Is all information about casinos useful information? That’s the notion behind today’s question (or really, comment) you have for me:
Please let us know which Casino you’re at when you don’t win big so we can avoid those!
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Well, I could, but it’s not useful information really, because the same casinos where I’ve won some of my biggest jackpots are also the same casinos where I’ve had some of my worst runs. And go figure, it’s also the same casinos I visit most often.
This is because a single session or visit isn’t really helpful to see what sort of payback you can expect from a casino in the long term. Casinos reach their expected payback on a single slot machine over millions of spins. This long term goal leaves a lot of room for short term deviation.
That’s a good thing for players, because it’d get quite boring to be paid $90 for every $100 wagered, for instance. Instead, I can win $70,000 on a single bonus or lose nearly $10,000 in a half hour video, and that casino will still reach its payback percentage average over the long term.
The ups and downs are what make it exciting, but it also makes being able to tell what that payback is more difficult.
Thankfully, there’s some ways to get helpful information. The most helpful is that in many markets, casinos are required to report their payback information (we’ve shared links to where you can find that information previously on Flip The Switch). If you live in one of those markets, you can compare the various casinos and learn from that information.
If you don’t live in those markets, but your local casino is owned or managed by one of the big casino owners, you can probably still learn from that publicly reported data. A lot of the bigger companies set rules that are corporate wide – meaning paybacks will be similar at all their casinos. So you can look at the ones with public data and figure it will be similar for the one by you.
Finally, sometimes casinos will list the payouts of a particular bank of slots as a way to promote their payback percentages. In those cases, make sure it says a certain percentage, and not “up to” a certain percentage – up to means only one machine in a bank is guaranteed to be at that level, and you won’t know which.
Either way, I hope you enjoy watching the ups and downs of my casino visits, and support the casinos that allow me to film and share my play, as well as those who allow me to host events at their properties, because it wouldn’t be possible without their permission and support.
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