One of the reasons we think it’s important for players to understand how slots work is the extremes to which assertions go to claim casinos are making changes that hurt players’ ability to win:
You can tell when they change that percentage because no one is winning and there are very few attendants running around.
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You can’t tell, because it isn’t happening. It’s just in your head.
When a casino makes changes to a slot’s return to player/RTP (we’ll share how to know that is happening in a moment), they’re usually just changing it one step up or down from where it was. Such a step constitutes an overall payback change of 1-2 percent. That means, over time, for every $100 wagered, players will see a $1-2 difference in payouts from the previous setting.
In the short term, players will struggle to detect this because slots don’t pay evenly. A slot whose payback was just reduced could award a player a jackpot. A slot whose payback was just increased could offer a $0 or miniscule bonus.
These options exist on any payback level, and the randomness of slots mean any outcome available within a payback setting can come out at any time. If a casino lowers a machine’s payback, it doesn’t mean it instantly sees a benefit from that – that Grand jackpot could go off and throw the balance off for awhile.
What it isn’t changing:
- Bonus Frequency: While there can be minor variations between payback percentages, a slot feels like a slot in part based on the frequency of its bonuses.
- The Pay Table: Payback percentage changes will not change what a line pays, but generally the frequency of various sorts of payouts or the general overall size of a bonus.
- Jackpot Frequency: Jackpots don’t vanish because a casino changes payback percentages, because things like progressives and big wins are still available on any payback setting,.
- Players Would Notice, and Get Used to, Casino Manipulation: Global changes to slot settings would mean a bunch of slots shutting down and rebooting to reflect the changes in settings. Casinos doing so manually would show staff going in and changing settings systematically. These are the sorts of things that would get noticed, captured and shared on social media. The fact we never see these things in an era where everyone has a camera in their pocket is probably the clearest sign nothing’s happening. Slots can’t have settings changed without a game reset, and that happens with visual clues on the machine that something’s happening.
No, slot randomness, how busy a casino is at the time and variance are all elements that can explain why players perceive more winning or losing at a given time. Slots are built to make casinos money without having to tinker with payouts, and the theoretical amount a casino might get by tinkering isn’t enough to make the effort worth it when a slot is already among the most profitable elements of a casino.
