Ask the Slot Expert: What happens if you pull your players card before cashing out?

Question: You recently wrote, "When you cash out while your players card is still in the reader, the ticket system will store your players card number along with the other ticket data. Casino personnel can then query the ticket database to find out who owns a ticket."

What if you pulled your players card for no particular reason and then cashed out. Would the ticket still belong to you or are you now in jeopardy of being told that it isn't yours?

Answer: When you pull out your card (known as a Physical Card Out), that signals the machine to send the current values of various meters to the slot club database so the system can determine how much you won or lost and how much you played. If you check your point totals using an app on your phone while you're playing, your current play won't be included in the totals until you pull your card.

Pulling the card is the signal to end data collection and 99.999% of the time it does. Your "slot club" session on the machine ends when you pull the card, so your players card number won't be stored in the ticket data.

Now, to answer your questions.

Does the ticket still belong to you? Of course, it does. You cashed it out.

Consider this analogous situation: A player without a card cashes out. Does that player own the ticket?

Are you in jeopardy of being told the ticket isn't yours? Only if you're doing some sketchy behavior that causes slot floor personnel to suspect you "found" the ticket.

I have been asked to show my players card when I've cashed largish tickets at the cage. Pulling my card is always the last thing I do before leaving a machine, after noting how much I cashed out and how many points I played. I don't know what would happen at the cage if I had pulled my card before printing the ticket.

I said that 99.999% of the time pulling your card ends data collection. There is one situation in which it doesn't. I've written about it before.

Under what condition does pulling your card not end your slot club data collection session?

Speaking of Jeopardy, I've written before about how some players leave money on the table with their Final Jeopardy bets. Somehow, it became the norm for the leader to bet just enough to win by $1. That may be a way to make the second-place player's loss more heartbreaking, but in many cases the leader could have bet more -- and won more -- and still have had the same possible outcomes based on whether players answered Final Jeopardy correctly.

It took a gambler, James Holzhauer, to bet smarter.

Another thing happening on a game show that gets me is players on The Traitors beating themselves up over eliminating faithfuls. For the first few rounds at least, they have almost nothing on which to base their faithful/traitor determinations. It's like choosing people at random. It's no wonder that most of the players they chose to banish are faithful in the early rounds of the game.

It's not like The Mole, where the mole tries to sabotage the missions. It's in both traitors' and faithfuls' interest to win more money in a mission. I don't think players can get many clues as to whether a player is a traitor based on how that player acts during a mission. Players have to use how a player acts all of the other time to determine whether the player is a traitor.

Next week I'll have some rants about Deal or No Deal Island.

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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