I got this the other day from John Heaton…
In one of your recent blog posts, you wrote, "Don't play the slot machines at the airport." My sole Las Vegas gambling experience was at the airport, and I won seven bucks on one $0.75 spin. I take it this modest success was atypical?
No, it was probably typical in that seven bucks is about all the slots at the airport ever pay off. Elsewhere, they have been known to spit out payoffs in two, three, four, five, six and even seven figures.
It's pretty well-known in Vegas and Reno and places like that that slot machines are not set for loose playoffs in places where you play them because you're stuck there. If you're at the Tropicana and the machines just aren't paying off for you, you can walk across the street to the Excalibur or the MGM Grand and play there. If you're sitting near Gate 17 waiting for your flight to board in an hour and a lot's going in but nothing's coming out, where are you going to go?
The slots at the airport have no reason to be competitive. When someone scores a big win at a casino, the casino takes out ads and billboard proclaiming that Becky Lou Freebish from Walla Walla won three million bucks at their establishment. That's to entice gamblers who'll think that casino's slots must be easy to win on. When there's a huge payout at the airport, no one says, "Hey, let's go out and play the slots at the airport!" (For one thing, you can't if you aren't flying somewhere.)
There have been big jackpots at the airport slots but since those don't noticeably increase business there, how do you think the slots are set? Conventional wisdom among some slot players is that the machines at the airport are, these days, no worse than a lot of the slots in casinos. That may be so but the point is that there are better machines than others to play and you at least have a chance of finding one in other venues.