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Advice & More July 2015

Deal Me In

Hitting the Big Kahuna – Possible, But Improbable

By Mark Pilarski

Progressive slot machines that offer super-sized, life-changing jackpots eventually are hit, as is a lottery. Unfortunately, on many, especially the wide area progressives, the chances of your hitting your state’s lotto might be easier.

Dear Mark: I just returned from Las Vegas and noticed every casino offers banks of slot machines that offer those huge progressive jackpots. Do those machines ever pay the progressive jackpot or is that the casino's way of getting people to pump in more of their money?  Gary C.

The allure of progressive slots, Gary, is always in the possibility of arriving by bus and departing in that new car showcased on top of a bank of progressive machines. Unfortunately, that appeal is far from reality.

Yes, progressive slot machines that offer super-sized, life-changing jackpots eventually are hit, as is a lottery. Unfortunately, on many, especially the wide area progressives, the chances of your hitting your state’s lotto might be easier.

Progressive slot machines come in three forms:

The Stand Alone Progressive can have a fixed top jackpot. On these machines, a specified percentage of the coins played is added to the award for the highest winning combination.

The second variety is Proprietary Progressives.  These are an in-house group of machines that are owned and operated by the casino and are linked together.

Your question most likely refers to what are called Wide Area Progressives. These machines are linked together from multiple unrelated casinos. Think MegaBucks and Quartermania. With these progressives, the casino shares in a percentage of the winnings, but here, IGT owns the games.

That sizeable progressive jackpot is established by taking a certain percentage of all monies played on the machines from throughout the network, with the jackpot continually climbing as more players play the machines.

Using a $1 Megabucks machine as an example, these progressives return approximately 87% back to players compared to a standard $1 slot that returns roughly 94%. That seven percent loss in your long-term return is tied up in a jackpot that you have little chance of hitting.

My recommendation, Gary, is to not make playing progressives the mainstay of your casino play. Your expectations when playing these machines should be based on pure luck akin to hitting a lottery ticket.

If you are still inclined to give them a shot, I suggest that you only put aside a small percentage of your playing bankroll, and recognize that the true entertainment value is that of fantasizing about champagne wishes and caviar dreams, and not necessarily winning.

 

Dear Mark: How many decks do the blackjack video machines use? R.R.

In the majority of gaming jurisdictions, video card games such as video blackjack are required to be based on random shuffles and deals that match those of the live table games they simulate. Typically, video blackjack is a one-deck game, and the deck is "shuffled" after every hand rather than playing to a virtual cut card, finishing the hand, and then reshuffling.

 

Dear Mark: I have always been curious as to how often the dealer busts. What is the average amount of times that it happens? Skip B.

How often the dealer busts, Skip, is dependent on his or her up-card. Excluding having a “natural 21,” if the dealer is showing a 7 – Ace, he or she will bust 17% of the time. If the up-card is a 2 – 6, they the dealer will but bust approximately 42% of the time. Overall, the dealer will bust about 28 percent of the time considering all possible dealer up-cards.

 

Gambling Wisdom of the Week: “Handling the luck through adjustments in your play, is one of the great arts in gambling.”
– Bobby Baldwin, Tales Out of Tulsa (1984).

 

For more gambling information, check out Mark at http://markpilarski.com

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