We learned a lot about slot machines from YouTube. There’s no doubt that it’s the reason we’ve been more successful.
However, we’ve also been mislead by slot influencers who claim to know the “secrets” or “tricks” to winning at slots. This brand of fake wisdom only benefits the one preaching it. If you come across a “tip” you’d like to debunk, please leave a comment on one of our YouTube videos, and we’ll try to work it into a video.
#1: Time of Day
You will hear slot influencers say things like, “Don’t play slots around meal times” or “Only play slots in the morning / late night / middle of the night.”
It doesn’t make ANY difference what time of day you play slots. That’s one reason I almost always include the time I start playing a machine in our videos. The other reason is that I use it to measure how quickly I’m gambling so we don’t go overboard on our next trip.
#2: Pump Up the Volume
When I heard this one, I laughed out loud. Then I noticed that the video had 400K views. Turning up the volume on a slot machine has no effect. I’ve won on machines with the sound completely off.
My guess is that this myth originated from YouTube slot videos. YouTubers will almost always turn up the volume when they begin playing to drown out the copyrighted music playing in the casino, which could demonetize their video. We do the same thing.
Madness Begets Parody
This myth was so crazy that I made my own parody video about finding “hot” slots by using a thermal imaging camera. Unfortunately, we won on the hotter machine. Oops.
#3: Don't Play Near a Bathroom
This is usually called the “captive area” rule, where you never gamble in a space where people have to wait around for any length of time. This includes…
- Near a bathroom, where people are “captive” while they wait for friends or their partner
- In non-smoking areas. This one is pretty funny since the casino at Park MGM is entirely non-smoking.
That said, I do have my own theories about where I think high-paying vs. low-paying slots are in each casino. Luckily, I keep these theories to myself.
#4: Banging on the screen/buttons
This is the most egregious because it hurts us all. I think this may have originated from watching demo video slot machines, where extra controls appear on the screen that control demo bonus rounds or jackpots.
We’ve never done any banging and hand flapping, but still managed to win $11K in a day on a $1K budget. In fact, we push the buttons just enough to have them trigger.
The damage caused by these people makes slot play worse for all of us. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to use the bet buttons or an onscreen button to spin the reels because the play button was busted. Sticky buttons? Yuck.