Is it wishful thinking that they may have slighly looser slots during opening week? I never experienced a casino's grand opening.
I'd lean toward this too, but all their slots should be server based so they could change percentages pretty easily.
With the server based machines and some creative marketing person I often wonder if they would loosen them up at the start of each evening to start the frenzy then tighten and the night progresses and the drinks are flowing.
Agree. To change the hold percentage of a machine, approval must go through the gaming control board. And while I'm not sure how being "server based" changes things, but I think each machine must still have it's own EPROM and RNG.
Yeah you need 4 minute idle periods minimum. Generally speaking I get the impression that slot floors don't change the payouts all that frequently even with server-based machines. Slot floors are generally pretty lazy. If I had to take a guess though, Cromwell will be one of the worse payback casinos in the CET Vegas empire.
Having been to a couple of Grand Openings in larger casinos, I cannot imagine what a cluster F this one is going to be, right there on the busiest corner of the strip, with that tiny of a footprint. While I would love to go, my better judgement is winning out and telling me to stay far far away.
Digging through Nevada regulations, I'm not sure prior approval of the commission is required. It's possible I missed it though, regulations are a bitch to read. For your home state, prior approval is clearly required.
My understanding, Nevada is the same. You have to do paperwork and such prior to swapping out EPROMs There was experimentation and investigation into server-based systems that allowed changing the hold percentage at will, after a certain idle time (as mentioned), but I do not believe that type of system was ever approved. They can be server based, but you can't just change the hold on the fly
In Nevada it is required for server based slots as well, but they grant the approval ahead of time, usually when the machines are being set up/installed. So the casino could have approval on a bank of machines to have the payback set anywhere from as low as 85% up to 98% and so long as their change falls within the approved range they are good and don't need a gaming agent present to change the settings.
Oh it's been approved for a long time. It just wasn't clear to me that you needed prior approval of the the commission. This wouldn't surprise me, but I never have found that actually on the books. Like I said, reading regulations is annoying. And considering Nevada should be the leader of the gaming industry, I feel their regulations are sub-par vs. some other states.
I've saw a person with a clipboard at PH go to various slots to look at some payout screen totals - is this a regular audit or do they do this when a machine pays excessively?
This is exactly what they did at downtown Grand with video poker at least. The speed in which they lowered the paytables was sick. They lowered them in about 3 days. May have done that with slots as well.
They could change the payout on a server based slot quickly. However, I can't remember a casino being tightened up later. They are generally tight from jump street.