How to Get the Most out of Gambling Machines

No type of gambling is more popular in an American casino than a gambling machine. People love the slots and video poker games for various reasons.

In this post, I examine the popularity of these games and offer some tips about how you might be able to get the best of it while playing them.

Why Are Gambling Machines so Popular?

The biggest of reason gambling machines are so popular is simple: Gambling machines are fun to play.

They also offer an opportunity to get a bigger payoff than you’d get at a table game. With the rare exception of some progressive jackpot table games, most payouts at a table game offer payouts of less than 35 to 1. In fact, the main bets in most table games in the casino pay even money.

Gambling machines also offer faster action than table games. At most table games, you might be limited to making 50 to 100 bets per hour. On a slot machine or video poker game, you can easily make 500 wagers per hour and find out how you’re doing almost instantly.

Table games can intimidate new gamblers for multiple reasons. If you don’t know how to play blackjack or baccarat, it can be scary to sit down at a table full of other players and ask questions about how to play. With gambling machines, you don’t have to worry about being intimidated.

In fact, the gamblers in the slot machine sections at most casinos are more light-hearted and relaxed than the players at the table games. This makes for an atmosphere that’s more attractive to many gamblers.

Casinos Love Gambling Machines and Here’s Why

Of course, the casinos love their slot machines and video poker games, too. One of a casino manager’s main concerns is how much money the casino is making per square foot. And based on the amount of space a gambling machine takes up, it’s very profitable.

Casinos don’t have to spend much money maintaining their slot machines. They pretty much come from the manufacturer ready to go. Plug them in, and let gamblers start running their money through there.

Also, casinos don’t need to hire dealers to run the games. Gambling machines literally run themselves. So, other than the cost of the electricity, they’re more profitable just because the expenses related to them are minimal.

You can also find more kinds of gambling machines than you can find different kinds of table games. Gamblers love variety, even if it just means playing a slot machine with the same odds and payouts but with different symbols on the reels and different sound effects on the speakers.

Most importantly of all, gambling machines generally have a much higher mathematical edge over the player. Combine that with the fact that the gamblers are making 500 bets per hour, putting more money into action every hour, and gambling machines are easily the most profitable thing in the casino.

You Don’t Have to Lose Money Playing Gambling Machines

Even though most gambling machines have a high house edge and earn a lot of money for the casino, you can still get the best of it when playing gambling machines—at least some of the time. It might even be easier than you think.

For the most part, if you want to get the best of it playing gambling machines, you’ll need to be playing the video poker machines.

And not just any video poker machines. You need to find the progressive video poker machines. The same logic applies to slot machines with progressive jackpots, but the math works so differently with these games that it’s hard to get an edge at them.

What’s a Progressive Jackpot?

A progressive jackpot is a top prize that increases as gamblers continue to play. Once the jackpot is hit, it resets to its original starting point. How the progressive jackpot grows depends on the settings of the program running the machine.

For example, some progressive jackpot games might increase the size of the jackpot by a penny every time you lose a dollar playing that machine. Often, progressive jackpot games are networked with each other, so the jackpot might increase every time anyone on those networked games loses a dollar.

Megabucks is the biggest progressive jackpot game in Nevada. Thousands of machines are networked together for the Megabucks jackpot, which starts at $10 million and grows from there.

This is not the game to play if you’re hoping to get the best of it at gambling machines, though. The odds of winning at Megabucks are similar to the odds of winning the lottery.

Even if the Megabucks jackpot got big enough that the game offered a positive mathematical expectation, you still wouldn’t want to play it because the odds of winning are so awful that you could easily play Megabucks for 200 years and 24 hours a day without ever hitting the jackpot.

How Positive Expectation Works on Gambling Machines

The idea behind getting the best of it with a progressive jackpot gambling machine is simple:

Once the jackpot gets high enough, the average payouts on that machine will be higher than the amount of money you’re putting into the machine.

Normally, the payouts on the games are set low enough that the machine always takes in more money than it pays out.

But when the jackpot gets big enough, the reverse is true.

Real money casinos and gamblers measure the math of a gambling machine in terms of its payback percentage. An average slot machine or video poker machine has a payback percentage of between 90% and 95%.

But once a progressive jackpot reaches a certain point, the payback percentage goes over 100%.

If you’re playing games with a payback percentage of less than 100%, you’re always going to lose in the long run.

If you’re playing games with a payback percentage of more than 100%, you’re always going to win in the long run.

The Math Behind Getting the Best of Gambling Machines

If you’re playing video poker, you’ll get a royal flush about once out of every 40,000 hands. At 500 hands per hour, that’s about 80 hours of play. The royal flush is always the top jackpot on a video poker machine, too.

If you’re playing a quarter video poker machine, you’ll need to play the max bet of five coins per hand. That’s $1.25 per hand.

40,000 hands of video poker at $1.25 per hand is $50,000 in wagers. That’s just $1.25 per hand multiplied by 40,000 hands.

Obviously, if the jackpot on this machine were $50,000, you’d have a profitable opportunity.

But it doesn’t have to be over $50,000 for the game to be profitable. You get paid back on many other hands on a video poker game, too. On a standard Jacks or Better game, you get paid out on any hand that’s better than a pair of jacks or higher.

In fact, you’ll lose on about 55% of your hands, but you’ll win at least something on about 45% of the hands you play at Jacks or Better video poker. This is another reason, by the way, why video poker machines are so popular. The hit ratio for video poker is higher than on most slot machine games.

Most video poker games will pay out 95% of the money you put into them as winnings even if you never hit the royal flush. This means that you’ll lose 5%, on average, of every dollar you wager. If you put $50,000 through the machine, you’d expect to get back $47,500 in winnings and lose about $2,500.

But when you account for the size of the royal flush jackpot, that number gets even smaller. On a full pay Jacks or Better game, the royal flush adds another 4% or so to the payback percentage. This assumes, of course, that you’re playing with optimal strategy.

Let’s that suppose you have a progressive jackpot on that royal flush, and it’s up to $3,000.

Now, if you put $50,000 through the machine, you’ll get back $50,500, which represents a profit of $500.

And the bigger the progressive jackpot gets, the higher your profit turns out to be.

So, if you want to get the best of it at gambling machines, your goal is to look for video poker games with a progressive jackpot that’s gotten over $2,500.

One Big Caveat About Video Poker Gambling

I already mentioned this, but it bears repeating and explanation. The numbers I’m quoting assume that you’re playing video poker with optimal strategy. Your decisions about which cards to keep and which cards to discard has a major effect on the payback percentage for a machine.

Don’t believe me?

Consider this:

Suppose you’re dealt a royal flush, and you decide to discard even one card. That’s not the strategically best play, obviously, and it would cost you money.

Other strategy mistakes obviously won’t have as big an effect, but they will have an effect.

Most of the time, when you find a profitable opportunity on a video poker game, you’ll have a small edge over the house. You can’t afford to give up even a single percentage in payback percentage or you’ll be facing a negative expectation again.

This means that you’ll need to review some of the posts on this site (or sites like this) to learn how to play video poker with optimal strategy.

Conclusion

Contrary to conventional wisdom, you CAN get the best of it playing gambling machines, but it won’t be because you picked a slot machine that’s gotten hot or is due.

It will be because you found a video poker game with a progressive jackpot where the prize is high enough that you can show a long-term profit.

It will also be because you learned how to play that game with optimal strategy.