An unwelcome hand pay

To most slot and video poker players, a hand pay is usually a good thing. A hand pay, as its name implies, is a jackpot that must be paid by an employee, usually because it is $1,200 or more and must be reported to the IRS. When a player hits such a jackpot, the machine locks up and usually starts playing music. The screen will alternately flash the amount of the jackpot and the words "call attendant," although in virtually all cases the machine has electronically notified the slot attendant dispatcher of the fortuitous event. At a casino with a competently run slot floor, an employee will arrive within a couple of minutes, punch some data into the machine, ask the player for ID and a Social Security number, then go to work station to prepare the tax forms and get the money. Five minutes or so later, the player is paid, the machine reset, and life goes on as before.

So when is this a bad thing? Well, if you're betting big stakes, especially on a multi-line game (triple play, five play, ten play, fifty play or hundred play), the jackpots can constantly interrupt your play. Sometimes a casino will minimize the stoppages by stationing an employee next to a big player to record all the jackpots and add them up later, issuing one collective tax form. This is called "key to credit."

A jackpot can also be a nuisance if if you're playing a high limit, single line game, such as $5 jacks or better. A straight flush in this game (with max coin bet) pays $1,250, which feels more like upward blip in fortune than a windfall. Stopping play, waiting to be paid and dealing with employees who expect to be tipped is annoying when you don't feel as if if you've really won anything. Some casinos, such as the Rio in Las Vegas, avoid this unhappy situation by reducing the payout for the straight flush to $1.199, which benefits the player by avoiding a hand-pay situation, saves time and work for casino employees, and saves the casino $51 each occurrence. Because the straight flush is quite rare, the reduction in the payback of the game is a minuscule 0.02 percent, in my opinion an acceptable price to pay as a player.

There's one other situation in which a hand pay is a nuisance, and this is especially annoying because it is unnecessary and exploitative. Machines can be set to require a hand pay for amounts less than $1,200, and some casinos do this.

Tonight I was playing at Emerald Island, a small casino in downtown Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas. This is an extreme low roller environment, billed as "Nevada's only all penny casino." I'm not sure exactly what the slogan means, but the game I play there is 300-coin "not so ugly" nickel deuces on a 10-play machine. So I was betting $15 a hand, three times as much as if I had been playing a $1 single-line game. Anyone who has played at this level knows that you can lose hundreds of dollars in 15 or 20 minutes, and this has often been my experience at Emerald Island.

But soon after sitting down tonight, I got lucky. I was dealt three deuces, and hit the fourth on two lines, for a total of $600. Much to my surprise, the machine locked up and started playing jackpot music.

A waited a few minutes then a few minutes more, getting annoyed that no one showed up. Eventually I tracked someone down and was paid. The employee told me that every jackpot of $400 or more at Emerald Island is a hand pay.

Why would a casino create this extra work for its employees and annoyance for its customers? The only reason I can think of is that management thinks it creates a tipping opportunity. Many customers, including me, do tip on hand pays, particularly of $1,200 or more. I have sometimes tipped on smaller jackpots ($1,000 seems to be a popular threshold) but I was not about to tip for $643 (including the wins on lines other than the two sets of deuces), especially when the service was lousy. On the other hand, to a penny or nickel player, a $400 win might seem like enough of a windfall to warrant a tip, especially in a case of good service and/or an employee known and liked by the customer.

Although I am generally opposed to making unnecessary work for the purpose of generating tips, in Emerald Island's case I understand the policy -- in most cases. But it seems to me that on machines where customers are playing at higher stakes, the jackpot trigger amount should be set higher.