In a recent video, Brian Christopher shared the example of how the next spin being a winning or losing one is the same odds regardless of what’s happened in the past. A viewer took issue with the video, but went in a different direction, saying:
Most people don’t believe that. You can fast spin, slow spin, wait a few seconds and lots of machines are set to very low payouts these days. I watch lots of YouTubers on line and play live at my local and I see the huge increase in dead spins. Say it’s timing, but the machines are set to more dead spins and lower payouts, and I don’t mean jackpots than ever before.
Holly H.
You hit upon a few things, Holly, so let’s go through them individually.
First, Brian’s example of 50 red and 50 black balls is probably not what a modern slot would have, but was purposefully made to be simpler to understand.
A modern slot might look like, say, 20 percent of spins are winning ones, 50 percent are losing ones, and 30 percent are “false wins,” which means you get some money, but not your full bet back. So the setup might be three different colored balls, for instance.
What Brian is saying is still true – you’ve still got 100 balls in the bag, and each spin you’re drawing from the same percentage of possibilities – just because you drew 20 losing spins doesn’t make the 21st one any more or less likely to be a winning or losing one.
However, there’s a few things you’re mixing that shouldn’t be mixed. For instance, more dead spins doesn’t mean a slot is set to lower payouts. In fact, a slot game that’s set to different payback levels may have the same or nearly the same hit frequency – that is, percentage of winning and losing spins. This is done to better obfuscate what the payback level is set to without us players being the wiser.
At a certain point, when you’re comparing 85% vs. 95%, we’d expect it to be more obvious given enough time, but the difference between 89% and 90% is going to be much harder to discern.
But oftentimes players will confuse dead spins for payback. A slot machine can have lots of dead spins and still have a high payback. The example we love to bring up is Hundred or Nothing – it’s a slot machine with a $1 bet that has only two outcomes – you win $100 or you win nothing.
You can imagine there’s going to be a lot of dead spins on that, since even if it’s set to a 95% payback percentage the average would be more than 100 dead spins for each winning one. And since those $100 payouts won’t be evenly spaced out, some players could do hundreds of losing spins in a row, while some might win $100 twice in quick succession.
That means dead spins alone isn’t the best barometer for payout.
What many players don’t understand is that game makers have been shifting the money away from the base game line hits and into harder to reach spaces like bonuses. While the overall payback hasn’t changed, the percentage of winners, and how much they win, is shifting.
Offering bigger progressives and bigger bonuses means less and less frequent line hits to make up for it. We shared the example of how the Huff N’ Puff series evolved to be more of a bonus-based approach, taking money from the line hits and raising the bets over successive versions in a way that make it very difficult to win without a good bonus.
We looked at the payback data in recent years, and saw the overall trend was pretty flat in terms of slot machine payouts. But players keep saying that paybacks are lower. That perception comes from the changes in games.
Our editor in chief started winning handpays even as the games got tougher. That’s not a coincidence – more slots make it possible for lower bettors to have those moments than ever before, but that’s at the expense of a more volatile ride at the casino, and why you (and all those others you’re referencing) are feeling the pinch when it comes to the average casino trip.
It turns out it’s not casinos getting greedier – it’s the machines getting harder. (And other things like bigger bet requirements and faster machines, but we’ve also covered that elsewhere.)
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if ghe casino is installing more volatile slots, they have more money in their pocket.
Volatility and payback are two different measures. A more volatile and a less volatile game can both be set to pay back the same amount, and in the long run they will – each will just take a different journey volatility wise to get there. We’ll do a longer piece on this soon!
No they are still paying out the same % it just takes a lot more loosing spins to pay out those jackpots ( which we never win)
I love a good bonus but not the ones that shaky shake and make a lot of noise and then give you back your bet or less.
Yeah that’s definitely frustrating, Brian – it gets are excitement up only for the bonus to not deliver!