Ask the Slot Expert: Big disappointment on the Big 6 Wheel

Question: The Horseshoe casino in central Indiana has a big 6 wheel. It Will consistently land on in bed or low pay numbers. After over 2oo landing on multiplier, it always resulted in the lowest 20 x. Always.

Answer: I published this letter without editing it because it might be using slang that I'm not familiar with. I don't play the Big 6 Wheel, so I don't know whether "land on in bed...numbers" is Big 6 slang or the typo ("land on bad or low pay numbers") that I think it is.

I learned a new slot slang expression a few months ago. What do you call people who hang around machines with increasing bonuses and hope that the players playing those machines give up before hitting the bonus so they can jump on the machines and get the bonuses themselves?

I first heard about this practice with Big Bank Piggy Bankin'. We called the people who would hang around the players, making them feel uncomfortable and sometimes even blowing smoke in their faces and doing other things to make the players leave, Jackpot Vultures.

I recently received an email from someone complaining about the payouts from slots in a casino. She said that people there were "rooting" the machines.

Root can mean a number of computer-related things. The root user in Linux is a superuser. I really doubted that these people were able to gain superuser status on the slot machines.

I've heard of rooting an Amazon Fire TV device. You root the device to break free of the Amazon ecosystem so you can install unapproved apps on the device. Again, these people were not trying to install some dodgy streaming app on the machines.

After searching around online, I learned that rooting is a new term for being a Jackpot Vulture. A rooter hovers around the slot floor looking for machines that have "ready to hit" jackpots. Rooters become sour rooters when they actively try to intimidate a player playing a machine into leaving.

I found a number of videos of people rooting online, but most of them show people who just could have been walking the slot floor looking for a machine to play. This video showing people sitting or standing near two machines being played and keeping the machines under close surveillance, however, is pretty creepy. Maybe I'm just a little paranoid because I just binge-watched three seasons of From.

There are a number of layouts for a Big 6 Wheel but they all have in common that there are many more spots for the low-paying symbols than for the higher-paying ones. In the layouts on the Wizard of Odds' Big 6 Wheel page, almost half of the spots are for the dollar payout. When you add in the $2 payout, you're well over half. You can count the number of wedges with the top payouts on one hand.

I don't know what you mean by the multiplier. Landing 200 times on a 20 times multiplier sounds pretty good to me. The Wizard has a page on Money Wheel, which is a Big 6 Wheel with a multiplying feature, but the game he describes does not have a 20 times multiplier.

I don't know what you consider to be a "low-pay number," but let's say it's $5 or less. On the Wizard's Las Vegas Rules wheel, only 8 spots out of 54 pay more than that. You should hit a high-pay spot about every 7 spins, on the average, but it wouldn't be unusual to go 14 or 21 spins without hitting one of them.

There are only two spots with the highest-paying symbol. You'll hit one of them every 27 spins, on the average. Again, it would not be unusual to go 54 or 108 spins without hitting one of them.

Because more spots have low-paying numbers, it's more likely that the wheel will land on a low-paying number.

It sounds like double-talk, but in probability, the most likely thing to happen is the most likely thing to happen.

If you would like to see more non-smoking areas on slot floors in Las Vegas, please sign my petition on change.org.

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