A player recently suggested on a slot forum that a slot machine will offer better paybacks when cash is inserted vs. a ticket, sometimes called a TITO. Their reasoning was a ticket can be “tracked” so they know if you’re winning or losing.
STATUS: Another one of those slot machine payback myths.
This falls into the same bucket as other myths around slot machine payback, such as:
- Cashing out your ticket and putting it back in will change your payouts
- How much you deposit into a machine impacts payouts
- Using a player’s card impacts payouts
TITO systems do track the tickets, but for a very benign reason – they need to know whether a ticket has been redeemed or not, so they don’t pay multiple people for the same ticket, whether as credits in a slot machine, via a ticket redemption system, or at the Cashier’s desk.
The slot machine doesn’t care what you put into it – it gives you the credits for the value of the bill or ticket inserted, and then the game does its thing – you make wagers, it shows you the outcome of that wager, and at the end of it, it will dispense a ticket for the value of whatever credits were in the machine at the time you cash out.
Remember that a ticket is created when a cash out is requested, and it’s redeemed once put into the next machine or paid out through a redemption method. You aren’t running on the same ticket through a bunch of machines – on a purely technical level, you’re getting a new ticket with each cash out, and voiding that ticket with each cash in.
But in any case, the slot doesn’t really care, as the source of the credits has no meaning to it. It just does its job in the process, and what you put into it has no impact on the game’s payout or chances of winning.
