Slots Fantasy

27 October 2022

By Royal Flushes

CINDY: What is the great fantasy of slot players?

ABBY: That’s simple, I guess. Slot players probably fantasize about winning it big. Putting your credit slip or money and having the huge winning hit. Maybe winning millions. That’s probably it, right?

CINDY: Okay, I am going to take you on two tours of the casino. One this afternoon and one tonight and we are going to take a look at slot players. Are you game for this?

ABBY: Why not? I’m game.

(Returned from both tours.)

CINDY: Okay, what did you see?

ABBY: More players. Let me rephrase that. Many more players, the overwhelming majority of slot players in the afternoon played what I consider to be the conventional machines in terms of payouts. By that I mean those machines that don’t return millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars to jackpot winners. I don’t see how any of those machines being played would radically change a person’s life by very much.

CINDY: Except to have something to brag about. What about during the evening? The same or different?

ABBY: Obviously there were more players in the casino and a few were playing some of those mega-jackpot progressives. But they were only a few in the hundreds of people playing the machines. By the way, this surprised me. I always thought the machine players had the same psychology as lottery players. You know, wanting to win those monster jackpots. It wasn’t like that. Not at all.

CINDY: Not at all. In the hundreds of times we’ve been in casinos I only saw slot players as lottery players, wanting those giant jackpots, not the traditional kinds.

ABBY: I agree. I never really looked. I mean I looked around all the time and saw what I wanted to see. Strange as this will sound, more slot players were what we would call low-rollers in their expectations. That didn’t mean they were all playing quarters. There were five-dollar players and some more but what they were angling for were wins that could be called conventional in the general scheme of things.

CINDY: I found the same thing. Do you have any theories?

ABBY: A couple. I think most slot players will play those progressives, especially when they first start going to casinos. But as they become regular casino-goers, the losses from playing those types of machines become great. They switch to what I would call normal machines and their losses become smaller. I also think that winning huge jackpots are not much of a fantasy. To actually wager your money, you want to know you at least have a chance to win something.

CINDY: I have the same opinion here. One type of machine is “pie in the sky,” while the other types are seemingly realistic to play. Those progressives can take 15 percent of the money played in them. That’s a huge percentage I’d say.

ABBY: I agree. Sometimes our preconceived ideas are downright wrong. Slot players are not much different in their expectations than everyone else who comes to the casinos.

CINDY: A lesson learned.

ABBY: A lesson learned.