Professors advise to lower RTP, punters will not notice anyway

Professors advise to lower RTP, punters will not notice it is not often heard that university professors are researching pokies. Usually only the negative impact of gambling on people is studied. But professors at the University of Nevada (UNLV), Anthony Lucas and San Diego State University, Katherine Spilde, are not interested in gambling addiction.online casino nz And they will not please the punters with their conclusions. The results of their research were recently published. They studied the behavior of punters playing pokies in land-based casinos, and as a result, they concluded that punters are not able to feel the difference in what percentage of return pokie

offers.

... That is, slightly lower or slightly higher, it will not be noticeable to users. Based on these conclusions, they recommended that gambling establishments slightly lower the return on all pokies, which, in their opinion, should lead to a good additional profit. Namely, $ 100 per day from each machine, which should additionally bring $ 40,000 per year. And according to some of the data they received, this is generally $ 60,000 annually. Considering that there may be hundreds of pokies in a casino, this really must have sounded tempting for a casino. Anthony Lucas commented: “If punters could feel the difference, we would expect to see them move from high to low house edge games, but we are not. We look at the difference and it stays as flat as an ironing board. ” He goes on to advise operators that many punters would be unhappy with %s... “I would slowly increase the lead and watch the results. I think the establishments are missing out on a lot of money. We have no evidence of brand damage in the sense that people will leave casinos and play elsewhere. Time goes by, and games with reduced reimbursement work in the same way. I don’t understand where the concern about this came from." Industry Opinion It is believed that house edge affects the length of a gaming session. If the advantage of the casino is doubled, then the punters will spend half the time at the pokie. Managers trust punters to notice the difference %s... However, Anthony Lucas strongly disagrees with this. This is not true at all. The house edge has practically no effect on the length of the pokie game. The time behind the pokie is affected by the variance, but you can't convince these guys. By changing the variance in the paytable, you can completely eliminate the theory that house edge affects the duration of the game on the pokie. This is tragic. You spend all your time and energy to arrange pokies, spend on marketing and make promises to punters who expect a different result and therefore do not go to play in other casinos, all in order to get access to more rewarding pokies. In reality, they do not get another experience %s... This is bad for trust because you feel like the ad is cheating.online casino nz This is the risk of damage to the brand. Alternative Opinion According to Anthony, it is very easy to increase casino revenues. You just need to rip off more money from visitors, reducing the percentage of return on pokies. They won't notice it anyway. But there are those who do not agree with this opinion, they consider the method of analysis itself inaccurate, and the conclusions are fundamentally wrong, and even dangerous. On this topic, Relax presented Magnetz, a pokie with magnetic force. If the government believes that the whole problem is to lower the return on pokies, they can raise taxes on the establishments. After all, according to the professor's conclusions, it costs nothing to earn more money %s... Mike Meczka, a consultant to marketing research firm MM/RC Inc., says gamblers can determine what percentage of bets a casino is holding. He says that as time goes by and frequent punters, those top 20% of visitors who generate 80% of the income can definitely tell the difference between a casino advantage of 7% and 9%. How the study was conducted The study was conducted in numerous casinos in Mexico, Australia and the United States. Two identical pokies were observed for nine months. The casino advantage of these pokies ranged from a minimum of 7.98% to 14.93% %s... The results of the study showed that there is no evidence that punters leave pokies with a large house edge and go to those that give a lower percentage to the casino. However, the research method was also questioned. Buddy Frank of CDC Gaming Reports says the research is based on data collected from pokies. And this is a big mistake if you do not supplement them with data on the behavior of the punters. Nobody knows how the punters behaved behind these pokies, how many people sat down at them and how long they stayed behind them, and what is more important, whether they returned to this machine. And this is very important. And this is exactly what allows the casino to arrange the pokies more efficiently and separate the successful pokies from the failed ones. If there is a new pokie machine in front of the punters, its success can last as long as new punters arrive who have not tried it yet %s... But after testing it, they won't come back if it doesn't suit them in terms of payoffs or fun. Therefore, some pokies seem to be successful when looking only at the data from the pokies. Buddy Frank noted that pokie manufacturers do not support this approach. They hate it when a game that was designed with an 8% house edge shows up at a casino with a 13% house edge. They even sponsored research that showed increased benefits did not translate into higher income, he said. To refute the findings of the study, he gave a real example. In a report from the Nevada Gaming Control Board for 12 months to June 2019, it can be seen that this year the establishments on the Las Vegas Strip have increased the number of pokies by 1.4% while increasing the house edge to a record 8 %s.16%. As a result, their revenues increased by 3.95%. But in the northern part of the city, where pokies are much more generous (6.66% casino advantage), revenues grew by 5%, while they have 1.4% fewer pokies.