Today Las Vegas is a slot machine players paradise, but Vegas hasn't always been full of slots. In the 1950s and 1960s table games such as Blackjack, Roulette and Poker dominated floor space in the casinos.
Slot machines where first introduced into Vegas casinos to provide the wife's and girlfriends of table game players with some entertainment whilst their partners played blackjack and baccarat. The simplicity of playing slots appealed to the those's with little or no knowledge of playing table games.
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Slot machines can also be played for very small stakes, the minimum bet on a hand of blackjack in a vegas casino is around $10 - compared this with a slot machine which can play for as little as $0.05c! it wasn't long before the casinos realized that the revenues from slot machines was getter larger than those from traditional table games. Slowly but surely the casinos started to make more floor space available to slots, today a typical Vegas casino will make around 70% of it's total profits from slot machines.
The slots make great business for the casinos, after all they don't need to pay a dealer to man them, slots are incredible hard to cheat and most slots in Vegas payout with a voucher so the casinos don't even have to employ anyone to empty the machines of cash! To be fair to the casinos they are only reacting to the demand from customers - and the demand for bigger and better slots is raising all the time. Walk into any Vegas casino and you will see massive jackpots luring players into the casino entrance - prize money can range from $100,000 to several million dollars.
Hard cash isn't the only prize on offer, it isn't unusual to see slots offering new cars as prizes and there is even one slot that pays out in real diamonds! Whilst these machines may be a little gimmicky they are no less popular. The average payout for a vegas casino on slots is around 91.74% this drops to 85.2% if you play at a slot in the Vegas airport departure lounge - the best payout rates can be found at Palms casino (93.42%) still that gives the casino a healthy 6.5% house edge, which is bigger than almost any table game.
Many professional gamblers would consider those odds very poor, as most of us are recreational gamblers we tend to care less about the odds and more about having fun. To put it into context, if you gamble $100 on a vegas slot machine in a 2 hour period you will lose about $7. Now if you take advantage of the free booze that is offered by casinos you could easily drink more than the $7 you will statistically lose over that time - I know I did! and if the gods are smiling on you you may also drop a mega jackpot to boot!
