Does A Slot Machine Have To Take In More Money Than Its Jackpot Before It Can Pay? by John Robison
 
“I’m confused. Doesn’t a slot machine have to take in more money than its jackpot before it can pay it out? Do the casinos reset the machine when they empty the cash? Does the machine now have to start over building cash?”
 
Dear Confused,
Have you ever been in a casino right after it opened? You would have seen that many machines hit combinations that paid far more than the amount of money that the machines could have won from players up to that point in time. If you were lucky enough to be one of the first people through the door, you would have seen that some machines hit on the very first pull, maybe even for their jackpots.

The same thing happens with slots when they’re new to a casino floor. They may hit on the very first pull. Frequently they hit for more money than they’ve won from the players up to that point.

Slot regulations require that if a combination is displayed on a machine’s paytable, then it must be possible for the machine to hit that combination on every single spin. That means the machine must be able to hit the jackpot on every spin. How can a machine satisfy that requirement if it also has to take in more money than its jackpot is worth before it can pay it out? There’d have to be a series of spins on which the jackpot could not be hit.

Contrary to what you may have heard, slot machines in the U.S. do not have any kind of a governor function that makes the machines win a certain amount of money from their players before they hit particular combinations. The results of a spin, the symbols that land on the payline, are determined by one or more numbers generated by
the Random Number Generator (RNG) function in the slot machine’s program. The RNG doesn’t care about, or even know, how much money has been won by the machine. It continuously generates a stream of numbers without any outside influence. (This is how Class III machines, the machines in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Tunica, etc., operate. The Class II machines that you find in many Native American casinos operate differently, getting their results from a central server).

It’s difficult for me to convince players there is no governor function in a slot machine. To disprove players’ erroneous theories, I usually ask them to watch a machine and note what happens. They usually see very quickly that the results on the machine do not fit their theory. When they observe what happens on a machine to see if the results fit the governor function theory, however, they see that winning spins are usually followed by a series of losing spins. The results seem to fit the theory. It seems logical then to conclude that the machine has to take in money again before it can pay out another hit and therefore there is some sort of governor function causing this behavior.

We don’t need to look for some deus ex machina to explain what they observed on the machine. On most machines, a spin is more likely to result in a losing combination than a paying combination. That simple fact alone explains why winning spins tend to stand alone among losing spins, and why cold streaks tend to be longer than hot streaks. What the players observed is what we expect to see given the probabilities of having a winning or losing spin. No governor function needed.

At this point, you still have to take my word for it that machines do not have governor functions. For proof, let’s go and watch the machines some more. If someone playing one of the machines that we’re watching is lucky, we’ll see the player hit a jackpot followed by another jackpot a few spins later. If the player is really lucky, they’ll hit back-to-back jackpots. That hasn’t happened to me, not even “close proximity” jackpots, but back-to-back and near jackpots have been reported to me by sources I trust.

If machines had to take in the money to pay their jackpots before they could hit their jackpots, how do you explain the occurrences of close proximity and back-to-back jackpots? Most players think that slot machines are a license to print money for the casino. That’s true, but only in the long run. Because machines do not contain a governor function, casinos recognize that games may not be immediately profitable after they’re put on the slot floor. I attended a seminar that described how to calculate a game’s breakeven point, the number of hands or spins or whatever at which the casino will have broken even on running the game. If your theory about a machine needing to take in money before it could pay out were true, it would be impossible to calculate the breakeven point for a machine. Moreover, there would be no need to calculate it.

To answer your penultimate question, casinos do not reset machines when they empty the bill acceptors and coin buckets. The only thing the casino is doing is collecting the money. Nothing more.

— John Robison is an expert video poker player and author of The Slot Expert’s Guide to Playing Slots, $6.95, by Huntington Press (800) 244-2224. He is the managing editor of the gaming pages at rgtgaming.com.  Email: slotexpert@comcast.net.