I happened to be passing by the Empire Casino in Yonkers so I figured I'd take a look just out of curiosity. When I saw that the Jacks or Better game was not only 9/6 but paid 60 instead of 50 for a straight flush, it looked pretty suspicious. I heard before that they might use pull tabs but wasn't certain, but I was able to find an employee who confirmed this. I pretty much never play anything less than 9/6 JOB (legitimate), but they had an offer for $5 in free slot play for new slot club members. I figured I'd take the free slot play, hopefully end up with something, and never come back again. I ended up finding a 10 cent JOB game, so I played 10 hands at $0.50 per hand, and got lucky and ended up with a $1.50 profit on top of the $5.00 in free money.
I understand that the pull tabs mean that the results are predetermined, so a video poker pay table would be meaningless because the casino would just lower the probabilities of the paying hands in order to get the desired hold percentage.
But I saw an electronic roulette wheel with a lot of people playing, and it had the same payouts as a standard roulette wheel (although they might not return half of an even money bet on 0 or 00). I'm assuming that everything there is pull tab. However, with roulette, I don't see how it would matter if the results were predetermined by pull tab or generated randomly. No number is better than another, so altering the frequency of each number won't help the casino. And even if some numbers (like maybe 0 and 00) normally get fewer bets, if you made those numbers more likely to hit, people would figure it out and change what they bet on to gain an advantage.
I'm thinking that the only way the casino can increase their take to more than 5.26% is if they decide the results after they see what everyone bet on, and base the result on that information. But if they did this I don't think it would be a pull tab and would probably need to use an RNG. I wanted to play this and split my bets between red and black and their 5.26% advantage would probably be less than a video poker game that is really a slot machine. I didn't play this only because every machine was taken and the minimum bet was $5. They told me that they had a $2 minimum game, but I figured that if the $5 game was packed then the $2 game would be even worse. And I only was going to bet my $5 in free play. Maybe the roulette games were so packed because people knew it was the "best" game. I checked online at the NYS lottery website and their hold percentage (for all games) averages over 8%. So if my theory is correct about roulette, then everything else is probably taking close to 9%.
Does this make sense? Would their roulette game have to have the same standard 5.26% house edge with a pull tab?