This guide remains useful and accurate with the latest patch. Minimum gambler confidence for $1 and $.25 slots has been lowered so that just about anyone will play those up front - making them more popular and reducing the need for $.05 and $.01 slots to build confidence. Instead you can start with money makers right away. Pretty much everything else in this guide remains accurate

The basic theory of this guide follows from what happens in a real casino. You can play at a penny slot for literal hours on $20. That isn't profitable by the time you count running costs, maintenance costs, certification costs, etc. Slots cost money to run and penny slots don't make that money back.

But they keep guests at the casino, they keep them playing and ultimately probably extract a small amount of cash.

So the key to any casino is to "graduate" your players to higher priced slots. When a new player enters the casino, it's rare for them to just go straight to $5 slots. They're going to start at penny or nickel slots, and might never go beyond quarter slots. So you push those slots but make them unattractive to more confident gamblers.

So ultimately the core strategy involves having a few penny and nickel slots to increase confidence and then a bunch of expensive slots to make lots of money.

What do you need to get started doing this?

I've tested the content of this guide on a new profile with the $500k start. I suspect it can be done with the $250k start as well, but in that case, you might have to balance very carefully because of the ongoing costs.

Until stated otherwise, this guide assumes zero staff beyond the default 3 you get just by putting down the garbage, delivery, and vault zones. It assumes zero investment into marketing, and zero upgrades.

In short, this can be used as an early money maker, as well as a late-game cash cow. There are other areas that have better income potential, but slots are reliable and stable, and I'll present throughout this guide how to make money off of them with starting tech and minimum investment, as well as how to grow their potential.

Gamblers arrive with a confidence score that helps determine what they want to do. They also arrive with a cash amount and a bank amount. They can never spend more in your casino than the combination of the two, and atm withdrawals cut into the bank balance as well.

The higher their confidence, the more likely they are to accept a higher-priced slot. This number is initially affected by their cash but also by their specific demographic. Wealthy guests arrive with higher confidence than poor guests, even if they arrive with the same cash.

Confidence is increased whenever a player wins or breaks even on a slot. I believe at this time (but haven't had enough testing to prove this) that it can decrease when they lose, but it certainly isn't every time they lose.

Higher-priced slots won't be played by players with low confidence. Likewise, low-priced slots with weak jackpots won't be played by players with high confidence. So ultimately, the goal is to build up your guests' confidence so they can play the more expensive machines and give you more money.

When your guests arrive with low confidence, you want to build their confidence as fast as possible.

The best way to do this is with low house edge slots. So plop down some penny slots, set the house edge to 2-3% (lower if you have a healthy bank balance), and set the jackpot to $1. This is your confidence machine. You set the low jackpot so that even if they are lucky they don't break your bank, and so that the machine isn't attractive to higher confidence players (a $1 jackpot severely limits who will be interested in the machine). This will grow their confidence rapidly to be comfortable with quarter slots.

You can also put down some nickel slots to do the same thing with nickel slots, and in fact, it's a good idea to do so as they will lose you slightly less money over all. I usually have just one penny slot of each "game" and the rest of my confidence builders are all nickel slots. Again, limit the jackpot to $1 so they don't stay on nickel slots forever.

Now it's time to actually make money off of slots. This is where your quarter slots and up come in. Each of them functions in a different tier.

First some basic math for quarter slots:

• The slowest slot game gets about 150 games per hour
  
• The average slot machine is probably used about 12 hours over a 24 hour period in a busy casino
  
• That works out to about $45 of profit per percentage point house edge per day worst case
  
• The most expensive game is about $80 a day license fee

So, the net result of all of this is that the first 2% or so on a quarter slot of house edge is a break-even point. The rest is pure profit. The smaller the jackpot, the more even the cash flow will be, while a higher jackpot might have massive earnings for a few days and then wipe them all out at the end of that. Ultimately, over a 3-4 week period, the machine will even out to that approximately $45 / day / percentage point over 2% house edge.

So a 8-9% house edge can make you serious money serious fast, with enough slots to do so.

A dollar slot will make even more money.

Keep the jackpot around 10x the bet amount ($2.50 for quarter slots, $10 for dollar slots) to encourage confident players to go to higher machines, but also to keep the cash flow even.

Keep adding quarter and dollar slots as you see they are busy until you cross the profit line - that point where you are making profit if you ignore construction costs.

Once you cross that line, it's time to move into establishing growth.

Now that you have basic income going, it's time to start looking at where to put that income, how to organize your slots for the maximum cash grab, and how exactly to handle those large jackpots.

At this point, it's not a bad idea to experiment with advertising. Start small and make sure that you end up making more in profit as a result, if it's a break-even proposition, then you probably don't want to advertise yet. I usually find that I need about 40 slot machines before advertising really becomes profitable. I generally wait until Friday I can't keep the slots filled until 10 pm to start advertising. Advertising will bring in more people on any day, but you have to have something for them to do. If you bring in more people than you have slots, that's wasted advertising money. Build more slots first.

The more you invest in improving people's opinion of the environment, the more they will be willing to play higher price slots.

I hope by this point you have provided a bathroom for your guests. A good next person to provide is a drink waiter. This employee will go around and reduce the hunger and thirst needs of your guests while they're playing games. This keeps them on the machines longer. Also helpful is a pit boss. They'll reduce the frustration of any player near them. They also have a chance to detect cheating. The pit boss enables you to run higher house edge without your guests always leaving because they're frustrated before you've taken all of their money.

As you get bigger, it becomes harder to manage exactly how many of each slot you need. To that end, I've kind of established a working ratio:

1 confidence builder (penny/nickel) : 5 quarter : 2 dollar : 2 $5 : 1 $10.

The reason for the ratio is that the quarter slots are going to be the most enticing to a broad range of people and keep them playing longer. Dollar, $5, and ultimately $10 slots don't stay as busy. They may make more money, but if you have a bunch of them, they'll just sit there idle.

This is probably the spot that has the most potential for micromanaging yourself into a hole. Games are hot at times, not at others. The hotter the game, the more players want to play that game and are willing to go to a higher price machine to do it. But the hotter games also cost more per day. So you can micromanage and make sure that the hottest game of the day is only on your $10 slot but there are also fees around changing the game and you can end up costing yourself a lot of money doing that.

Instead it's better to balance out your game selection so that each game is well represented in each slot tier and don't worry too much about daily variations.

If you really want to, you can micro-manage your highest tier slots, but I don't recommend doing it for all slots.

Some upgrades are less obvious how valuable they are than others. The upgrades that tie directly into making good money on slots are:

• Player's Club - this allows guests to return and maintain their confidence level from before
  
• House edge - these allow you higher house edge on slots as well as table games, meaning you can suck more money out of people.
  
• Lower Bank Fees - this reduces the amount that customers have to pay at the ATM and as a result makes them less likely to just give up and leave

That's about it. Everything else is related to expanding your entertainment and table games offerings, not about making more money with slots. I know, you were expecting an epiphany here about some upgrade and its value. Sorry, not this time. It's just the obvious upgrades here.

A problem that a lot of people face when trying to figure out how to make slots work really well for them is that guests get frustrated really easily.

High Frustration comes from losing repeatedly, as well as from atm fees (not card fees at services, those are paid by you and don't frustrate players). You can't control them using an atm and getting frustrated there, but you can reduce atm card fees, as mentioned above.

What you can control is the frustration level that comes with high house edge slots. Keep the jackpot low. A high jackpot reduces how often a push or win can happen while keeping the house edge high.

A good rule of thumb that I've found relating to jackpot vs house edge is to keep the house edge below 5% for any jackpot higher than 20x the base bet, below 8% for any jackpot higher than 10x the base bet, and if you really want a high edge like say 18% then drop the jackpot to the absolute minimum for that machine. Keep in mind that high confidence players won't play at a low jackpot machine, so if you are going to be running the high house edge machines, you need to also have a few low edge high jackpot machines around.

Higher jackpot attracts players more than lower price, so you can theoretically have a high jackpot $10 slot which the high confidence players will run to, but because it's only 20x you can still have it be profitable.

Pro Tip: always have enough cash in the vault to pay out every jackpot at once. It will happen.

Eventually, you'll want to grow your casino into other areas such as table games, bingo halls, and food and hotel services.

All of this can be supported by slots and can introduce you to ridiculous profits once you get going.

Most modern casinos don't actually make any profit off of slots. Slots keep the lights on. All of their profit is made in the hotel, entertainment, bingo, tables, and food/drink sales. So too can it be for you.

As you grow out additional features, always make sure that your slot income is equal to or greater than your overall expenses. Don't worry about being profitable on slots alone as you grow, instead, let the slots pay the bills, and then pocket every single penny from the bingo hall, the table games, the buffet, and the hotel.

When the slot income stops exceeding your daily expenses, add more machines. If guests aren't filling the machines, add more advertising.

Ultimately, you can use slots to keep from ever losing money on a new area. Just make sure that the operating costs are covered by the slot machines and voila! Profit!

So this is currently not well balanced and likely will change in the future, but right now bingo halls are super profitable if you set them up right. To be fair, bingo halls are a source of major profit for a real casino as well.

The more seats in the bingo hall, the more profit because in any given round of bingo, the payout is fixed, but the income is based on how many players played.

Set the price to $15 (important, you are limited in profits by the time it takes to complete a game, so getting players into the bingo hall makes you more money, but so does increasing the price).

Then increase the payout until price satisfaction just hits 100%. Your bingo hall will always be full, and you will absolutely rake in the cash.

Credit to _+|.DeL']['RoN.|+_ for pointing out this in the discussion threads.

I welcome any feedback or recommendations. This process is tested to work on a new save, but depending on how established you are, adjusting your slots to be actually profitable might be a challenge.