In today’s episode of “aren’t casinos manipulating my payouts,” a player worries he’s won too much money and is now being punished:
I have been playing slots for a couple of years now. At the start of this year I was hitting great scatters, often winning upwards of £100 from free spins. Now every time I hit free spins/Scatters, the win seems to be capped and they’re paying out tiny amounts. The last 17 free spin scatters I’ve landed have all payed £10 or less. This must be rigged. Surely there’s like a black list they put you on once you win a certain amount then they cap your wins
Nathan R.
Nope, there’s no such list. Slots are built with an edge for the casino or business that has them, so all they need to do is let you keep playing and over time they’ll win the money they’re supposed to.
As such, there’s no such thing as winning too much – over the long run it will all average out, and your wins will be smaller than the losses, making room for that profit for the business.
The only time players might get locked out is if they’ve been found to have a consistent edge against the casino – think things like card counters playing Blackjack, where they tend to be able to win in the long run (even though card counters can still lose at times, because there’s still an element of randomness to what cards are dealt at what times).
If a casino believes you’re that type of player, they’ll ban you and not let you play at all. They can’t control what a bonus outcome is on a slot because they don’t have control over the specific outcomes – that’s all governed within the machine on its own. They can set a machine’s payback percentage to be lower, but players can still win in those scenarios thanks to the randomness of the outcomes. And that setting isn’t manipulated based on who’s playing the slot, because it can’t be.
Finally, when a slot’s payouts are determined by completing millions of spins, 17 bonuses is a pretty small sample size. It can feel like a lot, and be frustrating to not get a good bonus for awhile, but it doesn’t mean anything’s changed at all. There’s always a chance the next bonus will be as bad – the same chances, in fact, that the last bonus would be that bad.
So no, you’re not on a list, you’ve just hit a run of bad luck. And at some point, you’ll have another good run, but you should go into playing expecting to lose your money, as in the long term, that’s what it’s designed to do – win money for the business that offers it.
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Trying to find a slot machine game called Yardbirds looking to play but can’t find what casino has the slot machine
We set up a page on our site with the various slot finders out there – hopefully something in there may be helpful!