Take slot credits or cash

A woman in Atlantic City recently won a drawing. She had her choice between taking $1 million in slot credits, or choosing one of three envelopes containing an amount from $200,000 to $275,000 in cash.

Do you think she should take her chances on the slot credits or take her chances on the cash envelopes?

Dollar paybacks are about 93 percent in Atlantic City. One million credits played 3 per spin fund 333,333 spins. At that number of spins, we can estimate that the payback we experience will be within 3 percentage points of a machine's long-term payback with 90 percent certainty, although that is highly dependent on the machine's volatility. So we'd expect the payback to fall within 90 percent to 96 percent or $900,000 to $960,000.

Unless I'm missing something, I think she's much better off playing the credits -- but it's a lot of work and it's going to take a long time to play over 300,000 spins!

Best of luck in and out of the casinos,
John

Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert, at slotexpert@comcast.net. Because of the volume of mail I receive, I regret that I can't reply to every question.