Knowing Which Vegas Slot Machines Payback More
It would be interesting if we could know the payback of all Vegas slot machines we play in casinos. It's possible but it would take real hard work.
Understandably, most casinos will not help us out with this information. It would be added work for them and it wouldn't help the house edge for them to do that. However, there are certain casinos that do inform the gambling public of the paybacks of their machines. These are casinos like the Riviera, Fitzgerald, and Stratosphere. They promote their Vegas slot machines that have 98 percent payback.
Indian casinos are mostly exempt from submitting reports on their returns, but not non-Indians. Thus, the Casino Player, a magazine that features casino slots, put out payback monthly reports of these casinos for public information. However, we have several setbacks on this. Sure, we are able to peek at return reports from casinos of the caliber of Tropicana and Showboat, and have a good idea of where the best slotting may be found, but the state of Nevada group them all under one heading.
And these are monthly returns, and sometimes it's hard to tell which is from jackpots and which are not. Looking for slots returns from a common heading with other casino games is hard enough, what more of differentiating returns. To top it all, video poker machine returns are also lumped in with these figures. So it becomes doubly difficult to tell which is which. Having return and payback reports en masse and not departmentalized would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Lastly, casinos owned by Native Americans are not obligated to submit return reports, thus, most of them don't, if not all.
But return and payback reports do help us know the regions that have the best payouts of Vegas slot machines. They're located there in North Las Vegas and most parts of Reno. Many are also located in Downtown Vegas. The worst are in Atlantic City, compared to not only other casinos in the region, but in the country. As expected, Vegas Strip in Nevada yields the most undesirable returns. In Vegas, it's a lot better to play slot machines than table cards games when we're talking of returns and paybacks.
It would very advantageous to see the return and payback repots on each machine we use to know their potential. But digging through all those files in hodge-podge order would make simply inserting coins and pulling the lever the better option.
