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CASINO ANSWER MAN
by John Grochowski
John Grochowski is a blackjack expert and a well-known and respected casino gambling columnist. His syndicated casino gambling column appears in the Denver Post, Casino City Times, and other newspapers and web sites. Grochowski has written six books on gambling including the "Answer Man" series of books (www.casinoanswerman.com). He offers one-minute gambling tips on radio station WLS-AM (890) and podcasts are available at
http://www.wlsam.com/sectional.asp?id=38069. Send your question to Grochowski at casinoanswerman@casinoanswerman.com.Q. We can all see that video poker is getting tougher. It’s not just that full-pay Deuces and 10-7-5 Double Bonus are all but gone, but now so many casinos have lowered the pay tables to a third and a fourth tier. Do players just not notice? Why do these bad games survive?
A. I once asked a representative of a game manufacturer if he thought players noticed the differences in pay tables. He said that only a small minority of players could distinguish the games at a glance, but that players noticed their bankrolls disappearing faster on the lower-paying games.
They might attribute it to the casino tightening the machine by making winning hands come up less often, or to the casino being an unlucky place for them. But players notice when their bankrolls are disappearing faster and that affects where and how often they play.
But once players are in a casino, most don’t notice which have the higher pay tables. Given that reality, casino operators put lower-paying games on the floor because they can.
A former slot director of my acquaintance told me changes in casino ownership, upper-level management and goals, contribute to the decline in pay tables. When he was working for an independently owned casino, he and his predecessor had 10-7-5 Double Bonus Poker machines at quarter and dollar level, with a progressive royal on the dollar games. When a large casino company bought the place, he was instructed to replace games that had been very successful.
"We made money on those machines," he told me. "Players aren’t really good enough to beat them. Besides that, they were an attraction. They brought people in the door, which might not have come otherwise, and some of them brought wives and husbands who played other games."
That’s an argument he couldn’t sell to the new owners, who wanted to see every game hold its own. Why keep a video poker game that’s holding 2 percent when one in another part of the casino is holding 5 percent? For that matter, why keep a game that’s holding 2 percent when most of the growth in gaming is in video slot machines that hold 10 to 15 percent?
Nor do many operators work on that theory today. Lower-paying video poker has become a default position in most areas, and for it to change, operators would have to see players vote with their feet. So far, that hasn’t happened.
Q. I was on the Strip right after Thanksgiving, and saw the marquee at Bally’s touting single-deck blackjack, "by popular demand." I knew without even going in that it was going to be one of those awful 6-5 games, but I had to check. Sure enough, it paid 6-5 on blackjacks, and the tables were full. Has the public just given up? Is this battle lost?
A. Similar to the video poker question above, the public just doesn’t notice, or doesn’t understand, how big an effect 6-5 payoffs have in blackjack. I often get questions in my email wondering why I make a fuss about something that "only comes into play in the tiny proportion of hands that are two-card 21s," to quote one reader. And those questions come from people who read gambling columns.
A large portion of people who stay on the Las Vegas Strip are tourists, conventioneers, and business folk, for whom gambling is part of the excitement, but not the whole purpose of their being there. Most are not about to venture off the Strip to look for a better game Downtown or off-Strip. They’re going to play whatever games are offered, hope to get lucky, and spice up their stay.
Q. I took a break from blackjack and was playing video slots with my wife. She was playing a game that had both free-spin and second-screen bonuses. To get the free spins, you had to have special symbols and the first, third, and fifth reels. For the second screen, the bonus symbols had to be on the second, third, and fourth reels.
Is that a way to make sure you get the bonuses less often?
A. Probably not. It’s possible to work the math so that it’s possible to have as good or better a chance of going to the bonus round if the symbols have to be on three specific reels compared to needing three symbols spread across any of the five reels.
And if the goal was to reduce the frequency in bonus events, the designer could do it just as easily working with all five reels by reducing the frequency of bonus symbols.
When a gamemaker uses bonus events, the goal is to build anticipation and excitement that keeps players in their seats.
That only works if the event occurs often enough that players know they’ll get to experience it.
Some bonus events with bigger potential payoffs will occur less often than others, but players have to know there’s going to be some kind of payoff in credits and entertainment for the time and money invested in the base game.
The most likely reasoning behind the design of the game you describe is that the gamemaker thought the difference in display would be eye-catching, and would enhance player anticipation every time the first and second free-spin or bonus symbols came up.
As for the frequency of bonuses, that can be taken care of in the math of the game no matter how many reels are involved.
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