Slot machines are REGULATED, not “rigged” (or programmed to cheat you for the owners benefit). Regulated slot machines have payouts that are set by the gaming commission, based on the configuration of the machine. Editor's Note: For this answer, we turned to the inimitable Arnold Snyder, among the world's greatest blackjack and table-game experts. First off, if this shuffle machine is on any table game in a Nevada casino, it would be unlawful to program it with a 'set-percentage' payout, as truly random shuffles are required by law.
Source: Vizual Statistix by Seth Kadish
The house always wins, but just how often exactly? And how much?
That is the question posed by the above data visualization by Seth Kadish, a scientist from Portland, Oregon, who publishes data visualizations on his site Vizual Statistix. Using one year's worth of public data published by Nevada's Gaming Control Board, Kadish shows how much casinos on the Las Vegas strip make from different games on an average week and what percentage of gamblers' wagers makes its way into casinos' vaults.
The bets and games with the best odds are on the bottom of the first chart. As Kadish notes, $100 slot machines have the best odds, as they take only 3.6% of gamblers' money. Of course, that's $3.60 per pull, so penny slots are a better idea if the goal is to make your money last as long as possible. Bingo and blackjack are the best bets for games at 8.8% and 11.1% respectively. Baseball is the best sport to gamble on, but all sports are better deals than betting on the racetrack.
Source: Vizual Statistix by Seth Kadish
Knowing this isn't about to put a dent in Vegas's profits though. As the right-hand side of the scatterplot shows, the games that bring in the most money for Vegas (baccarat, penny slots, and blackjack) also offer some of the most generous odds to players. The house still always wins.
Kadish's original post on Vegas odds is available on his blog Vizual Statistix. To get occasional notifications when we write blog posts, sign up for our email list.
Real examples of rigged slot machines in Las Vegas.
Everyone who visits Las Vegas expects to lose money—or at least, they should. Casinos aren’t in the business of making everyone a winner. But most of us anticipate a fair shot at being one of the fortunate few. Hitting a big win on the slots, or having a great run at the tables, is the dream of every gambling enthusiast.
What most of us don’t expect, however, is to be swindled (not by the casino itself, anyway). The good news is that, thanks to strict regulations and much more sophisticated monitoring technology than prior decades, rogue Vegas casinos and gambling software manufacturers are no longer a concern. But there was a time…
Rigged Slot Machines Propagate ‘Near Miss’
This particular slots fraud happened on numerous occasions, and was committed by a multitude of casinos and games manufacturers. Throughout the years, many slot makers and casinos collaborated to dupe players out of more money by installing these duplicitous machines.
Known as the ‘Near Miss‘, this particular scam wasn’t an obvious one. In fact, it wasn’t until the Nevada Gaming Control Board realized what was going on that they re-scripted the regulatory guidelines to specifically prohibit such behavior in a gambling machine.
The Near Miss occurs when a game lines up a combination that is extremely close to a huge win. A 3-reel slot might line up two perfects 7s, then drop a third 7 just above or below that line. So close, right? Yet ultimately worth nothing.
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What this does is give players a sense that they were so close to winning, all they have to do is play a bit more to hit that big payout. The idea was to encouraged players to keep pumping money into the machine, and it worked flawlessly. Is that really illegal, though?
According to Nevada law, a machine must display a random, unpredictable result. When the NGCB investigated these machines, they found that some of them displayed a Near Miss up to 1000x more often than a winning combination. Such results are far from the random, therefore wholly illegal.
Slot Machines are Rigged to Never Pay Jackpot
This one is the best known story of fraud ever to take place in Las Vegas casinos. It happened in the 1980s, before regulators had access to superior computer monitoring of wins and losses. And while the casinos who used these machines were not innocent, the bulk of the blame fell upon the shoulders of games’ makers, American Coin.
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What this company was doing was pumping out slot machines, video poker machines and keno machines that were rigged to never pay out their highest prize. No Royal Flush would ever be dealt—no perfect all-number match would ever display on keno. It took quite a long time for the manufacturers scheme to be discovered, which is understandable since these jackpots are rare to begin with.
When it was finally discovered that they never had paid their prize, the NGCB investigated. They found that over 1,000 machines were intentionally rigged to never show these results. The NGCB slapped American Coin with a $1 million fine. That may not see like much by today’s standards, but it was a rather large penalty back in those days, and successfully put an end to rigged slot machines in Las Vegas.
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