All of the infrastructure, all of the personnel, all of the security, all of the hotels, and all of the entertainment, that you see at your typical gaming destination, is dependent upon the customers that patronize these establishments, and almost without exception, the most important revenue generator on the gaming side, is the slot machines, and definitely not the table games. Depending upon the casino location, slotmachines might represent nearly all of the gaming business generated, whereas for destinations such as Las Vegas, slot machines typically represent around 50% ofgaming business generated or thereabouts.
There are many advantages for casinos in having slot machines, such as the fact that slot machines do not necessitate a lot of personnel per slot machine on the casino floor, as the interaction of the slot machine with its patron, is basically one-on-one, man v. machine. In addition, since a slot machine is a machine, it can easily operate 24/7 with scheduled periodic downtimes for system upgrades or maintenance, and thereby too means that these robust machines are available for its patrons to play at all hours and at all times. So too, because slot machines do not necessitate a social interaction, players can played the game by themselves without fear of being considered to be out of the norm, infact, that is pretty much the norm.
The thing about slot machines is that they have fundamentally changed over the years, taking away, for instance, the need for coin play, and thereby reducing to a bare minimum the labor needed for personnel to provide change, and instead patrons utilize dollar bills or scrip in order to engage the machine, with payout not in coins, but in scrip. Not only is that far more efficient for the casino, scrip can be misplaced, or not cashed in when the value of such scrip is insultingly low, also adding to the casino's bottom line.
However, the biggest fundamental change in slot machines is the fact that these machines use to be mechanical devices, that is to say, using gears and levers to spin the reels, in which each reel then would eventually stop, one at a time, and when the final reel came to a full stop, the patron would win or lose whatever that final reel position represented. The modern day slot machine, looks basically the same, but is not controlled by mechanical gears, instead it is controlled by a Central Processing Unit (CPU), which generates a random number and then a random result, all under the control of the computer which has been preprogrammed with a predetermined payback amount, such as 92% of so, indicating that on aggregate for every $100 gambled, the casino will pay out $92 and keep $8, obviously a formula that assures the profit and success of the casino.
The deception of these modern computerized slot machines lies in the fact that the machine "knows" the result via its processing power before it is actually visually displayed to the patron, signifying that the display can be "gamed" and is "gamed" in such a manner so as to make it look to the customer as if they were close to winning the big jackpot, even though in actuality, that isn't the case whatsoever, but is all there as a show so as to encourage the guest to continue to gamble, in the mistaken belief, that their luck may soon turn, and only when the defeated patron gets up from the slot machine, and looks around at these magnificent grand casinos and hotels, will they perhaps in a short glimpse of incisive insight, recognize that these great edifices are built upon suckers, that never do get an even break.