The Casino Answer Man

I was wondering if it is tougher (in odds/probability terms) to play and hit slots on a big riverboat, such as Grand Victoria, than on a smaller boat such as Hollywood's City of Lights II, even though the ads say that the bigger one has a better overall payout percentage.

I mention this only because after reading your Slot Machine Answer Book (which is very entertaining, by the way), I remember that these percentages are governed by pooling all money played, so one would think that a greater revenue pool would be harder to hit as opposed to a smaller one. In Hollywood's case, is each boat governed by its own separate slots monitor/computer, or is there one that controls both boats on land?

Slot machine payouts are "pooled" only in gathering information for casino statistics. Each slot machine is governed by its own computer, and each slot machine has its own payback percentage. We're just not privy to that information.

We do know that in Illinois, for example, no machine may pay less than 80 percent nor more than 100 percent in the long run. That leaves a lot of room for variation. A casino that pays back 95 percent on dollar machines can have an 85 percent machine here, a 98 percent machine there and a 92 percenter across the way.

Ideally, we'd like to see the payback percentages for individual machines so we could play the 98 percenters and avoid the 85 percenters. That's something we'll never see, and there's no way to tell a slot machine's payback percentage by looking at it from the outside. So the best we can do is look at a casino's average payback percentages, broken down by denomination of coin used, and say that on the average, we're more likely to win where the returns are higher.

There is no one computer that controls paybacks in the whole casino. There is a central computer that monitors all the slot machines, but it has nothing to do with what you see on the reels or the machines' payback percentages. It's merely an accounting device, tracking the outcomes.