One of the continual myths many players seem to have trouble shaking is that casinos ratcheted down payouts in the aftermath of the pandemic shutdowns that took place in 2020. We shared previously examples of how the data doesn’t bear that out. Here’s another take on the topic:
Do you see a transition of lower or zero handpays in casinos since Covid? Do you ever notice more employees coming out of the pay out center on nights you hear ANOTHER JACKPOT WINNER…but when there are not a lot of employees present PA announcements are near zero?
Dianna W.
No, we haven’t seen a downward shift in handpays in the past few years. In fact, with rising bets, and slots being structured higher in volatility, we’ve noticed more.
To take the higher bet bias out of the equation, we opted not to have Brian Christopher answer this one (he gets a lot of jackpots at his bet level), and instead are using our editor-in-chief as an example.
- He got his first jackpot in 2018 – he put $50 in with another Rudie the first Rudies Weekend, and got a $2,000 handpay jackpot on a $3 bet.
- In 2021, his second jackpot was winning a Major on a Gold Stacks 88 machine, on a $1.76 bet. (It was a lucky day – he got a $1,000 royal flush the same evening!)
- Later that year, two more jackpots were won online after iGaming rolled out where he lived. One was on a $2.25 bet, and the other was on a $5 bet.
- In 2022, he got a Royal Flush on a $2 bet for $1,600 online, and later that year secured his biggest win to date, a $12,500 Grand Jackpot on Eureka Reel Blast on a $1 bet!
- In 2023, he got another Grand, albeit not the top jackpot for that slot, still good for more than $2,000 on a $2 bet on Duo Fu Duo Cai Grand Ingotcha.
- And finally, in April of 2025 (almost two years after his previous jackpot), he got his most recent handpay, another progressive of nearly $2,400, this time a major, on Coin Combo on just an 88 cent bet.
That’s eight handpay jackpots in eight years, on bets ranging from 88 cents and $1 on the low end to $5 on the high end. Six of the eight were at or under $2.25 a spin. But he’s been gambling for almost 25 years, and all of his jackpots were in the last eight, with seven of them since the pandemic closures.
What gives? Slots have over time become more volatile, and added more aggressive jackpot possibilities on lower bets. Games like Lightning Link made Grand jackpots accessible to the lowest bettors, meaning a 50 cent bet yield an astounding win of $10,000 or more.
The flip side is they’re harder to win. And so players can find it harder to go home a winner when those wins don’t come out, and lower bettors still struggle to get a jackpot, but the potential is there in ways they weren’t at those bets 10 years ago.
Let’s go back to Brian for a second – the number of grand jackpots on link style hold and spin games are still able to be counted on two hands, despite him playing slots on camera for nearly a decade. He finally got his first true Link Grand, on Buffalo Link, but still hasn’t won it on Dragon Link, which he’s played a ton. So it shows how difficult it can be.
But back to your question about staff. It may be a scenario that’s the reverse of what you’re describing causing what you’re seeing. At times when there’s less jackpots, the staff won’t be shuttling back and forth to the back to grab the paperwork and the cash, so they’re probably off working somewhere else.
Slot attendants oftentimes are dealing with the functioning of slots as much as jackpot payouts, so they are often using the time to walk the floor and take care of other issues, like slots being out of paper or having an issue that needs attention.
Casinos can’t suppress jackpots based on staffing or predict when/how many jackpots will occur in a team shift – the randomness of slots, along with the individual design of each slot, drive the potential of those coming out.
But they have been more aggressive in putting in these more volatile slots (in part because they tend to do more business), so that’s more likely the driver for what you’re feeling and seeing, Dianna, and hopefully that helps explain why it may feel different today than it would have in an era where slots worked differently.
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