We get inquiries all the time from players curious, or fearful, about what a casino can do with a slot machine. Here’s one such question from those submitted via the You Asked! capability on our site:
Can the casino change odds and make machines pay less or not at all?
Steve R.
Casinos have limited configurable options within the confines of the game’s design. There are only certain changes they can make, and only at certain times. Let’s go through some of the things they can change, and those they can’t.
Slot Machine Changes Casinos Can Make
Casinos have options around the payback percentage that they can select from a menu. These are a set of choices that the game makers offer. On modern slots the range of options, known as Return to Player, or RTP, is traditionally between 85 and 98 percent, with a half dozen or so options made available.
Casinos can choose whichever one makes the most sense for their floor. As players we can’t see which one is chosen – that decision is hidden away. So you can’t tell if one casino is set to an RTP of 90% and another to 88% by looking at the machine or its pay table information.
Other settings casinos can generally control include, for instance, which denomination or denominations are presented to players to play. They can set caps for progressives, or in some cases set progressives to not increase at all (you see this a lot in major casino markets like Las Vegas, especially from some of the bigger casino owners, as well as on cruise ships).
Slot Machine Changes Casinos Cannot Make
Casinos cannot control which outcome comes up when you hit spin. The fact that a casino can only choose between a range of 85-98 percent means it cannot set up a machine to never pay, whether for an individual player or overall.
Even on the lowest payback setting, if a slot shows a big progressive, there has to be an outcome in that payback to award it – all prizes available on the slot must be available to be won.
Combine that with the randomness of the random number generator and a player sitting at a lower paying slot can win a massive jackpot. The randomness also means a player sitting at a higher paying slot can still get clobbered.
That’s what makes slots fun, and not a boring exercise where you put $100 in and it gives you $90 every time.
Casinos don’t have the power to change a machine’s payback while you’re playing. Generally, it has to be opened up in most cases. If a casino has the ability to make changes remotely, which most don’t, there are often rules as to when that can be done, and that exempts when a machine is in active play.
If a machine’s settings were to be updated remotely, it goes through a reboot and verification cycle (a security check, effectively) before a machine is able to be used again. As players we’d see this happening and know that a change had occurred.
And as such, casinos can’t change the odds of something happening within a chosen payback setting – they trust that the randomness will take care of it over time. Mathematically, it will. And constantly tinkering with the payback doesn’t guarantee a result because in the short term, anything can happen.
Players often fear casinos are constantly adjusting payback settings, but we’ve yet to see the inevitable social media post showing a whole room of slots rebooting with settings updates. It’s one of those things that’s feared far more widely than reality would offer.
Takeaway
With slots as profitable as they are, there’s no reason to need to do anything but set them up and let people play them. Your luck and the timing of when you press that button have far more to do with your run at the casino than most other things.
The casino is not sweating an individual slot player and isn’t actively trying to separate you from your money any more than is needed by the nature of being a casino.
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