Saturday, March 4, 2006 | 7:22 a.m.
Take it from Bart Bye, there's nothing like the rush of hitting a royal flush on a video poker machine.
Unless, of course, you hit a few straights, full houses and flushes at the same time the royal hits.
"I usually get about two or three (royal flushes) a year," said Bye of Kamloops, British Columbia, as he played a multihand Ten Play Draw Poker game at Sam's Town - the type of game that local slot managers say is the most popular at the city's major locals casinos.
While video poker has been and continues to be the king of the slot floors of Las Vegas casinos, video slots with multiple lines and bonus play are getting a bigger piece of the slot floor.
Slot floor managers keep a close watch on the level of play and patterns that emerge, making various adjustments to keep the most popular games in front of the most players.
Local slot experts say low-denomination video slots have started getting more attention for the same reasons multihand video poker is so popular - people can play for a long time on a small budget.
"I've played for quite awhile on $3," said Pat McAlister, a tourist from St. Louis who was playing 25 poker hands simultaneously at 5 cents a hand on a Hundred Play Draw Poker machine.
The multihand games, introduced by Las Vegas-based Action Gaming and distributed by slot giant International Game Technology, allow players to draw a hand, select the best cards for a main hand, then redeal to up to 100 hands from up to 100 decks of cards.
If the player has good cards in the main hand, the "held" cards are kept for all subsequent hands - making the chances very good that several winning hands will be dealt in the second and further deals. The whole process occurs in seconds.
A summary of winning hands and the payout appears on the screen so the player knows exactly how much is returned for each penny wagered.
Betting a penny a hand, one 100-hands play costs $1. If one of the pennies hits a royal flush, it's worth only about $2.50. But the other winning hands add up to a bigger payout.
While Action Gaming's multihand machines are popular among players - and usually are the most profitable for the casinos - you may not see many of them on casino floors. That is because they are "participation" games for which casinos pay a royalty of $15 to $25 per day.
Most slots are purchased outright, allowing the casino to keep all the revenue they generate. Experts say it takes only a few weeks for a good machine to pay for itself. Only about 4 percent of the machines on Station Casinos' floors are participation games.
The multiline video slot machines with a variety of themes are gaining popularity because symbols no longer must come up in a straight line to produce a winner.
Some machines, characterized by dazzling colors zigzagging across the symbols on the screen, have as many as 40 different combinations of winning lines.
But while the multiline, low-denomination games are gaining, poker is still the game of choice for most players.
About 55 percent of the more than 3,000 slot machines at Sam's Town have some form of video poker, said Andre Filosi, director of operations at Sam's Town. That's about standard for locals properties across the city.
Dan Roy, senior vice president of operations for Station Casinos, said the most popular games on his floors are multihand, low-denomination offerings because of their versatility.
Easy access on the floor and buzz about the games usually lure players to the most popular slots. Roy said he and his staff of eight dedicated to the slot floor talk regularly to players and monitor reports on each machine to see which ones are performing best.
Roy said the company has several options if a machine starts to underperform. The casino can move it to a different location on the floor, change denominations and, on some slots, change themes.
Sometimes, casino companies contact machine distributors to see what is working at other locations. For companies such as Station Casinos, which will have about 23,000 slots in town when Red Rock Resort opens next month, machines can even be moved to other casinos.
In some cases, when a machine's popularity runs its course, it is simply sold to another company and a new, more versatile replacement purchased.
Most often, new software is installed and themes are modified because most of today's video slots are built to be easily changed.
Dale Hambleton, director of slot operations at Cannery Resorts, which also operates the Rampart Casino in Summerlin, said the trend toward video slots became apparent about four years ago.
"It used to be that video poker had about 80 percent of the floor and 20 percent was reel slots," Hambleton said of slot floors in general. "In the last four years, it has shifted with about 60 percent poker and the rest a mix of video and reel slots."
The biggest shift he has seen has been to the low-denomination play.
"They call them penny slots, but they're not really pennies," Hambleton said. "The average bet is around 35 to 50 cents, but there are many more ways to win, which is what keeps the players interested."
The next big shift in the industry will be the arrival of so-called downloadable server-based games.
Roy said that will take slot floors to a new level because managers will be able to change the game, its look and its denomination with a few strokes on a computer keyboard that controls a central server.
The technology, expected to be introduced later this year, will give casinos the ability to offer games and denominations that appeal to an afternoon crowd and then modify it for a different demographic of player that arrives in the evening.
archive
