Ask the Slot Expert: On the slot floor, sometimes the grass is greener on the other side

A long time ago, in a casino far, far away...

Actually, it was in The Mirage about 30 years ago. I was walking through the casino with my cousin's boyfriend.

As we passed a bank of upright video poker machines, he said, "I like to play those Draw Poker machines." Draw Poker was the name on the top glass.

I was just starting to get into video poker at this time. I said, "Draw Poker machines aren't all the same. Some pay better than others. These machines pay only 8 coins for a full house and 5 coins for a flush. Others pay 9 and 6." (The Mirage was never known as a good place for high-paying video poker, at least not in the lower denominations.)

I've told the following story many times in the past, but that won't stop me from telling it again. Caesars Palace used to send me good offers for free or reduced-rate rooms and meal comps. I always thought it was funny that it would mail me offers for free buffets, but there was no way I could play enough to earn a buffet comp.

I used to play video poker in a hall that, if I remember correctly, was between the main casino and the entrance to the Omnimax theater. I see that the Omnimax closed in 2000. I didn't think that my story could have occurred that long ago, but then I checked when Bellagio opened. That was 1998 and I stayed at Caesars so I could walk across the street and go to Bellagio on opening night. It could have been that long ago.

Caesars had a couple of rows of video poker machines in this area. Some were 9/6 JOB and others were 8/5. They were all mixed together. A 9/6 might have been between two 8/5s.

I'd frequently see people playing an 8/5 when the machine next to them was 9/6.

Around this time, a general rule of thumb from some video poker "experts" was to look for a machine that pays 9 for a full house and 6 for a flush. These are high-paying machines, they said.

That may be true for Jacks or Better, but not necessarily true for the various Bonus Poker paytable variations that were being introduced at the time.

Lenny Frome, the father of playing video poker with a mathematically derived strategy, wrote a message board post in which he said that the "look for 9/6" advice was like leading lambs to the slaughter. Some of those 9/6 paytables paid much less than 9/6 JOB.

The takeaway from these stories is to be aware of what a machine pays for its winning combinations.

The advice goes beyond video poker. Pay attention to payouts on slot machines, too.

Some online (for fun) casinos I've played slots at have games that I've never seen on a slot floor. Others have online versions of real games.

I play a lot of Mega Diamond Wild Stacks on the Station Casinos online site. I was pleasantly surprised to find the game on the slot floor in a Station Casino. (Actually, I saw it and noted the general area it was in so I could play it on my next visit. When I tried to find it again, I couldn't until I used the Slot Locator function in the Station Casino app to pinpoint its location.)

The casino has four Wild Stacks machines in a cluster. I sat down to play at one of them. It wasn't the exact game I played online, but it had the main feature I enjoyed: stacks of wild symbols on the reels.

I didn't know it at the time, but I learned that there are two Wild Stacks games -- Gold Inferno, the one I played in the casino, and Mega Diamond, the one I played online. All I had to do in the casino was to pay closer attention to the games in the cluster and I would have seen that there were two Gold Inferno machines and two Mega Diamond machines.

Many more machines have progressives today than in the past, particularly small numbers of machines that share a progressive. I think that's because the software to administer the progressive is built-in now instead of an add-on.

At first I didn't pay close attention to the paytables on the individual machines in the cluster of four Egyptian-themed slots I like.

The machines are part of something IGT calls Egyptian Link. Each machine has four jackpots: Grand, Major, Minor, and Mini. The values of the Minor and Mini are fixed and based on denomination. The value of the Grand is displayed in the top box on each machine and is the same on each machine. I didn't notice the first time I played at this cluster that the Major is different on each machine. After I learned that, I looked for the machine with the highest Major and only played that machine (even though I didn't think I was likely to hit the Major).

Scientists estimate that we filter out anywhere from 30% to 90% or even more of what we see. Our brains would be overwhelmed if they tried to process all of the visual data our eyes send to them.

The next time you pick out a slot, pay a little more attention to what it and the surrounding machines are showing you. You might find a better to machine to play.

If you would like to see more non-smoking areas on slot floors in Las Vegas, please sign my petition on change.org.

Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com.

Copyright © John Robison. Slot Expert and Ask the Slot Expert are trademarks of John Robison.

Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com. Because of the volume of mail I receive, I regret that I can't reply to every question.

Copyright © John Robison. Slot Expert and Ask the Slot Expert are trademarks of John Robison.