Ask the Slot Expert: Calculating your payback on a slot or video poker machine

Have you ever had to set an alarm to ensure you got up early enough to go to the movies?

The Cinemark multiplex at the Suncoast sometimes has showings as early as 9am on weekends in the summer. I had to set my alarm just to ensure I got up early enough to get ready and have time to prepare or pick up a bagel to sneak in to the theater for breakfast. (Showings before 10am are a bit early for popcorn and a Coke ICEE.)

I had gotten up early on a Friday and a Saturday to catch the first showings of two movies, so I continued the streak and got up early on a Sunday to pick up an iced coffee at Dunkin and hit the NSU machines at Red Rock before the casino got crowded with visitors taking one last shot at the casino's bankroll before leaving to go home.

As I wrote last week, I've been having a rough streak at video poker. Session after session ended with my hitting my loss limit before reaching my point goal. As a result, I didn't have any money left from previous sessions to fund this one.

After a quick stop at the cage to take out a marker, I settled in at an NSU machine and promptly lost all of my money. It was so quick, I thought that if my session at Suncoast goes as poorly, I could be home early enough to have a late breakfast. The machine at Suncoast was much kinder to me, fortunately, and I not only exceeded my point goal, I left with a $150 profit. I didn't mind missing breakfast.

My results have improved since then. Every session has ended with a loss, but I've been able to get a lot of play from my money. It cost me $5 for $9000 in action, $150 for $10,000, and $265 for $6000.

I redeemed points for $50 in free play in the second session. I hit two full houses in my first few hands and quints later. I won a total of $160 from the free play. Even though it seems like you rarely win much from free play, sometimes it does pay off. I redeemed points for free play in the third session too, when I was about halfway to my point goal. Although I didn't hit anything big from that free play, the winnings from it and subsequent winning hands was enough to take me to my point goal.

I used to frequently be able to use winnings to buy back markers. Or take a bit of my profit and try some slots or a high-limit video poker machine. Now I rarely have an adventure funded by my profit and I just let the casino deposit my markers.

I wondered what my payback has been on my recent sessions? I've played almost entirely on days when I had a small (0.02%) advantage, but comparing the emptiness of my wallet with the record of deposited markers in my bank statements, I definitely have not had a profit over the past few months.

Let's say you put $100 in a machine and play until it's gone. Was your payback -100%? No. Payback can't be below 0%.

Now, say you put $100 in a machine and play until you have $100 on the credit meter again and cash out. Was your payback 0%? No, you have to take into account the winnings that you played.

The formula for payback is (Action + Profit)/Action.

Let's look at a couple of real-life examples from my play records.

I put $100 in, played $1010, and cashed out $100. (Breaking even is the next best thing to a profit.) Plugging into the formula, (1010 + 0)/1010 = 1 (or 100%). That makes sense. My winnings funded all of my hands.

I put $405 in, played $3060, and didn't have anything left to cash out. (That's been happening much too frequently.) Payback on this session was (3060 - 405)/3060 = 0.867 -- not that close to NSU's long-term payback of 99.7%.

Let's take a closer look at the formula. Payback is the amount won from our bets divided by how much we bet. The denominator is easy. Action is how much we bet. We can usually find that from the number of points we earned.

Now let's look at the numerator. Unless you noted how much you won on each winning bet, calculating the amount we won from our bets requires a bit of math. We know we had enough money to fund the action we gave, so we start with action. If we were lucky, we cashed out some money. We have to add that amount to the numerator because we won it. We put some money into the machine, so we didn't win that amount and we have to subtract it. Dollars Out - Dollars In = Profit. So the numerator is Action + Profit and the formula is (Action + Profit)/Action.

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