Building upon a piece I wrote recently about players thinking the worst of casinos, another common gripe I see from a certain subset of players is that casinos want players to lose every penny because they’re greedy. Do casinos really want to win every penny from every player?
STATUS: No. In fact, they know that’s not a successful business model.
Those who have been reading this site throughout the past year know that casinos have a payback model that effectively, over time, earn them money on every game offered in the casino. Those are set at a number high enough that generally more than 90 percent of every wager ends up being returned to players in some form of winnings.
Casinos understand that exciting moments and experiences is good PR and worth of mouth. A player hitting a jackpot, coming home a winner, having an epic round on craps, and so on are stories players tell other players, and become moments of joy that they can share and experience.
The casinos will put up pictures on their website or around the casino of recent winners to tout the possibility. Others have counters that run showing how much people are winning on slots, jackpots, tables, or whatnot.
Of course, not every player or session can be a winner – we know the casino has to make money on some percentage of players. Some players will lose their entire bankroll, some will lose some, still others will break even, and there’s a subset that will win on a given visit. A few could win a lot!
But a casino business model wouldn’t succeed if it just quickly bled every player that walked in dry. For one, that wouldn’t be fun, and so players wouldn’t come back. It also would mean sessions wouldn’t be long enough for people to get any entertainment out of it, and not enough players actually playing because they’d be broke too soon.
Games have various levels of volatility, of ups and downs, but ultimately there will be some winners and some losers. The casino model counts on it. If a casino feels like it’s constantly a hard time for you, there’s probably another player who thinks it’s their personal ATM.
