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Gaming Guru
Ask The Slot Expert29 May 2003
Dear Hector, I'm sorry to hear that you haven't been able to match any squares on Yukon Gold. The tiles are placed at random in the bonus round and you've just been unlucky in picking them. I'm sure that if you continue to play this machine you'll have better luck in the future.
Best of luck in and out of the casinos,
As I said in the article, whether or not a casino makes money on positive expectation video poker depends upon whether or not the casino has enough machines to have a mix of knowledgeable and hunch players. If a casino has too few machines, knowledgeable players will monopolize them and the casino will lose money on them. If a casino has enough machines, they'll win enough from the hunch players to more than offset the amount the knowledgeable players win. Let's say a casino does have enough positive expectation machines to make a profit from them. Why might they remove some of them? It's entirely possible that the casino has made a decision to lower the paybacks on its slot floor. It can't lower its overall payback by increasing the number of high-paying paytables because even hunch players will tend to win more on high-paying paytables. The casino's only choices are to downgrade some of its okay machines to mediocre or some of its positive-expectation machines to negative expectation. Most casinos seem to be downgrading the positive-expectation machines. This action starts the self-fulfilling prophecy I wrote about. The remaining positive machines are monopolized by the knowledgeable players and they no longer show a profit. The next step is to remove all of them, unless the casino decides to keep a few just to be able to say they have them. In any case, good machines come and go in casinos. Casinos that long had high-paying machines downgrade their inventories, and other casinos that had nothing playable put in high-paying machines. One of the lessons I learned from Bob Dancer, Jean Scott, and other positive-expectation players, is that you have to be flexible if you want to play only positive-expectation machines.
Best of luck in and out of the casinos,
Dear John, Twenty-five cents per dollar is too high. My understanding is that the contribution to the jackpot is about 8% of each dollar played. That would be about 25 cents for each three dollars played, not for each dollar.
Best of luck in and out of the casinos, Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert, at slotexpert@comcast.net. This article is provided by the Frank Scoblete Network. Melissa A. Kaplan is the network's managing editor. If you would like to use this article on your website, please contact Casino City Press, the exclusive web syndication outlet for the Frank Scoblete Network. To contact Frank, please e-mail him at fscobe@optonline.net. Recent Articles
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