesn’t mean things can go up or down in a single session.
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I do believe i was told when I worked at a casino that A machine with a progressive must be paid out , if they get rid of that machine they put the money in another progressive machine,Casino (Tribe ) do not just change pay outs it takes a lot to make a change, starting with the compact
Spot on Lezlie – progressives get moved if a machine is decommissioned. The rules for making a change to payouts varies by jurisdiction, but it’s not as simple as a few clicks in virtually every case.
Why does it seem like casinos put in new machine, and since Covid winning payouts seem low?
Hey Janine! It’s a bit of a complex question, but we approached it in this post here. Effectively new games are harder to win on, and so even if they’re set to pay back the same, there will be less winners (winning more) and more losers (overall) because of how they’re designed.