![]() Newsletter Signup
Stay informed with the
NEW Casino City Times newsletter! Recent Articles
Best of John Robison
|
Gaming Guru
Ask the Slot Expert: Where have all the slot floorpeople gone?28 September 2016
Answer: It takes far fewer employees to man a slot floor today than in the past. Tickets eliminated the most positions. No more change people pushing heavy carts filled with coins. No more coin redemption booths -- and no ticket redemption booths either; we do our own redemptions at a kiosk. No more hopper fills. Today the slot floorperson's duties are: loading more tickets, clearing machine problems and handling handpays, which now only occur with payouts of $1200 and up. In addition, there are fewer payouts of $1200 and up now that slot play has shifted from quarters and dollars down to pennies. I rarely see payouts requiring tax forms on penny machines -- although I did see one a few days ago when a lady won over $1300 on the free spin bonus on a Wild Blue Quick Hit Progressive machine. On some machines, moreover, the only way to win that much loot is to hit one of the top progressives. You can't do it on the base game. Looking at the most recent Winners page at the Suncoast Casino, only four of the 12 players on the page won playing slots and one of those players played a dollar slot. Most played video poker and keno. The next page tells the same story. About half of the players who got a handpay played video poker. Add a few keno players to get to two-thirds. The remaining third played slots. It's definitely possible to decrease the likelihood of hitting the top jackpot(s) and still have the same long-term payback percentage. They just make some of the smaller payouts more likely to hit. But it's unusual for casinos to change a machine once it's on the slot floor. They usually just wait to replace the machine with one that follows their new philosophy. Tickets and pennies, I think, are the main reasons that casinos need fewer employees to run a slot floor today. Although I feel sorry for the people whose positions were eliminated, I think players have benefited from the reduced personnel costs. A casino's overhead keeps going up. How does a casino raise its prices? By cutting back on comps and raising the house edge. More efficiency on the slot floor may have enabled casinos to put off raising the house edge on their machines. Handpays today, in addition, are lightning quick, at least at the casinos in Las Vegas at which I play. An attendant comes by within a minute or two of the machine's locking up. Okay, the rest of the process is paperwork and doesn't seem any faster than before, but at least the process gets started shortly after hitting the jackpot. I was never impressed with Harrah's when I lived in New Jersey. Although the casino was nice, there was better video poker on the boardwalk.
Answer: The machines don't switch RNGs. Remember that the only thing the RNG does is generate a stream of numbers. The numbers have no meaning in and of themselves. It's up to the software running the machine to do something useful with the numbers and give them meaning. On 88 Fortunes, numbers from the RNG determine where the reels stop. If there's a wild symbol on the screen, the software will go back to the RNG to determine if the bonus round should be triggered. Let's say that the output from the RNG will be scaled to a value from 1 to 10. At the lowest bet, the bonus will be triggered only if the value from the RNG is 1. At a medium bet, the bonus will be triggered on values from 1 to 4. At the highest bet, the bonus will be triggered on values from 1 to 7. It's the same RNG that the software used to determine where to stop the reels. The software is polling the RNG again and doing something different with those numbers. On the Lord of the Rings machine, the archer bonus randomly appears on some spins. Again, the software uses the RNG to determine where to stop the reels. Then it polls the RNG again to determine if the archer bonus should be triggered. As above, more numbers trigger the bonus with larger bets, so the bonus is more likely to hit with larger bets. It's important to remember that the amount bet has no effect on where the reels stops in both of these examples. The amount bet only comes into play to determine whether the bonus should be triggered -- in the case of 88 Fortunes because a wild symbol appeared on the screen, and in the case of the Lord of the Rings game without regard to where the reels stopped. And in each case, another poll of the RNG is needed to make the bonus decision. The bonuses run hot and cold on 88 Fortunes -- and on every other machine, for that matter! It's not unusual to not get a bonus on the 30-50 spins you got from your $50. Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com. Because of the volume of mail I receive, I regret that I can't reply to every question.
Recent Articles
Best of John Robison
John Robison |
John Robison |