Ask the Slot Expert: Still more adventures in Cashless Gaming

The movie Bridge of Spies seems to be playing on one of the channels I subscribe to every time I scroll through the TV listings. The first scene with Tom Hanks, the star, is an informal discussion between two attorneys about an accident in which an automobile driver lost control of his car and hit five motorcyclists. Hanks plays James Donovan, the attorney representing the insurance company -- yes, Hanks is eventually the hero of this story. The other attorney represents the motorcyclists. He is arguing that the policy's limits should apply to each motorcyclist. Hanks, for the insurance company, is arguing that only one limit applies.

"The guy insured by my client had one accident. One, one, one. Losing control of the car and hitting five motorcyclists."

This scene sets up a crucial scene later in the film. Hanks has been tapped to negotiate a swap. The U.S. is willing to swap Rudolf Abel, a Russian spy in jail in the U.S. that Hanks was also tapped to represent in his trial, for Francis Gary Powers, the downed U-2 pilot held by the Russians.

The negotiations are to take place in East Germany. Hanks learns that the East Germans have arrested Frederic Pryor, an American student studying in Germany. Hanks decides to include Pryor in the swap.

The trade is endangered when the East German negotiator balks at the two-for-one swap. He says, "We agreed on an exchange, Abel for Pryor. Now I learn you are a rug merchant selling the same rug to two customers. Abel for Pryor you sell to us. And Abel for Powers you sell to the Soviets."

Hanks counters, "This is one transaction between us and the two of you. We're not trying to do two things here, sir. We're just doing one thing. One, one, one."

A passage in the letter I published last week reminded me of these scenes.

Therein lies your unique spin on the 'Option' of adding Jackpots to your set-up accounts. No more handpays, no more angst of how much do I tip, etc. You are truly a "Thought Leader", gave Me that 'Ah Hah!' moment! (pause, while I soak that concept in)

Okay, I'm still not convinced I trust all those fancy ways for the Casino to 'link' to my bank accounts (unless I open a separate account strictly for 'Gaming funds'), I do like a choice on alternatives.

What we have here are three separate things. Three, three three. Not one, one one. The three things are Instant Jackpots, Cashless Gaming, and linking a bank account to a Cashless Gaming account. You don't have to do all of them.

Instant Jackpots is Boyd's (apparently not trademarked) name for being able to have reportable jackpots credited to your meter instead of having to wait for a handpay and to sign a W-2G.

Cashless Gaming is an account at the casino that you can use to transfer money to and from machines.

Once you have the account, you can optionally transfer money between it and a bank account.

You can sign up for Instant Jackpots without a Cashless Gaming account. And you can have a Cashless Gaming account and still wait for handpays and tax forms. You can have a Cashless Gaming account, moreover, without using a bank account.

Even though not using a bank account with a Cashless Gaming account defeats one of the advantages of Cashless Gaming (not having to carry large amounts of money to and from the casino), I'm not going to pay a fee to transfer money to or from my cashless account.

Concern about entering your bank account information in your Cashless Gaming account shouldn't stop you from setting up a Cashless Gaming account or setting up Instant Jackpots. You don't have to link your bank account.

We're doing three -- well, two and a half -- separate things here, not just one.

I have some new experiences with Cashless Gaming to share. At Boyd, if you pull your card with credits on the machine, the credits are supposed to be transferred back to your account. I usually go through the menu options to do the transfer myself, but one day I decided to let the software do it for me.

I pulled my card. The reader displayed something like "Transfer In Progress" and...got stuck on this message. I tried pressing buttons and putting my card back in to see if I could break out of it, but nothing worked. I hit the Service button.

When the attendant came, I explained to him what had happened. He hit the Collect button. The display cleared and the machine printed a ticket. I said, "I thought I had tried that, but apparently not."

The software in some machines is too old to support Cashless Gaming transfers. Sometimes the transaction just fails even though the machine should support it.

Suncoast went from two Magic of the Nile machines to one when it rearranged the layout of some machines. I was playing the remaining one when a slot technician came by. I asked him if the other machine was moved. He said it wasn't. "The cabinet is right there. We changed the game software in it."

I said I was disappointed, but understood that that's the way it goes. "By the way," I told him, "I tried to transfer from my cashless account to this machine but it keeps timing out."

"I can take a look at it now or just make a note of it and look at it later," he said.

I said that later was okay. There are hundreds of ATMs on the casino floor at which I can transfer money from my account into a ticket that I can put in a machine.

Casinos change cashless behaviors, sometimes without notice. In the beginning at Red Rock, if you walked away from a machine without using the STN Cash app to disconnect from it, the machine would automatically transfer any credits on the machine back to your account once the bluetooth connection between your phone and the machine was dropped.

A few months later, Stations sent an email saying that players didn't like that, so the credits would remain on the machine if you just walked away and didn't cash them out.

When I had the opportunity, I told them that I didn't think that was a good change. Having the money go back to my account limited the ability of someone to steal my credits if I forgot to take care of them before leaving a machine. I think the app was also changed to ask whether you wanted to transfer credits back to your account or cash them out in a ticket when you disconnected from a machine.

I hit a few sets of deuces at Red Rock, so I had some extra cash available. I figured I would use some of that cash to settle a marker and the rest to fund a session at Suncoast. I could go to the cage to get the money out my account, but that's a little inconvenient because the cashiers have to leave their windows to go down to the one window that has a STN Cash terminal. I'll just transfer the money to a machine and cash out into a ticket. Now any cage window can handle my transactions.

I picked a machine, transferred money to it, and hit the Collect button to print a ticket. The machine transferred the credits back to my account. That didn't use to happen. Let me try that again and double-check that the app doesn't give me an option to cash out into a ticket. Nope, it doesn't. Let me try another machine.

Same problem. There doesn't seem to be any way to get money out of machine. I'll have to go to the cage. I was a bit ticked off so I decided that I wouldn't settle the marker. It's due to be deposited in a few days anyway. I'll just let them deposit it.

A pleasant surprise at the cage. Every window can now make transactions on your Cashless Gaming account. Despite that cheery news, I still didn't withdraw the money to settle the marker.

I stopped at the STN Cash table in front of the cage after I had gotten my money. I wanted to look at the brochure to see if it says that credits will always go back to your account. A STN Cash rep materialized out of nowhere before I had a chance to pick up a brochure.

She confirmed that they changed the system and credits will now go back to your account. I said that it would be nice if players could get a ticket when they hit Cash Out, but I can live with the new system now that any cashier can access my account.

Next week, I'll talk about an unpublicized advantage of Cashless Gaming that I recently discovered.

Preliminary data from the CDC's National Health Interview Survey estimates that only 11.1% of adults report being current cigarette smokers.

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

Click here for the latest Covid data.