Slot Machine Max Bet
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Slot machines are the most popular game in any casino. Sure, people bet more on the lottery, and the worldwide sports betting market is huge. But slot machines are the game du jour in most casinos, especially in the United States.
Sadly, slot machines games also offer the worst odds in the casino except maybe for keno. The compounding effect of making hundreds of bets per hour at the slots make these games a bigger moneymaker for the casino than keno.
There’s no science to playing slots. You put your money in, spin the reels, and hope for the best. The only decisions you make are which game to play and how much to bet.
This post covers how much you should bet. You’ll often hear so-called gambling experts say you should always place the maximum bet on slot machines.
This isn’t true for most games.
There Are Two Kinds of Max Bets on Slot Games
You’ll only find one “Max Bet” button on a slot machine game, but some games allow you to adjust the number of paylines you bet on. These are older games. They preceded the guaranteed “243 ways to win” games.
The first time I saw one of these games, a friend of mine called them “penny slots.”
The minimum bet was 10 cents per payline and the game had 25 paylines. The minimum bet was, to my way of thinking, $2.50. You could never bet just a penny on that “penny slot” game.
The maximum bet was $1 per payline. This was a sneaky way of getting the players to lay down more money. If you hit “Max Bet” on that machine, it took $25 in credits from your balance.
The More Complicated the Slot Game, the Less Likely You’ll Win
If you don’t understand how much you’re betting when you push a button on a slot game, there’s something wrong with the game. Perhaps the gaming industry just went through a phase of bad design.
But just because a slot machine game has multiple paylines, you shouldn’t assume that you’ll lose money if you bet on fewer paylines. Each bet on each payline is a separate bet, so playing all the paylines at once might make you more likely to see a winner. But you’ll also see more losing spins on the other paylines to compensate (in the long run, anyway).
The game is still programmed to spin as if all the paylines are active. I watched in horror, as that $25 bet spun the reels. I got lucky and the machine paid a low prize. I didn’t lose $25.
You can save money on a slot machine like this in two ways.
- You can bet on fewer paylines.
- You can lower the size of your bet.
My buddy disabled all the paylines and played $1. We saw a big prize combination come up but it didn’t pay anything. It was on a deactivated payline. There was no pattern on the one active payline.
A Few Older Games Increased Your Probability With Your Bet Size
This kind of game worked in the opposite way. You didn’t disable or enable paylines. The game’s help screen said some features were only enabled for the max bet.
We deduced that meant the theoretical return to player was calculated only for the max bet. And if the game wasn’t allowing you to use all the features with lesser bets then it must have had a lower RTP.
I went back to play some blackjack that night but my friend stayed and played that game. He did okay, not great. He said it made a big difference to play the max bet.
A Basic Slot Game Doesn’t Change the Probabilities
Whether it’s a 3D video slot with monsters running around the screen or just a classic three-reel game, if the slot game doesn’t disable paylines or require max bets, then the probabilities don’t change.
You can bet the minimum or maximum credits, and it won’t affect the outcome of the game. You simply change the number of guaranteed spins you can play.
If you have $300 and a game has a $1 minimum, you can play that game 300 times. If you make a maximum bet of $5 on every spin, then you can only play the game a maximum of 60 times (if you lose every time).
This makes a difference to some players. Other players say you’re not going to lose 60 times in a row, so why worry about that? Bet the max and get the most from your prize.
Most Progressive Slot Games Only Pay on Max Bets
If you’re playing a progressive slot game, then you need to make a maximum bet. I’ve seen a few games with multiple progressive jackpots where you only needed a max bet for the biggest jackpot.
If you have two versions of the same slot game, one is progressive and the other is not, you might as well play the max bet on the progressive version of the game.
Progressive slot games have a mixed reputation. I’ve talked to people who refuse to play them. They’re convinced the payouts are less on progressive games.
And I know people who almost exclusively play progressive slot games. They would rather win a big prize beyond whatever the machine itself pays. They don’t have to win $1 million if they can come away with a few thousand.
I’ve seen it play out both ways. I’ve never been in a casino where someone won more than $10,000.
The Math Says Max Bets Put You Ahead Faster
Assuming you find a slot machine that pays reasonably well, maybe it’s on a “hot” streak despite its regular RTP, why not play only max bets?
If the maximum payout is 1000x your bet, you’ll make $999 on a $1 bet or $4995 on a $5 bet. That’s a really simple equation, so why doesn’t everyone bet that way?
If you’re down to your last $20, you may decide to “roll it up. ” But what’s the difference between rolling up $20 and rolling up $200?
It comes down to how many spins you can guarantee yourself. This is a psychological game we play with ourselves. The odds of winning on the next spin are the same regardless of how much you bet.
There Is Another Advantage to Not Making Max Bets
If you want to play a lot of different games and you don’t have an unlimited bankroll, then playing minimum bets allows you to spread your time around.
Some players like to test the games when they visit a casino for the first time. They make a decision based on luck.
I remember watching a man approach a slot machine late one night. I was getting ready to leave. He put a dollar in the machine and spun the wheels.
He went down the line of machines until one of them paid. There, he stopped and began playing.
Conclusion
Slot game designs have become more polished, but their rules are less confusing. People want to push a button and win some money.
I think caution is only warranted if you’re unfamiliar with the games and you don’t know immediately if they have any special rules. It’s always a good idea to read the pay tables first.
And if you’re a little confused by the game rules, then only play minimum bets until you understand what the game is doing.
There’s no need to rush into max bets if you’re not ready to take that chance.
The gaming industry is big business in the U.S., contributing an estimated US$240 billion to the economy each year, while generating $38 billion in tax revenues and supporting 17 million jobs.
What people may not realize is that slot machines, video poker machines and other electronic gaming devices make up the bulk of all that economic activity. At casinos in Iowa and South Dakota, for example, such devices have contributed up to 89 percent of annual gaming revenue.
Spinning-reel slots in particular are profit juggernauts for most casinos, outperforming table games like blackjack, video poker machines and other forms of gambling.
What about slot machines makes them such reliable money makers? In part, it has something to do with casinos’ ability to hide their true price from even the savviest of gamblers.
The price of a slot
An important economic theory holds that when the price of something goes up, demand for it tends to fall.
But that depends on price transparency, which exists for most of the day-to-day purchases we make. That is, other than visits to the doctor’s office and possibly the auto mechanic, we know the price of most products and services before we decide to pay for them.
Slots may be even worse than the doctor’s office, in that most of us will never know the true price of our wagers. Which means the law of supply and demand breaks down.
Casino operators usually think of price in terms of what is known as the average or expected house advantage on each bet placed by players. Basically, it’s the long-term edge that is built into the game. For an individual player, his or her limited interaction with the game will result in a “price” that looks a lot different.
For example, consider a game with a 10 percent house advantage – which is fairly typical. This means that over the long run, the game will return 10 percent of all wagers it accepts to the casino that owns it. So if it accepts $1 million in wagers over 2 million spins, it would be expected to pay out $900,000, resulting in a casino gain of $100,000. Thus from the management’s perspective, the “price” it charges is the 10 percent it expects to collect from gamblers over time.
Individual players, however, will likely define price as the cost of the spin. For example, if a player bets $1, spins the reels and receives no payout, that’ll be the price – not 10 cents.
So who is correct? Both, in a way. While the game has certainly collected $1 from the player, management knows that eventually 90 cents of that will be dispensed to other players.
A player could never know this, however, given he will only be playing for an hour or two, during which he may hope a large payout will make up for his many losses and then some. And at this rate of play it could take years of playing a single slot machine for the casino’s long-term advantage to become evident.
Short-term vs. long-term
This difference in price perspective is rooted in the gap between the short-term view of the players and the long-term view of management. This is one of the lessons I’ve learned in my more than three decades in the gambling industry analyzing the performance of casino games and as a researcher studying them.
Let’s consider George, who just got his paycheck and heads to the casino with $80 to spend over an hour on a Tuesday night. There are basically three outcomes: He loses everything, hits a considerable jackpot and wins big, or makes or loses a little but manages to walk away before the odds turn decidedly against him.
Of course, the first outcome is far more common than the other two – it has to be for the casino to maintain its house advantage. The funds to pay big jackpots come from frequent losers (who get wiped out). Without all these losers, there can be no big winners – which is why so many people play in the first place.
Specifically, the sum of all the individual losses is used to fund the big jackpots. Therefore, to provide enticing jackpots, many players must lose all of their Tuesday night bankroll.
What is less obvious to many is that the long-term experience rarely occurs at the player level. That is, players rarely lose their $80 in a uniform manner (that is, a rate of 10 percent per spin). If this were the typical slot experience, it would be predictably disappointing. But it would make it very easy for a player to identify the price he’s paying.
Raising the price
Ultimately, the casino is selling excitement, which is comprised of hope and variance. Even though a slot may have a modest house advantage from management’s perspective, such as 4 percent, it can and often does win all of George’s Tuesday night bankroll in short order.
This is primarily due to the variance in the slot machine’s pay table – which lists all the winning symbol combinations and the number of credits awarded for each one. While the pay table is visible to the player, the probability of producing each winning symbol combination remains hidden. Of course, these probabilities are a critical determinant of the house advantage – that is, the long-term price of the wager.
This rare ability to hide the price of a good or service offers an opportunity for casino management to raise the price without notifying the players – if they can get away with it.
Casino managers are under tremendous pressure to maximize their all-important slot revenue, but they do not want to kill the golden goose by raising the “price” too much. If players are able to detect these concealed price increases simply by playing the games, then they may choose to play at another casino.
This terrifies casino operators, as it is difficult and expensive to recover from perceptions of a high-priced slot product.
Getting away with it
Consequently, many operators resist increasing the house advantages of their slot machines, believing that players can detect these price shocks.
Our new research, however, has found that increases in the casino advantage have produced significant gains in revenue with no signs of detection even by savvy players. In multiple comparisons of two otherwise identical reel games, the high-priced games produced significantly greater revenue for the casino. These findings were confirmed in a second study.
Further analysis revealed no evidence of play migration from the high-priced games, despite the fact their low-priced counterparts were located a mere 3 feet away.
Importantly, these results occurred in spite of the egregious economic disincentive to play the high-priced games. That is, the visible pay tables were identical on both the high- and low-priced games, within each of the two-game pairings. The only difference was the concealed probabilities of each payout.
Max Bet Slot Machine Videos
Armed with this knowledge, management may be more willing to increase prices. And for price-sensitive gamblers, reel slot machines may become something to avoid.