I’ve never been one to be drawn to gambling myself. It can be a nice distraction but if I’m down 10 or 20 dollars I can’t bring myself to keep spending more money on such entertainment.
How about you?
A reader asks the Slot Expert: Cold Winter Means Bad Video Poker in Wisconsin?
The Golden Age of video poker is over. When I started going to casinos regularly in the late 1990s, 9/6 Jacks machines were plentiful even on the Las Vegas strip and a dollar through a video poker machine counted the same as a dollar through a slot machine. Today good video poker paytables are getting harder to find and most slot clubs require more play from video poker players than slot players to earn the same reward. (We really can’t complain, though, when the long-term paybacks on video poker are much higher than those on the slots.)
I checked online and found that the Potawatomis have a compact with the state of Wisconsin, so their casinos offer Class III machines. When they changed the paytables on their video poker machines, they lowered the long-term paybacks on the machines.
I don’t think you can blame the change on the cold winter, though. It’s more likely due to an overall strategy of trying to earn more revenue from the slot floor. Many casinos are replacing their high-paying video poker paytables with lower-paying paytables without going through a brutal winter.