Regular casino players over time become familiar with a win/loss record provided by casinos. Many casinos will list on these win/loss records a coin-in and coin-out number.
These terms are confusing to many players because the terms coin-in and coin-out sound like how much you put in and took out of a machine. Back in the days of the actual coin slot machines, this was probably more literal – you put in three quarters, spun, the machine spits out 10 quarters for your win and so on.
Coin-in and coin-out is the entirety of the number of wagers you made, and the amount you won out of those wagers. If your coin-in is $10,000 and your coin-out is $9,000, it means that in total you made $10,000 worth of bets, and you won $9,000 of those bets.
Nowadays, in the world of tickets and credits, you didn’t put $10,000 into the machine and take $9,000 home with you – that’s the part where a lot of players get confused. You might start and put $100 into the machine, win some small (or even big!) wins, keep playing, and that $100 could have yielded hundreds of dollars worth of bets.
Each of those bets counts towards the coin-in, and each of those wins counts towards, the coin-out, even if you kept playing with that money. As such, it’s a record of all the wagers you’ve made while your players card was in the machines.
And that’s the other important wrinkle – this is all the play tracked on your players card. So it’s not complete if a machine failed to read your card and you played anyway, or if you didn’t put your machine in a card that day, and so on. As such, it’s generally not a complete record of your gambling, and isn’t going to be 100 percent accurate. (This is doubly the case for table games players; the frequency of mistakes on that human-entered data is much higher.)
So when evaluating coin-in and coin-out, you can breathe easier knowing you didn’t put all that cash in – it’s just an accounting exercise of your cumulative wagers and wins.
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