Ask the Slot Expert: Dusting off some lost slot-playing skills

I was playing a 25-cent Silver Strike machine at Red Rock trying to complete my collection of Red Rock Silver Strike tokens. This machine is an old reel-spinning machine that doesn't maintain a cash credit meter. It can only handle multiples of 25 cents. When you insert a ticket into its bill acceptor, the credit meter increases by the number of quarters in the amount on the ticket and the machine prints a ticket for the remainder.

As I was playing, I was trying to keep track of how much cash I had on the machine. Dividing by four isn't as difficult as doing calculus, but it was still taking me a couple of seconds to do the math in my head.

I used to be pretty good at doing the division because I used to do it all the time. Almost every machine I play today is supposedly a "penny machine," despite the fact that the minimum bet might be 40 cents or more, so the credit meter and the cash meter are nearly identical (except for the dollar sign and decimal point). When a machine doesn't automatically display cash, I always change the meter to the cash meter display.

Quickly dividing by four is a skill I've lost over the years with the advent of TITO (ticket-in/ticket-out). I wondered whether there were other slot-playing skills that are now outdated, like learning to drive a horse in harness is an outdated skill today.

Just as spies never sit with their backs to the door and always know where all the exits are, I always used to ensure that I knew where the nearest coin buckets were. If there weren't any nearby, I found a couple to have before I started playing. Bucket-awareness isn't really a skill, granted, but I wanted to be prepared in case of a big win.

Years (and years and years) ago I was playing a slant-top machine near the entrance to the Treasure Island casino from the parking garage. TI squeezed in a few extra machines by placing some in the corridor right before the casino entrance.

The slot floorpeople must have been given instructions to preserve an Architectural Digest-like look in the area. Every time I left a bucket on one of the slant-tops in the corridor, a floorperson would put it back in the casino proper.

This time I hit a nice payout and was ready to cash out. Darn it! I forgot to bring a bucket. I had too many coins on the meter to carry or put in my pockets. I had no choice but to dash 15 feet into the casino to grab one of the buckets sitting between machines in a carousel.

I zipped in and grabbed the bucket as fast as I could. When I turned around, I saw someone about to sit down at my machine and steal my credits. I'm glad I don't have to carry around a bucket anymore.

I'm very good at procrastinating and I haven't been meeting my monthly goals for Emerald tier requalification at Suncoast. Now I have to scramble to requalify. Ideally, I would play NSU. Because Boyd changed the tier-credit formula for video poker to be based on the long-term payback of the paytable a few years ago, it takes a lot of play to earn a tier credit on vp. For example, I earned 160 tier credits playing 2500 points ($5000) on NSU a few days ago.

A quirk of this system is that if you want to minimize your risk to earn a certain number of tier credits playing video poker, playing a low-paying paytable might be the way to go. Your expected loss will be about the same as if you played a higher-paying paytable, but you'll have to play less action (i.e., risk less money) and earn the tier credits in less time.

The tier-credit formula for slots is as simple as could be: $5 = 1 tier credit. If I had played that $5000 through a slot instead of NSU, not only would I have earned 1000 tier credits, I also would have earned 5000 points.

Some players have speculated that they might be able to use the slot formula to their advantage by playing high-denomination slots to earn their tier credits. Even though the long-term payback on a slot game might be a few -- or many -- percentage points lower than on a video poker game, the fact that it takes so much less action to earn a tier credit on the slot game may more than make up for the shortfall in long-term payback. Moreover, we're pretty far from the long term with the number of plays we're talking about here, so long-term payback doesn't have a big effect.

As I have less and less time to requalify, I've been playing more and more slots to get the tier credits I need. Last Sunday I had planned to play my favorite Quick Hit Blitz machine. It's in a group of four machines, two sets of two machines back-to-back. There were two people playing on my non-preferred side. That's good, I thought. More people feeding the progressives, even though they are competition for hitting the progressives.

Two people were also playing on my preferred side and, of course, someone was playing my machine. I walked around the casino a few times to see if anyone would leave. No one did, so it was time for plan B.

My Quick Hit Blitz is technically a penny denomination machine, even though the minimum bet on it is 50 cents. I wonder if this machine has a penny-machine-like payback or a half-dollar-machine-like payback. (I know I just said that long-term payback doesn't really matter for this small amount of play, but old habits die hard.) Let me try a quarter denomination machine, which should definitely have a quarter-machine payback and not a penny-machine payback. I found one that I liked, Wild Wild Gems, and played it for a while and discovered an advantage that this machine has over Quick Hit Blitz -- no bonus round.

Why is the lack of a bonus round a plus? Even though I don't have any money at risk while playing a bonus (and to quote Homer Simpson from The Simspsons slot machine, "Woohoo! I can't lose!), I'm also not earning any tier credits. It will take me less time to play the same number of points on the machine without the bonus round. Also, a session without its fair share of bonus rounds is almost certainly a losing session..

Fast forward to today. Maybe I'll try some dollar machines.

Another skill I used to have was identifying low-hit frequency reel-spinning machines. I wanted to identify them not because I wanted to play them, but because I wanted to avoid them. I prefer high hit frequency machines that hit often and keep you in "tray money" and in the game without having to put more money in the machine.

One feature that decreases hit frequency is a multiplying symbol. Machines with multiplying symbols tend to hit less frequently than machines without them to make up for the times when a winning combination is multiplied.

All of the dollar machines I found had multiplying symbols. A doubling symbol isn't too bad, but these machines also had 3x, 4x, and 5x symbols. I'll have to pick one of these machines.

Now I had to dust off another skill -- choosing a machine on which there is little or no penalty for not playing full coin. I eliminated progressives. They had nine coin max bets, so I was unlikely to play them anyway. All of the remaining machines had a very small bonus for playing full coin, so I could play less than full if I wanted. I eventually settled on a $2 machine with 2x, 3x, 4x, and 5x multiplying wild symbols hoping that this machine might have one of the highest long-term paybacks on the slot floor (like I said, old habits).

It may have a high long-term payback -- I don't know for sure -- but I do know for sure that it has a low, low hit frequency as a result of those high multipliers. It has long stretches of credit meter-depleting losing spins in between hitting those rare, sometimes multiplied wins. The machine is fine if you have a large bankroll and you don't mind high volatility and possibly having to feed the machine to stay in the game.

I don't like the volatility. After a long streak of losing spins, I cashed out and went back to the relative safety (much higher hit frequency, that is) of Wild Wild Gems.

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