Ask the Slot Expert: Keno cacophony

Question: I want to thank you for covering the casino life in your weekly columns.

With that said, pertaining to your recent column of casino noise, I find one of the most annoying sounds is sitting at a video poker machine and then someone sits down next to you and sets their machine to play Keno. That sound seems to always be turned up to max and that plopping sound in my opinion is enough to distract you into cashing out and moving -- if you can even find a decent-paying machine in Vegas anymore.

I really wish the slot managers would put those Keno machines in a bank by themselves. Maybe they do that on purpose to get rid of us video poker players.

Keep up the excellent writing.

Answer: Thanks for the kind words.

There's only one casino game that I do not understand why people like. Video Keno. I like playing Live Bingo, so why not Video Keno? Maybe it's the shared experience in Live Bingo of the players against the drawing and competing against the other players to be first with a Bingo.

Me against the machine, though, I'd rather take on a deck of cards or cows from the planet Moolah than a random drawing of 20 numbers.

I sympathize with your dislike of the sounds from a Video Keno machine. I dislike it when a video poker player near me hits the Bet Max button for each new play instead of the Deal button. A Bet Maxer, at least, only generates five identical sounds per play and not a random sequence of 20 hit and miss sounds.

As I wrote last week, I find Caveman Keno's flying, screeching dinosaur particularly annoying. (But not the moos from the cows from the planet Moolah.)

Video poker machines with multiple paytables is one of the best innovations for video poker players. Multi-paytable machines allowed casinos to offer many paytables in just one gaming position and gave video poker players more choices.

Adding slot and Keno options to the machines is one of the worst. The noises from those games ruin the relatively serene symphony of playing video poker hands.

Remember the advice about getting along with other people: You can't change their behavior, but you can change your reaction to it.

I find that it takes less than a minute for me to tune out the repeating sounds of Bet Max-ing from a nearby machine. It takes longer when the sequence of sounds changes from play to play, like on Video Keno .

My brother is a consultant to companies producing high-absorbency products like diapers. He wanted to be a dentist but the universe had other plans. I remember commenting to him that I thought gender=specific diapers was a great idea.

He told me it's a terrible idea. If the store doesn't have the gender you need, you walk out without buying anything. You would buy non-specific diapers though.

Multi-game machines give casino operators the same one-size-fits-all flexibility as unisex diapers give retailers. They cover all the bases. One machine can satisfy many diverse groups of players.

When Las Vegas was a vacation destination for me, I played 9/6 Jacks at The Desert Inn, The Venetian, Treasure Island, and even Caesars Palace. There are still some good-paying (99.5%+) machines on the strip at a reasonable denomination, but they are few and far between. You can still find good-paying video poker at many locals casinos.

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

Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com.

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