Ask the Slot Expert: To be progressive or not to be progressive

Question: There are 3 new machines in Mesquite, NV, that have progressive 5 play for dollars. But only 3 of the lines are progressive, the other 2 lines remain at $4000. Is this legal?

Answer: I don't know of any regulation that this situation violates. Any entry on a payable can be progressive or fixed.

This is very unusual, though. Every multi-hand machine I've seen has either paid a fixed amount for all royal flushes or a progressive on each hand.

Unusual. Yes. Illegal? No.

Last week I wrote about something I call overlay symbols on Diamond Quick Hit Link. These are symbols that appear over a symbol on a reel and then disappear.

This isn't my first experience with overlay symbols. I was rather fond of a Lord of the Rings machine on which an archer would randomly appear in a bottom corner of the machine and shoot an arrow that may trigger a bonus feature. As I recall, the help screens said that the archer was more likely to appear the higher your bet.

Last week I concluded that an advantage of overlay symbols is that a slot designer can make them appear more frequently for players who bet more and, thus, increase their long-term payback while playing the machine without having to change the reel layout. Back in the olden days, when slots still ran on steam, designers had to alter reel layouts to alter paybacks.

You might be wondering why this algorithm doesn't violate the regulation against secondary decisions.

In the early days of computerized slots, a manufacturer (Universal) looked at the results of spins on a slot machine and thought that a losing spin of blank-jackpot-jackpot isn't nearly as exciting as jackpot-jackpot-blank. They thought that as long as the player was going to lose on the spin, let's make the reels stop on a almost-high-paying near miss.

As the algorithm was described for me, the program would either pick a specific winning combination or loser. If loser was chosen, the machine would then choose a particular losing combination.

The problem with this procedure is that it gave players a false impression of how likely it was to land a high-value symbol on the payline. They appeared more frequently than they would have if each virtual stop was equally likely to land. As a result, Nevada regulators required that the symbols must be chosen by numbers from the RNG and those symbols must be displayed to the player without any alteration.

Players actually can estimate the payback of a traditional, reel-spinning slot without bonus features if they're willing to put in the work. You can track the symbols that land on the payline for a few thousand spins to get a pretty good estimate of how likely it is to land a symbol on the payline on a reel. You can then calculate the probabilities of landing the winning combinations and, thus, the machine's long-term payback. This procedure didn't work on Universal's machines.

Overlay symbols are allowed because they do not alter the result chosen by the RNG. Players aren't led to believe symbols are more likely to land on the payline than they acutally are. Overlay symbols are just a mechanism to randomly trigger a bonus feature on some spins.

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.

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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.