Tribal Gaming & Class II Slots - Part 4

Whenever a new game appears in one of my local SoCal Native American casinos, like most of you, I try it a time or two. You never know when they’ll put in a good one. Recently both Harrah’s Resort Southern California (Rincon) and Pala have added some banks of Cadillac Jack slots to their floor. The games are colorful, the music is loud, some might say annoyingly so, and because you can’t stop the reels and go to the next spin when you have a win, it takes a long time to collect your credits. That makes the machines seem to be paying often and paying more. These new games are very popular with the casino patrons, and their seats are always full. The players are all watching the reels that pay both right to left and left to right to see if they have a hit. They generally pay no attention at all to the tiny bingo cards at the bottom of the screens. 

That little bingo card is what tells informed players that the machine is not really a slot machine at all. It is really a bingo game disguised to look like a slot machine. it’s a Class II slot.  Another annoying clue that these Cadillac Jack machines are Class II games is this. When you have a win, you can’t just push the button and go right to the next spin. You are forced to wait and listen to the music signaling your win play while virtual coins rain down onto your screen. You can’t play on until all the winners of the linked games are paid and the server is ready for the next game to start. 

If you’ve never played a Class II slot, a good way to get a feel for their characteristics is to watch one of the YouTube videos filmed by players such as Random $$ Slots. There’s a link to one of his channel devoted exclusively  to Class II Slots HERE. The channel originally had examples of Class II games by WMS, IGT, and Cadillac Jack. Games by other manufacturers are being added to the site as they are played and filmed. Nearly all the major slot manufacturers it seems are devoting much of their resources to developing these bingo games. There are Class II games shown on the internet manufactured by slot giants such as Bally and Multimedia in addition to WMS, IGT, and Cadillac Jack. There are some smaller companies developing games as well. I suspect more and more manufacturers will be focusing on these Indian Casino Class II slots in the future. 

People who play Class II slots often complain that they can tell by looking at the tiny bingo card on their screen whether they are going to have a winning spin. I guess they like to be surprised. Under IGRA (the Indian Regulatory Gaming Act), the games are required to have a draw of bingo balls that must result in a game winning pattern. When the machine draws the bingo balls, the first 30 numbers drawn are daubed red - you can watch them appear on your bingo card when you spin the reels. If there is no winner in the first 30 numbers generated, the machine will continue adding yellow balls to the display until it arrives at a game ending pattern. These yellow balls, however, do not contribute any pays. 

In the early days, if you had a win, you had to daub your card by pushing the spin button a second time; now cards are auto-daubed. You can even change your card before the next game if you don’t like it, just as you can trade your card in for a new one when you’re playing a paper bingo game. On the Class II machines, you change your card by touching the display until you get one you like. It won’t matter what card you pick because there are too many possibilities to predict the one that will have the random numbers you’ll need for a good win. You might as well keep the first one they gave you, but if it makes you feel like you have some control over the game, even though you don’t, go ahead. Change your card if you like.

Take a look at the first video Ishtar’s Oasis by WMS on this slot channel CLASS II SLOTS and see if you can predict whether a spin is a good one by looking at the red daubs on the bingo card. Often you can. Sometimes you can’t because there are many more arrays that award credits in the electronic game than there are winning arrays in a regular paper bingo game. 

When you play in the casino, you might also want to take a quick look at the pay-table equivalent for the bingo games that your information screen can show you. There’s no way to study it really. In fact the machine I tried looking at refused to go to the bingo information screens after a time, wanting me to play instead I guess. Nor can you learn anything from it to improve your wins as you sometimes can with slot pay tables. There is too much information. It will give you a feel for how complicated the mathematics behind the game is, however. 

While you are watching this game on the internet, pause the action and take time to read the comments by the creator. You can learn a lot from the comments he posts with his videos. Reading them and watching the games, I relearned a lot I had forgotten about Class II Bingo Slots from years ago, and I saw some things that have changed. Today’s games are much different and much better than the ones we played a decade ago when they first appeared in our NA casinos. Today it’s hard to tell them from Vegas-style slots. 

If you think you can predict how big your win might be from the tiny bingo card that usually comes up before the slot reel screen does, and you don’t like knowing, you are not alone. Many players don’t want an early display of the bingo card spoiling their surprise. Cadillac Jack has a new innovation, called by John Groshowski the “unscripted bonus event. “ (Mr. Grochowski writes about such things in the Chicago Sun Times as the Gaming Guru). Cadillac Jack’s unscripted bonus, he says, adds bingo draws within the bonus events. These draws have varied enough outcomes that players can’t predict what will happen. 

There are also machines where the bingo card is revealed after the slot screen rather than in advance. IGT does this. One place you can see this in Random $$ Slots’ video of 2x3x4x5x by IGT.  A comment there also tells us that MultiMedia is now manufacturing Class II machines that don’t show the bingo card when the machine is idle. There will be more and cleverer way to address the bingo-card issue in the months to come. One easy fix might be to design the display so that the bingo card was not shown on the computer screen at all unless you pushed a button to reveal it.

As you watch these games and others, focus on the tiny bingo card when a bonus comes up. Ask yourself if there is still a card to watch during the bonus spins. If the bingo card in the corner during the game is no longer there when you play your bonus, perhaps it’s because your bonus is predetermined by the arrangement that brought it up. If so there is nothing you can do to change your bonus. If your bonus begins with your making a choice of some kind, such as picking one of four cards, your bonus total will be dependent on your choice.

If you watched Ishtar’s Oasis by WMS, you saw there was no bingo card on the screen during the bonus spins - the bonus spins were all for show, If you watch Spider Queen by Cadillac Jack, there is a small bingo card during the bonus rounds as well as during the base game so the amount of your bonus is not predictable from the triggering bingo card. The Cadillac Jack Power Stream series of games are the ones appearing recently in our California Casinos that used to have only Class III slot games. There are several films of these Power Stream games you could view. If you watch the Spider Queen video, you can see many of the Class II game characteristics illustrated: right to left and left to right pay, stacked symbols (that hardly ever seem to be part of your win), high volatility games, long waits while your credits pour into your bank if you have a hit, encouraging “messages” to read, and loud music to listen to while waiting for the payout to end. A lot of Razzle-Dazzle to entertain you while you wait for the next game to start - and no way to speed through it.

Class II game payouts are funded by other players. There is no random number generator in your individual machine, and you are not betting against the house. You are wagering for a share of the money other players are betting. For this reason there must be at least two players playing each game - though they can be on different themed machines. If there are not at least two players, the machine will cycle through the display waiting for the server to have a quorum. An excellent illustration of this is in the film of Queen of Wonderland by Cadillac Jack. Watch the start of this video and see how long it takes for the first spin to register. This is because there are not at least two active players to play the game. The hit frequency is always 50%, but the payout percentage is determined by how many prizes of various amounts are loaded into the program. This is a difficult concept to wrap my head around, and I have not been able to find in print if there are any restrictions on how low an indian casino can set this percentage. Logically you would expect a Class II casino to pay out about the same percentage as the one required for casinos having Class III games. Otherwise they could not remain competitive.

If you have a comment or know of a link to an explanation that could help us all better understand Class II pays, feel free to comment below - or better yet, send me an email to spin2win.jen@gmail.com.

HERE’S A LINK to an article written by Frank Legato who was discussing Class II slots with Casino Operations Senior VP, Charles Lombardo, formerly slot operations VP at Caesar’s Palace. Mr. Legato has worked with major slot manufacturers who have refined Class II technology to provide games that look and play like the Class III Vegas-type slots. The information in the paragraph above above comes from this article. It still leaves me with unanswered questions, perhaps the answers are trade secrets, but you may find the article helpful. 

The article also has some information on hit frequency on three reel slots which I have not seen anywhere else at this time, but which I want to share with you. I think it may explain an anomaly that appears on the film of the IGT three reel slot Double Diamond Stars. 

At around the 30 second mark of the video, a single credit is added to the total without any explanation. But Lombardo gives us a plausible one.

Lombardo says this: “Because traditional [three reel] games like Blazing 7’s or Red, White, & Blue generally have a hit frequency around 14% for the seven or eight winning combination in the pay schedule, a 50% hit frequency would be impossible and still have the game make money for the casino. To remedy this, Lombardo explains, we came up with a bonus feature. 14% of results in the pool will be actual reel combinations, and the other 36% will yield a bonus symbol on the reels that will accumulate. When you accumulate 25 of these symbols, you will win 1 bonus credit. Therefore you still have the 50% hit frequency, but your frequency of reel wins is similar to what it is in the traditional Class III versions of those games.” Did you watch this happen in the film of Double Diamond Stars?  Watch it HERE.

So, where are we going with all this? Nowhere I want to be! 

I think what we are going to see over the next few years is that a lot of our Native American casinos, and maybe even some of the traditional non-Indian casinos we play at, will be putting more and more of these Class II bingo-slots on the casino floors. The games will become increasingly harder to distinguish from the traditional Vegas Class III slots as the technology gets better and better.  Most people playing the games will not even realize there is a difference. 

I also suspect that, when this happens, State revenue from the tribes will drop. That revenue now comes from payments required by the compacts. If the Native American casinos have Class II rather than Class III machines, the tribes will not have to pay the State the large per-machine fees the compacts demand. When that happens, the State lawyers will undoubtedly find a new way to define Bingo that excludes these Class II slots from that definition. And then the State will once again force the Native American residents of California to give up what is rightly theirs to fill the State coffers. There is a term I would use here to describe this ravaging of other peoples if I were not a lady!  I’ll leave it to your imagination. You know how I feel about past atrocities and future fears. 

I will probably follow this with an article on Class II video poker in a few days.  We’ll see.

Special thanks once again to Random$$Slots for all his help with this and for permission to use his slot videos in preparing these four articles.  Please continue to visit his site as he makes more films of games from more manufacturers available to help us all understand how to play our favorite games.  And don’t forget to view, like, and subscribe.