There’s nothing quite like snatching victory from the jaws of defeat to make you feel good about a day in the casino. One big win at the end that erases previous losses and makes you a winner doesn’t happen anywhere near often enough, but it feels great when it does.
I’ve often told slot machine players that when they play pick’em bonus rounds, their choices make a real difference.
For most of us, hitting a really big jackpot is a rare event. You never know when — if ever — the next will come.
The event has seemed to be not so rare for one woman, according to a reader who wrote that his sister-in-law had two $20,000 jackpots in a month and a dozen or more of $10,000-plus in the last three or four years.
Regular readers know that I love to hear close encounters of the winning kind. Slot and video poker players have been great about emailing me their experiences in winning back to back jackpots, or at least jackpots within a few plays of each other.
The latest comes from Suzanne, a video poker player who wasn’t sure her story qualified because it involved royal flushes by two different players.
It’s not difficult to see patterns in wins and losses, and it’s all too easy to jump to conclusions based on small samples. Over the years I’ve fielded questions from readers who wondered if they should skip drawing to four-card straights because they missed several times in a row and from others who were convinced 20 was a losing hand in blackjack because they dealer drew a few 21s to beat them one night.
The Internal Revenue Service has proposed changes to federal tax requirements on that could triple the amount of paperwork when we win big on slots, video poker and other electronic casino games. In one proposal, you’d still have to sign form W-2G on any jackpot of $1,200 or more, but also would require casinos to use their player tracking systems to trigger tax forms on cumulative winnings of $1,200 or more above losses in one day.
Video poker games are designed to be as random as humans can program a computer to be. The odds of drawing winning hands are the same as cards were dealt from a real deck.
Still, when odd streaks happen, players can’t help but wonder if something more is going on.
When you’re a smaller slot manufacturer trying to compete with the likes of IGT, Bally, WMS and Aristocrat, you need to be nimble, creative and innovative.
Multimedia Games has been all of that, and expects to keep bringing the innovation now that it has been acquired by Global Cash Access. The new company is in the process of rebranding, and will reveal a new name in late August.
Video poker players in the know understand that on most games, payback percentages are changed by altering the returns on full houses and flushes. A “9-6” Jacks or Better game, where full houses pay 9-for-1 and flushes 6-for-1, returns 99.5 percent with expert play. If instead you see 8-5 Jacks or Better, meaning full houses pay 8-for-1 and flushes 5-for-1, then the average return is 97.3 percent with expert play.
However, when progressive jackpots are involved, even a game with a lower pay table can have high average returns.
Players usually don’t notice, or even have a chance to see, behind-the-scenes procedures that are important to the house.
Every year, the bag of tricks slot machine designers use to keep the games fun to play and the customers coming back grows a little. Second-screen pick’em bonuses, free spins, bonuses within bonuses, shared community style events, mystery jackpots — the list goes on and on.
Back when slot machines were a three-reel world, progressive jackpots were available only to those willing to bet the max. If you weren’t going to bet three coins, or two coins on some high-denomination machines, you weren’t going to be eligible for the progressive.
Neither straight flushes nor four of a kinds are exactly common in video poker. But the foursomes come up more than 20 times as often as the straight flushes, and in games such as Double Bonus Poker, Double Double Bonus Poker, Super Aces and more, all quads at least equal the straight flush payoff of 250 coins for a five-coin bet.
Slot jackpots occur randomly. There’s no way to tell when one might be coming. That goes for casino operators as well as for players. The people who run the casinos don’t know when the big hits are coming.
Still, a reader was taken aback when she heard what a casino employee said one night.
Slot machines have been with us ever since Charles Fey invented the Liberty Bell slot in San Francisco in the 1890s. Those early slots were mechanical, and if you knew the number of symbols per reel, you could calculate the odds.
If a game had three reels with 10 symbols on each reel, and one top jackpot symbol per reel, then the odds of hitting the top jackpot were 1 in 10 x 10 z 10, or one in 1,000.
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