Why don't I talk about slots?

I had one of my local readers, here in Reno too, ask me why I don't talk about slot machines more often. So I'll cover that in this post

Quite frankly, slot machines not that interesting to me. I rarely play them and when I do play machines it's either penny or nickel video poker or a Keno game. I never, evet play the reel type slots. They just hold no interest for me.

As a surveillance professional, they don't hold a lot of interest in me anymore either. It used to be slots were a common target of cheaters. And there were dozens of different ways to shape the machines. You could feed slugs instead of real coins into the machine. You could use a device called a "monkey's paw" to block the optics and cause a machine to pay out more than it should. In yhr real old days, when slot machines were mechanical instead of electrical, you could pop the handle at certain times to cause the reals to stop in a payoff position. None of that can be done anymore.

All slot machines now are cash  in and ticket out. No coins involved. this cuts down on considerable overhead for the casino, as there are no longer any coin hoppers or hard count teams picking up money and then rolling it into paper. And Bill acceptors these days are very very sophisticated, so much so that a counterfeit bill really cannot make it into a machine.

Reel  slots are the predominant ones that you see on the casino floor today and they are very popular. Even more popular than blackjack, which is another thing that has changed in the last 30 years.

Eastern European organized criminals have found a way to hack the machines, by reverse engineering the random number generator chip in the machine. We will discuss that in a future post, as I don't think it's being done in the US currently, but I do know I have many blog readers in Europe. So I promise of future post on it.

So in review, if slots are your thing, go for it, play whatever strikes your fancy.  And yes some slot players will hit jackpots and win lots of money. But for the most part slots are a losers. The house advantage on slot machines is anywhere from 5% to 50%.  In other words for every $1, 000 that you put through a slot machine, you can expect to lose between $50 and $500.

Most machines are set to pay back 80% to 90% of what goes through it, over time. But that still means a 10% to 20% house advantage. That right there should tell you everything you need to know about playing slot machines. They are profitable for the casino, not the player.