Electronic table games

You sit down where a table used to be. In front of you there is a screen, and beside the seat there is no little sign. Where does it say what the smallest bet is, what each result pays, and how the game goes?

• The smallest bet this seat takesOn the screen, in a line of its own
• What each result paysOn the screen, in the paytable, behind a button
• The rules of the gameOn the screen, in the same paytable
• Who is dealing todayNot on the screen at all. On the casino’s own website, game by game

Leoformer dealer · rules and maths

I dealt at a table for years, and then the table went. The seats around it came back as screens, and people sat down at them the way you sit down at a bus stop — fast, and without reading anything.

Everything my little sign used to say is still there. It is one layer further in, behind a button somebody has to press, and nobody is standing in front of it to tell you that you have not pressed it.

Bills in, credits on the glass

You feed a bill into the terminal and it comes back on the screen as credits (what a machine counts your money in on screen, which is not the same as dollars until you cash out). From that moment you bet by touching the glass, and there is no chip in your hand for the rest of the evening.

1. At the terminalYou feed in a billThe machine takes paper money and gives no chips back
2. On the glassThe screen counts in creditsEvery bet you place from now on is placed by touching the glass
3. When you cash outCredits become money againUntil you cash out, the large number on the glass is a count of credits and not an amount of money. Where a gaming machine pays out what is left on it, and in what form it pays, is Chips and cash

A credit is not a dollar: what one credit is worth was set inside the machine, and turning credits into money is the arithmetic of lesson 2.1.

The smallest bet belongs to the screen you are sitting at. It does not belong to the room, and it does not belong to the seat beside you, which can ask for more. Across the casinos we list, the smallest bet anybody publishes for one of these seats is $1 — and that figure says what one casino asks, not what the screen in front of you is asking.

Everything the little sign said, one layer in

Everything that decides what your bet does is on the screen before you commit the bet, and not only afterwards: what each result pays, how the game goes, and what any extra feature does when it arrives. At a live table the same information is split between a small sign, the cloth and a person. At a screen it is in one place, behind a button, and free to read while you are still standing up.

Two lines on a screen decide the price of the seat rather than the shape of the game, and both are easy to walk straight past, because neither the green-pocket line nor the commission line looks anything like a price.

• Wheel0 and 00
  How many green pockets this wheel hasEvery extra green pocket changes what all your other bets on that wheel are up against, and the payout for a single number does not change with it.
• BankerCommission taken
  Whether the bank hand pays a commissionTwo baccarat screens in one building can differ in the commission line and in nothing else at all.

One rule sits underneath both of those lines, and one operator states it in a single sentence: a bet that covers more of the numbers comes up more often, and it pays less each time it comes up.

Two strips of numbers

Along the upper edge of the screen runs the upper strip, which holds the game’s recent results. Along the lower edge runs the lower strip, which holds your own last rounds. The two strips are set in the same type and are the same width, and that is the whole of what they have in common.

The upper strip belongs to the game. A machine on a casino floor plays each round on its own, with no memory of the round before it, so nothing in the upper strip is about the round to come.

Several seats can share one game — that is what a casino means when it calls the room a stadium. Every seat sees the same upper strip, and each keeps a lower strip of its own.

Big comes up four times running, and the fifth round starts to feel owed to Small. Everybody reads a strip of numbers that way, and lesson 2.8 takes that reading apart properly. What matters at the seat is simply what the upper strip is: a record of rounds that are already finished.

The lower strip belongs to you. Every gaming device on a casino floor can show the round you just played and the nine rounds before it, with what you staked, how the round came out and what came back.

Losing track of what you staked is the ordinary way an evening gets away from someone, and the lower strip finds the stake again: looking costs nothing.

Who is dealing today

At some of these seats a person is running the game. At other seats nobody is dealing at all: the figure on the screen is a drawing, and the casino’s own word for that dealer is virtual.

• A person deals itThe casino publishes live dealers for this game, by name.There is somebody to talk to when a round needs sorting out.
• Nobody deals itThe casino’s own word for the dealer here is virtual.The figure on the glass is a drawing; the people to ask are the staff walking the floor.
• It depends on the hourThe casino publishes two timetables for the same seats.The same screen gives both answers, and it gives them at different times of day.

None of the three answers is on the screen. Who deals is a staffing decision for the day, and a machine has no line for it. At a live table you never have to look it up, because the dealer is standing in front of you and you can see who it is.

3 of the casinos we list publish two timetables for the same seats: the hours when a person deals, and the hours when the game runs on its own.

A live table has one more thing a screen has not: a rhythm you cannot argue with, in which every pause arrives whether you asked for it or not. One operator describes the difference in the kindest possible way — at these seats you play at your own pace.

At a screen the only thing on the list is you: your own pace means your own stop, and nothing on the screen will call it for you.

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

That last line is the one I would keep. At a live table something interrupts you every few minutes whether you want it or not, and half the people who leave on time leave because the shoe ran out and they took the hint.

At a screen the hint never comes. So name the round you are going to stand up on before you sit down, and if that round needs writing down somewhere so that you keep to it, Game plan does it in a couple of minutes.

Practice: read the screen

Four levels. Nothing here spins, nothing is staked and there is no balance: a screen has no decisions left in it once the bet is down, so the practice stops where the round starts. Level 1 puts one line of a screen in front of you and asks what that line decides — 5 moments. Level 2 gives you both strips and a question from the seat, and there are 5 such moments. Level 3 asks who is running the game, and the answer comes from what that casino publishes. Level 4 is the one decision the screen never makes for you, and it is not scored.

The lesson is one run: every square on the strip below is one of its scored moments, and they are all there from the start. Only your first answer on each one counts, and when a level’s squares are full the next level begins by itself.

Check yourself

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

Five quick ones. Pick an answer, then check it. No timer, no points: just whether it stuck.

Back to the question we opened with. The smallest bet, what each result pays and the rules of the game are all three on the screen, and all three are readable before you put anything down. Who is dealing today is the one thing you have to look up somewhere else.

Where to check this

19+ (18+ in AB, MB, QC) · Play responsibly · the helplines for every province are at the end of this page

Further reading

• Minimum Technical Standards for Gaming, 11: Game Behaviour · Alcohol and Gaming Commission of OntarioWhat a slot machine in a room is allowed to do, clause by clause: the payout floor, the reel strip, the odds on the largest prize and the ten games of history every machine can show you.
• How to play slots · Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (PlaySmart)An operator walking through the arithmetic of one spin, with its own worked example: nine lines on a nickel machine, and what one press of it takes.
• How to play slots · British Columbia Lottery Corporation (Casinos BC)Reels, lines and the province’s average return, in the words of the corporation that runs the rooms.
• Understanding chance: slot machines · Loto-Québec (Wise Play)The near miss, volatility and the illusion of control, named and explained by a provincial operator rather than by us.
• Informed Gambling: slots and VLTs · Manitoba Liquor & LotteriesA short brochure on what a payout percentage is and is not, and why two machines with the same one can empty a wallet at different speeds.
• Registrar's Standards for Internet Gaming: game design and features · Alcohol and Gaming Commission of OntarioThe same machine on a screen: what a regulated site in Ontario may not do with the picture after the outcome has been drawn.

How it’s worked out