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You can play a slot machine in Las Vegas before you’ve even reached baggage claim: there are tiny slots parlors in every terminal of McCarran International Airport. Once you pick up your rental car, you can stop for gas and play slots at a convenience store. And that’s all before you’ve even reached your hotel-casino, which — if it follows the modern standard — dedicates roughly 80 percent of its gaming floor to slots, and only 20 percent to table games.

1. How To Stop Slot Machine Gambling Career
2. How To Stop Slot Machine Gambling Clip Art Black And White
3. Gambling Slot Machines
4. How To Stop Slot Machine Gambling In Las Vegas

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Bally Technologies, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of slot machines, is headquartered 3 miles south of the Strip. When I visited Bally in mid-March, Mike Trask, the company’s senior marketing manager, walked me into the company’s showroom to play some games. Compared to the cacophony of a casino floor, Bally’s showroom was practically monastic, the lights low and the room silent apart from the soothing hum of two dozen hibernating consoles.

Trask, a tall man in his 30s with dirty-blond hair, showed me the company’s new Friends-themed game, installed on Bally’s ProWave cabinet, a slick, 42-inch curved console. Friends celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, and the company hopes to tap some of that nostalgia. 'That person, that girl who watched every episode of Friends when it came out, is our demographic,' Trask said, standing alongside the cabinet.

I took a seat in front of the unit, and Trask touched a logo on the display’s upper corner, selected a box on the display that ensured I would get a bonus round, and told me to hit the spin button. I did, and a pared down version of the show’s theme song played, the NBC sextet smiled at me from the prime of their youth, and five reels of symbols — a Central Perk decal, a guitar, screenshots of characters — scrolled down the screen. The Wheel of Fortune-style bonus round featured a clip of Rachel saying, 'Happy birthday, Grandma!' wearing a wedding dress.

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Bally assembles all of its machines in a factory warehouse next to its game studios and tucked behind its Vegas corporate headquarters. Last year, Scientific Games, Bally’s parent company, shipped out more than 17,000 new units. On my visit, hundreds of freshly assembled slot machine shells, featuring the industry standard black exterior and jutting dashboards, lined the warehouse walls.

A tag attached to each cabinet indicated its destination: Oklahoma, Washington, Michigan, Canada. Only a handful were destined for Vegas casinos, a sign of gaming’s national and international expansion. Scientific Games acquired Bally last year for $5 billion. At the time, 23 states had legalized gambling, a heavily taxable industry, to quickly infuse deficient coffers.

But the expansion of gaming generally is the expansion of slot machines specifically — the modern casino typically earns 70 to 80 percent of its revenue from slots, a stratospheric rise from the 1970s when slots comprised 50 percent or less. New York, the latest state to introduce gaming, doesn’t even allow table games, and Pennsylvania, now the third-largest gaming state in the country after Nevada and New Jersey, only later allowed table games in an amendment to its legislation. And increasingly, the psychological and technical systems originally built for slot machines — including reward schedules and tracking systems — have found admirers in Silicon Valley.

In the factory, Trask and I passed a ProWave cabinet, a design released by Bally in mid-2014 that features a 32-inch concave screen, like an even more curved Samsung TV. Trask claimed that putting the same exact games on curved screens increased gameplay 30-80 percent. I asked him why that was. 'It looks cool; it’s incredibly clear,' he said in a tone suggesting a guess as good as any. Game designers are charged with somehow summoning the ineffable allure of electronic spectacle — developing a system that is both simple and endlessly engaging, a machine to pull and trap players into a finely tuned cycle of risk and reward that keeps them glued to the seat for hours, their pockets slowly but inevitably emptying. As we stood over the gaming cabinet, Trask told me about the floor of the MGM, home to 2,500 machines and hundreds of different games. Trask’s mission, as he saw it, was simple: 'Our job is to get you to choose our game.'

The prototypical slot machine was invented in Brooklyn in the mid-1800s — it was a cash register-sized contraption and used actual playing cards. Inserting a nickel and pressing a lever randomized the cards in the small display window, and depending on the poker hand that appeared, a player could win items from the establishment that housed the machine. In 1898, Charles Fey developed the poker machine into the Liberty Bell machine, the first true slot with three reels and a coin payout. Each reel had 10 symbols, giving players a 1-in-1,000 chance of hitting the 50-cent jackpot if three Liberty Bells lined up. The three-reel design was a hit in bars and became a casino standard, but for decades gaming houses considered them little more than a frivolity — distractions for the wives of table-game players. Accordingly, casinos were dense with table games, and slots were relegated to the periphery.

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That began to change in the 1960s, when Bally introduced the electromechanical slot machine. The new rig let players insert multiple coins on a single bet, and machines could multiply jackpots as well as offer up smaller, but more frequent wins. Multi-line play was introduced: alongside the classic horizontal lineup, players could now win with diagonal and zig-zagged combinations. The new designs sped up gameplay and breathed life into the stagnating industry.

William 'Si' Redd, the bolo tie-wearing Mississippi native who oversaw some of Bally’s new projects during the era, was instrumental to that renaissance. 'The player came to win,' he said, 'he didn’t come to lose, [so] speed it up, give him more, be more liberal. Let him win more, but then [you make money] still with the speeding up, because it was extra liberal.' In other words, the new machines lowered slots’ volatility — gaming parlance for the frequency at which a player experiences big wins and losses.

The casino floor of the Boulder Club, early 1950s. Image courtesy of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

In the 1970s, Redd left Bally and founded another gaming manufacturer that was later renamed IGT. IGT specialized in video gambling machines, or video poker. Video poker machines could be designed to have even lower volatility, paying players back small amounts on more hands. And video poker’s interactive elements made them extra engrossing, turning them into an enormous success: people lined up to play the first machines, and the game’s ability to command a player’s complete concentration for hours gave it a reputation as the 'crack cocaine' of gambling.

'If you were to take $100 and play slots, you’d get about an hour of play, but video poker was designed to give you two hours of play for that same $100,' Redd said at the time, instructing game designers to lengthen the time it took a poker machine to consume a player’s money.

Redd also acquired the patent for the newly created Random Number Generator, which computerized the odds-calculator behind the spinning reels and allowed game makers to control volatility. A modern slot machine, at its core, is nothing more than an RNG going through millions or billions of numbers at all times. When a player hits a spin button, they are simply stopping the RNG at a particular moment. Everything beyond that — the music, the mini-games, the actual appearance of spinning reels, Rachel, Monica, and the rest of the gang keeping you company — is window dressing to keep you hitting spin.

IGT now makes 93 percent of the world’s video poker machines and is the largest manufacturer of video slots in the world. Its Wheel of Fortune franchise spans every kind of slot machine — reels, curved screens, and massive installations with enormous physical flourishes. On my visit to their Las Vegas offices, I asked Jacob Lanning, IGT’s vice president of product management, what makes a good game. 'If you can figure that out, you’ve got a job,' he said. Trask had told me something similar: 'If we knew what the perfect game was, we’d just keep making that game over and over.'

Perhaps no one has uncovered the Platonic ideal of the slot machine, but certain principles undergird most games. First, there’s a vague aesthetic uniformity: colors tend toward the primary or pastel, franchise tie-ins are a must, and the game soundtracks are typically in a major key. Meanwhile, the multi-line wins introduced by Bally have become an unintelligible tangle: modern slots offer players upwards of 50 and sometimes 100 different winning combinations — so many that without the corresponding lights, sounds, and celebration, most casual and even advanced players would have trouble recognizing whether they’d won or lost.

To keep players gambling, all slots rely on the same basic psychological principles discovered by B.F. Skinner in the 1960s. Skinner is famous for an experiment in which he put pigeons in a box that gave them a pellet of food when they pressed a lever. But when Skinner altered the box so that pellets came out on random presses — a system dubbed variable ratio enforcement — the pigeons pressed the lever more often. Thus was born the Skinner box, which Skinner himself likened to a slot machine.

The Skinner box works by blending tension and release — the absence of a pellet after the lever is pressed creates expectation that finds release via reward. Too little reward and the animal becomes frustrated and stops trying; too much and it won’t push the lever as often.

How To Stop Slot Machine Gambling Career

Like video poker, most multi-line slots rarely pay large jackpots, instead doling out smaller wins frequently. 'They’re imitating the formula of video poker, but they’re doing it in a slot formula,' Natasha Schüll, an associate professor at MIT who has researched slots for 15 years, says. In 2012, Princeton University Press published Addiction by Design: Machine Gaming in Las Vegas, the culmination of her research and a deconstruction of the slot machine.

Schüll says modern slot machines essentially continued the trend started by Redd so as not to jolt players too intensely in the form of losses — or wins. 'Too-big wins have been shown to stop play because it’s such an intense shift in the situation that you’ll kind of pause, you’ll stop, you’ll take your money and leave,' says Schüll. Stretching out gameplay with minor rewards, Schüll says, 'allows you to get in the flow of, another little win, another little win.'

As a result, modern slots pay out on approximately 45 percent of all spins, instead of the 3 percent of traditional slots. 'The sense of risk is completely dampened,' Schüll says. 'Designers call them drip feed games.'

That analysis is supported by a 2010 American Gaming Association white paper. 'Lower-volatility games often have greater appeal in 'locals markets' than in destination resort markets like Las Vegas or Atlantic City…Customers tend to play these games for longer periods of time…' In other words, lower volatility games paved the way for gaming’s wild expansion nationwide.

The advent of bonus games has also helped bolster slot machines’ popularity: instead of just winning money, certain combinations can trigger mini games. In the IGT showroom, Lanning showed me the company’s forthcoming Entourage game, in which a bonus game has the player match portraits of characters. In the industry, it’s called a pick-em bonus. 'Those are the most popular features,' Melissa Price, the senior vice president of gaming for Caesar’s Entertainment, told me. 'Customers enjoy ‘perceived skill’ experience.'

And then, there’s the emotional appeal: Price told me the company commissioned a study to find out why people love the Wheel of Fortune line so much. 'People said it was as much about the brand as anything,' she said. 'People said, ‘That brand — I used to hear it in the living room at my grandma’s house, I’d hear that wheel spinning because my grandma watched it. It reminds me of my grandma.’ I mean, how can you compete with that?'

Price and I spoke on the floor of Harrah’s Las Vegas at 9:00AM — the slots players were already at their machines, or perhaps they’d been there all night. Last year, Harrah’s parent company, Caesar’s Entertainment, declared bankruptcy as a consequence of overextension and growing competition. During proceedings, creditors appraised Caesar’s vast store of customer data as the company’s most valuable asset, worth about $1 billion.

Harrah’s pioneered the now industry standard Total Rewards player tracking system, first with a punchcard program introduced in 1985, then with a digital program and magnetic cards in the 1990s. Slots were easy to track, and stood at the very center of the program. The system grew even more sophisticated under the auspices of former CEO Gary Loveman. Loveman arrived at Harrah’s fresh from teaching at Harvard Business School, and he brought a methodical business savvy to an industry that, in many ways, had spent decades winging it.

Before the tracking system, the player management was as sophisticated as watching which players spent a lot of money and comping amenities to encourage them to spend more. 'We all looked around and said, there’s got to be a more automated way to do that,' said Price.

Price and I stood behind a woman playing IGT’s Ellen Degeneres game. Ellen’s head whizzed down the reels on the parabolic display in high definition. As long as the player had her Total Rewards card inserted in the machine, every time she hit the spin button the system recorded the size of her bet, what game it was spent on, at what time, how long she’d been playing for, and so on, until she hits the 'Cash Out' button on the machine, at which point all the data is encapsulated in her file, along with all the other games she has ever played at a Caesar’s casino.

Player tracking systems revealed more than a pit boss ever could: over time, Harrah’s can create a portrait of the person’s risk profile, including how much money a player typically loses before they stop playing and what kinds of gifts to give them to keep them on the gaming floor. Sometimes, that can be a penthouse suite; other times, it can be as little as giving a player $15 in cash. In 2012, This American Life charted the lurid and unsettling extreme of how these systems can be used in a story about a Harrah’s in Indiana that enticed a woman to keep playing with unlimited hotel suites, diamond jewelry, and free trips to the Kentucky Derby. The perks fueled her gaming habit until she was $125,000 in debt.

Every casino today has a form of the data system invented at Harrah’s — most of them are now built by Bally. 'We are the envy of probably every consumer products industry out there because of the amount of data that we really have on our players,' said Price. Newer systems can even visualize heat maps of casino activity — an operator can see precisely how much is being spent in a specific time period in localized areas.

The data also vindicates Redd’s approach: the small slots customer, over a lifetime of spending, is just as valuable as the high roller. 'The slot player was the forgotten customer,' Loveman told Bloomberg BusinessWeek in 2010. 'I had to be willing to be unsexy in this,' Loveman added. 'I can take you to a casino that would have a lot of young beautiful people in there and you would say, ‘Man, this is a happening place.’ I could take you to another place where there are a lot of people who look like your parents. The latter would be a lot more profitable than the former. My job is to make the latter.'

After my trip to Vegas, I visited the Sugarhouse casino in Philadelphia, on the bank of the Delaware River. Sugarhouse opened in 2010 and is one of 12 casinos that turned Pennsylvania into a gaming powerhouse after legalization in 2004. The casino’s interior — clear passageways, a clean line of sight from the eastern to western walls — brimmed with activity on a Tuesday evening. Sugarhouse squealed with the cacophony of slots and the saccharine melodies sounded like a thousand robots blowing bubbles. (The slot manufacturer Silicon Gaming decided at one point that soundtracks in the key of C were the most agreeable.)

In 11 years of legalized gaming, the state has earned $3 billion from table games and $17 billion from slots. Table players at Sugarhouse made their wagers at an island amidst an ocean of slots. As I made my way through the casino, I struck up a conversation with two slot players: Diane Singleton, a 45-year-old retiree; and Jack, who refused have his last name published. The two were playing Fu Dao Le, whose theme can only be described as Cherubic Chinese Babies. The game was loaded onto a ProWave cabinet, and a red cursive Bally logo hung in the upper right corner of the screen.

I asked what they enjoyed about the game. Jack said that unlike other games, Fu Dao Le is 'highly interactive.' He likes the game’s 'kooky stuff; you can touch the display,' he said, touching the image of cherubic babies above the reels, causing them to laugh with a Pillsbury Doughboy-like giggle.

Jack and Singleton say they’ve both earned 'Black Cards' through Sugarhouse’s player tracking system, meaning they’ve each spent more than $10,000 here. Jack says the casino has comped them four cruises so far; Singleton says she threw her card away because it reminded her of how much money she’d spent. I had more questions, but at a certain point it became apparent that Singleton was no longer listening.

'She’s in the zone right now,' said Jack.

The 'zone' is at the core of Schüll’s theory about the success and proliferation of slot machines. She heard the term over and over again in her 15 years of research — the players repeatedly told her that they played to zone out, to escape thought.

To understand the zone, you first have to understand 'flow,' the concept developed by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe a hyperfocused state of absorption. During 'flow,' time speeds up (hours feel like minutes) or slows down (reactions can be made instantly) and the mind reaches a state of almost euphoric equilibrium. Schüll, in her book, describes Csikszentmihaly’s four criteria of flow: '[F]irst, each moment of the activity must have a little goal; second, the rules for attaining that goal must be clear; third, the activity must give immediate feedback; fourth, the tasks of the activity must be matched with challenge.' For most of their history, slots easily fulfilled the first two criteria; after lowering volatility, they fulfilled the third criterion, and with the introduction of multiple lines, endless bonus rounds, and the occasional mini-game, they finally fulfilled the four criteria.

The 'zone' is flow through a lens darkly: hyperfocused, neurotransmitters abuzz, but directed toward a numbness with no goal in particular. When Singleton emerged from the zone, I asked her again why she found the slots so compelling. 'I lost my husband two years ago to throat cancer,' she explained. 'He was the love of my life, and I started doing this just to — I was out of my mind and spent a lot of time at the cancer center.' Jack had lost his son to pancreatic cancer. As they told their stories, Jack and Singleton hit the spin buttons and the machines blared so loudly that their words were lost in the noise.

Singleton says she never recovered from the pain of her loss, and that’s why she keeps coming back to the slots. Jack echoed that sentiment: 'I don’t have to think. And I know I can’t win.'

'Right, so you know that,' said Singleton.

'Every now and then…you get something,' Jack agreed.

'But it’s never what you lost.'

'Because I don’t care whether I win 38 cents or 600 dollars.'

'You just want to see them again.'

Singleton rifled through her wallet filled with $100 bills. 'I’ll be right back, guys,' she said, and went off to get change.

Back at the Bally showroom, Trask and I had sat in front of the company’s new Duck Dynasty game. 'There’s never been more slot machines in the world than there are today,' he said. 'And that’s proliferation not just in the US, but abroad.' His hand rested on the game’s display, his index finger next to a reel symbol of a cast member sticking his tongue out and playing air guitar. Scientific Games’ market now includes 50 countries on six continents. This spring, the company announced it was planning on providing 5,000 of the 16,500 machines recently authorized in Greece.

The industry is also preparing for the eventual deterioration of its key middle-aged demographic and competition from free-to-play mobile games. 'People only have so much leisure time and there’s a lot of activity on iPhones,' Price told me. At one point in the Bally’s warehouse, Trask said, 'You know how you get people younger to gamble? Hand them a fucking telephone.'

The industry seems to be working on the same hunch. In 2011, Caesar’s acquired Playtika, an online casino games company that offers free and paid mobile games. A year later, IGT acquired the free casino games app DoubleDown, which runs as both a stand-alone mobile app and through Facebook. The company now offers online table games and a good sample of its portfolio of slots, including Wheel of Fortune, to mobile players. Earlier this year, the gaming giant appointed former Zynga studio manager Jim Veevart as DoubleDown’s vice president of games. And last year, Churchill Downs Incorporated, which runs seven casinos in addition to its Kentucky Derby racetrack, acquired the free games company Big Fish Games.

Meanwhile, the tech sector is adopting the principles of slot design for its own purposes. In the early aughts, the tech writer Julian Dibbell devised the concept of ludocapitalism, a term inspired by watching World of Warcraft players mine gold in the game to making a living in real life. Ludocapitalism was an attempt to explain the growing gamification of society through technology. Dibbell admits the concept’s parameters are vague, but at its most basic it identifies that capitalism can harness the human play drive for better or worse — and that increasingly, games aren’t allegories that say something about our lives; they are our lives. As people move toward more Schüll says. Writing in The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal tapped Schüll’s concept of the ludic loop to explain the inextricable entrancement of flipping through Facebook photos: you push a button over and over, primed for an eternally fleeting informational reward.

A more exact replica of a slot may be Tinder. The mechanics of the dating app mirror the experience of playing slots: the quick swiping results in an intermittent reward of connection, followed by the option to either message your potential date or 'Keep playing.' Tinder recently launched a premium version that allows the user to undo an accidental 'not interested' swipe, essentially monetizing mistakes made while in the automatic rhythm of the zone.

'I can’t tell you how often I’ve been approached since the publication of my book by Silicon Valley types who say things like, ‘Wow, the gambling industry really seems to have a handle on this attention retention problem that we’re all facing,' Schüll told me. 'Will you come tell our designers how to do a better job?’'

Last year, Schüll heard from Nir Eyal, a tech entrepreneur who founded and sold two startup companies that produce advertisements in free-to-play games. '[Eyal] showed me his copy of my book, and it had, like, hundreds of hot pink sticky notes coming out of it,' she told me. In his 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products, Eyal laid out his 'Hook Model' of product development that works on basic behaviorist principles: a trigger turns into an action turns into a variable reward turns into a further personal investment back into the product. Last year, he invited Schüll to speak at his Habit Summit, hosted at Stanford. Schüll gave a talk on the 'dark side of habits,' placing slot machines on the undesirable end of the habit spectrum.

Eyal told me he invited Schüll to offer a less self-congratulatory, 'rah-rah' voice to the conference. Although the conference focused on how to build habit-forming tech products, 'These techniques — they have a dark side,' he said. 'If not used appropriately, or if used for nefarious purposes, then they don’t always benefit the user.'

Still, it was difficult to determine whether Schüll’s slot research has been received as a warning or a how-to guide within tech. Eyal criticized slot machines for what he said was a business model dependent on addicted players — 'that industry, I have a problem with,' he said. But Hooked is in many ways tech’s version of Addiction by Design: his model of successful product design is a loop going from 'trigger' to 'action' to 'variable reward' to 'investment' and back again. In his trigger section, Eyal uses Instagram to illustrate how emotional pain can be a powerful motivator to use a product — in that app’s case, the mostly insubstantial pain of lost memories. He writes, 'As product designers it is our goal to solve these problems and eliminate pain…users who find a product that alleviates their pain will form strong, positive associations with the product over time.'

I asked Eyal what distinguishes mobile games or dating apps from slot machines. He gave a range of answers that sounded at once comprehensive and somewhat defensive — that tech addictions never really plummet to the league of gambling addiction; that people prone to addiction will be addicted no matter what — before finally admitting that, in a sense, everything functions like a slot machine.

'All content needs to be made interesting. What you’re doing as a writer is introducing variable rewards into your story. Everything that engages us, all pieces of content are engineered to be interesting,' he said. 'Movies aren’t real life, books aren’t real life, your article isn’t real life. It’s manufactured to pull us one sentence after another through mystery, through the unknown. It’s a slot machine. Your article is a slot machine. It has to be variable. So just because an experience introduces variability and mystery — that’s good!'

'I think the answer is, it’s okay to addict people as long as your business model doesn’t depend on it,' he said, as if finally finding the answer to a problem that had long seemed without a solution. 'That’s the answer,' he added. 'That’s the answer.'

Correction: a previous version of this article stated that modern slots have a 45 percent payback rate. In fact, they pay out on approximately 45 percent of all spins. In addition Nir Eyal's Hooked was published in 2014, not 2003.

Photography by Tiffany Brown Anderson

Edited by Michael Zelenko

Casinos have more slot machines than all of the other games combined. But unlike many casino games, the slots still have some secrets.

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Here’s a list of 15 slot machine secrets the casinos don’t want you to know about.

1. Slot placement isn’t random

Although casinos would like you to think that everything on the floor is placed in a completely random way for ease of access and aesthetics, this certainly isn’t the case.

Every square foot of the casino is analyzed, measured, and reported on by the casino gaming department. Traffic patterns are monitored and value is placed on certain areas of the casino to determine which slots or games to place in that area.

Usually, the highest yield slots are placed in the most popular locations in the casino. On top of this, the most popular slots are also placed in these areas to attract players into the casino to play.

So now you know that those slots that are most prominent and visible are the ones that make the most money for the casino, which means they’re also the most disadvantageous for the player. Head towards the back of the casino next time you want to play slot machines to find a better value.

2. Some slots pay out more than others

Not all slot machines are created equal, and this means they all don’t pay out at the same rate.

Generally speaking, video slots pay out less than classic reel slots. This is because reel slots are cheaper to run and maintain, and aren’t as appealing to the player as the video slot.

Video slots are now extravagant and have pop-culture themes, which attracts more players. Because of this, the casinos can dial down the payout rate.

Alternatively, the classic slots aren’t as popular or appealing anymore so the casinos will dial up the payout rate to attract more players, and subsequently keep you at the slot longer. I suggest you do a bit of searching on the internet about slot payout rates as this information is widely available, particularly for popular gaming locations.

3. The slots club doesn’t exist to reward you

This is one of the biggest cons in the gambling industry. You know how the casinos promote themselves as giving back to the player and rewarding you for your play? This is all a lie.

Now, I’m not saying you won’t get some free play credits, access to promotions, and other comps for being a part of the slot or player’s club, but this isn’t why it exists. It exists to provide the casino marketing department with player data so that they can attract and retain you as a customer.

Yes, that’s right, all the free money and comps you get out of the casino are from the marketing department. They will analyze your play, movement, likes, dislikes, and betting patterns to determine how best to market themselves to you so that you return.

The slots club is a powerful marketing tool, and while it’s always a good idea to join and use your card whenever you play, don’t fool yourself into thinking that this is all done to reward you.

4. You can’t win at slots in the long run

People do win at slots all the time. They have big wins and small wins; the problem is that on a long enough timeline it’s impossible to win.

Slots are manufactured and programmed in a way to ensure that they only pay back a certain percentage of the money that’s placed into them by players. Usually, this is in the range of 70-90% but it can be far worse or better depending on where you’re playing.

No one would ever play if you didn’t win from time to time, so this is also built into the machines. Some casinos don’t want you to know this and in some US states, they don’t even have to tell you what the payout rate is. Fortunately, there are many states that do provide it to players, and I highly recommend taking advantage of that information.

Although it’s pretty common these days for players to know that you can’t win in the long run, some still don’t know, and those that are oblivious to this fact are loved by casinos.

5. Max betting is the best option

This one may seem counter-intuitive but it’s true. On most slots, max betting activates all the bonuses and jackpots and increases your odds of getting lucky and winning, which makes it the best option for players.

Although it doesn’t make too much of a difference, it still creates more favorable conditions for the player. The casinos don’t want you to know this because they want you to bet small and more often at a worse payout rate, which makes them more money in the long run.

One thing you certainly don’t want to do though is max-bet above your bankroll and burn through more money than you intended to. Playing more than you can afford to lose is playing right into the casino’s hands. If you can’t afford the max bet on a slot then drop down in denominations or move to a machine where the max bet is smaller and works within your bankroll.

6. Class 2 slots aren’t really slots at all

Sometimes you’ll come across slot machines that are classified as class 2 slots. These are usually found on native Indian reservations or racinos in the United States.

These aren’t traditional slots like what you would find in Las Vegas. Vegas slots are Class 3 slots and are proper slot machine games.

Class 2 slots are actually pre-programmed bingo games which present a slot face for entertainment purposes. Class 3 slots are usually illegal in the jurisdictions that have these slots bingo games, so game manufacturers and casinos combined their forces to come up with this alternative.

Sometimes you’ll see a small bingo card on the bottom corner of the screen which will straight away tell you that this is a class 2 slot machine. So, be warned, these machines are not slots at all and you’ll be effectively playing computer bingo when you start spinning on these.

7. Video slots pay out less than classic slots

Big fancy video slots will almost always pay out less than classic reel slots. This is because of the fact they’re more entertaining, draw more players and action, and cost the casinos a lot more to run and maintain.

These big machines often take up two to three times the amount of space compared to classic slots and tend to cost the casinos a lot more to keep them running. In order to maximize profits, the casinos will then dial down the payout rate on these machines so they still make enough money on them.

Immersive video slots are a huge moneymaker for the casino, so don’t go in thinking you have the same chance of winning on these compared to traditional old school slots. If you’re looking for better chances to win on slot machines, then stick to the classic slots.

8. Slots are completely random

Casinos don’t want you to know this, but slot machines are completely random in nature. Although they are weighted to pay out at a certain rate, this is still in line with the randomness of results that a slot will produce.

Each spin is completely independent of the previous spin. As an example, if you were to win the jackpot on one spin, then the likelihood of winning the jackpot on the next spin is exactly the same. No previous events impact future events. This isn’t how they work.

Casinos don’t want you to know this because they want you to think slots are “hot” or “cold”, because that will cloud your judgment in respect to how much you play and gamble. This works out better for them in the long run so they are happy for these myths to grow and spread.

9. All of your play is tracked

From the moment you sit down at a slot and enter your player card and cash, every movement you make is tracked automatically by the casino. Slot machines are now networked and have sophisticated hardware and software to track everything you do.

This information is collected, analyzed, and insight reports are developed and delivered to the casino marketing department so they can work out the best possible way to market their casino and slots to you so that you keep coming back and play more. If you don’t want your play tracked then simply don’t use your player’s card, but then you won’t get any casino comps.

In the near future, if it’s not being used already, casino marketing departments will start using security infrastructure to monitor and track your play irrespective of whether you use your card or not. Facial recognition programs will detect you, associate you with a player’s card or create a new player account and track everything you do on a video feed.

This is a bit scary and it shows the lengths casinos will go to. If you play online, everything is tracked under your player account, so it’s easier for online casinos to monitor what you do in this respect.

10. Payout tickets are more likely to be put back into a machine

Over the past 20 years, casinos have slowly phased out cash payouts at slots. These days you’ll likely receive a ticket when you cash out, which you then must take to a cash-out machine or the cage to exchange for cash.

While the casinos will claim this is for your convenience, one of the main reasons they’ve made this change is to disassociate you from the fact you’re holding money. This is similar to what they do with chips on table games.

Psychological studies have proven that people are far more likely to gamble more with a ticket or chips, as opposed to cash. So don’t be fooled into placing your ticket into another slot on the way to cashing out, they’ve done this on purpose. I’d recommend that you always cash the tickets out for cash every time, instead of keeping it for play later.

11. Slot arms don’t exist as much anymore because they slow down play

Back in the day, pretty much every slot machine had an arm, or lever, that you pull to activate the spin. These days it’s much harder to find machines that have these.

While there are a few reasons for this, the main reason and the one the casinos don’t want you to know is because using a lever is much slower when compared to pressing a button. Casinos want you to be playing as quickly as possible when it comes to slots because the more you spin the more the odds move in their favor.

So by having buttons instead of levers the game moves a lot faster. Some may even say they’ve removed the lever so people don’t refer to slot machines as one-armed bandits anymore, but that may just be here-say.

12. Games are designed to be played as fast as possible

As we touched on in the previous secret, casinos want you to play whatever game you’re on as quickly as possible. While one of the main measurements on a slot is the time spent playing, they also want you to play as quickly as possible.

This increases the yield on the machine for the casino, meaning they make more money. Consider this, if you have a bank of widely popular slots which many people want to play, and it takes 20 seconds per spin, that’s quite a lot of time.

If a spin takes five seconds then you’re getting four times the amount of play on that machine which results in much more money passing through. So, all the time the casinos are trying to think of ways to make games happen much faster. They don’t want you playing slowly, so make sure you take your time next time you sit down at a slot. After all, the more time you play the more entertainment value you get.

13. Slot sounds and graphics are designed to make you feel happy

One thing that casinos certainly don’t want you to know about is the fact that slot machine manufacturers have teams of psychologists and researchers that provide advice on what sounds, colors, movements and graphics to use in games in order to make the player feel as happy as possible.

This is both good and bad. Firstly, it’s good if you’re playing for entertainment’s sake and know your limits when it comes to how much money you’re willing to play with. If this is the case then why not play a game that’s designed to make you feel happy.

Secondly, it’s bad when it comes to problem gamblers who don’t know when to stop and are chasing that happy feeling that the games give them. So this is a two-way street; that’s for sure. Casinos probably don’t want you to know this because it isn’t a great look.

14. Sometimes a win isn’t a win

One recent trend on slots is to play a jingle and show an animation showing that a player has had a win; this used to be a good thing and it meant you were making a profit, but not so much these days.

Much to the ire of lawmakers and the regulators, slot machines now play this jingle and imply a win, even when the spin results in less money won than you actually wagered on that spin in the first place. So this is essentially a loss and it’s trying to trick the player into thinking that they won.

Regulators are trying to have this outlawed but it will take some time. So, next time you’re playing don’t be fooled by the animation and sounds and the on-screen advice that says you’ve had a win. Make sure you check how much you ‘won’ when compared to how much you bet, before you celebrate.

15. Major progressive jackpots are played across multiple venues

Have you ever walked past a progressive jackpot slot machine and stared in awe at the huge jackpot which is currently available and is running into the millions of dollars?

If so, then you may not be aware that these slots are actually linked nationwide and the jackpot is played across thousands and thousands of machines and the casinos actually have no part in this prize.

How To Stop Slot Machine Gambling Clip Art Black And White

Casinos don’t want you to know this of course; they want you to think that it’s just that machine so that you sit down and play and spin away thinking that you’re the only person who could possibly win that prize at that time.

Gambling Slot Machines

These major progressive jackpot machines actually take a small cut from each bet you make and divert it to the major jackpot. So you should never play on one of these unless your ultimate goal is to win the life-changing money, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.

Conclusion

Casinos are designed to make money just like any business. The slot machines are a big piece of the profit puzzle so the casinos do everything they can to make them more profitable.

How To Stop Slot Machine Gambling In Las Vegas

Now that you know these 15 slot machine secrets the casinos don’t want you to know you can gamble as an informed player. If you love slots there’s no reason to stop playing, but you should know these secrets before you play again.