As we approach two years online, Flip The Switch has received thousands of questions and comments. One we get a lot is players asking for us to explain what seems to be a pattern. Here’s two examples around a similar question:
How is it one day and it seems all the machines are hitting bonuses and people are winning but you return to the same casino and all the machines are dead nobody hitting anything?
Patrick M.
And
Why is it that I can go play like on Friday night and the slots I like to play are paying me a little so I can play a long time, but then on Saturday night I go back and can’t even get a bonus to keep playing any?
Email Submission
We hear these sorts of questions all the time. Some take it as indication casinos are tinkering with payouts. We’ve shared why this isn’t possible, in many ways, on the site.
It is true casinos can set the payback percentage of a machine. It’s also true a casino has the ability to change that setting on modern slots (older ones would often require a different chip, but that too can be replaced). In practice, casinos generally don’t, because slots make money over the long term, and making constant changes doesn’t really specifically help.
But even if casinos did set slots lower during a weekend, they can’t stop a slot from paying altogether. Slots can’t be set below certain thresholds, and any prize offered is possible on a slot at any payback setting. Often times it’s not the top paying jackpots that are throttled on lower pay settings, but instead it’s trimming back of bonus pays and the frequency of some of the smaller line hits.
What’s happened though is over time, slots have gotten more volatile. And that means less frequent big wins, but bigger big wins, are the order of the day. And so those bigger wins can be farther between than before.
But slot randomness means wins don’t happen in an even frequency. They can clump. And that can bear out within a casino as well – a clump of wins makes it look like a good paying day, when in fact it’s just the positive side of variance, which will inevitably get balanced out by a day where it seems like no one is winning.
Take your own casino sessions. Most of us have experienced days where we can’t seem to win a thing. And then we have days where we seem to not stop winning. This isn’t the casino deciding to purposely pay us wins – this is just luck and timing. Go enough, spin enough, and your winning and losing days will average out over time.
Our brains want to find patterns and “solve” for why this is happening. The math behind this stuff is next level – it’s one of those things where we encourage players not to obsess about it too much.
After all, those winning days create a lot of fun for when they come around, and slots are supposed to be for entertainment. None of us players are so important a casino would purposefully cut back pays on specific days just to harm us. It’s much easier to set it at the level they want, let the machines do their work (quite profitably, we might add) and generate income over time for the casino.
