Introduction to Florida Slots Return-To-Player
A big concern for slots enthusiasts is if casinos are trying to “get back their lost gaming revenue” by reducing their return-to-player (RTP). But is that true, state-by-state? Let’s look closely at the return statistics for Florida’s commercial casinos.
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Florida’s Slots Gaming Industry: An Overview
Florida slot machine casino gambling consists of eight pari-mutuel racetracks, seven tribal casinos, senior center amusement arcades, multi-day cruise ships with onboard casinos, and day-long gambling boats.
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State gaming regulations have authorized slot machines at pari-mutuel wagering racetracks in the cities of Miami and Fort Lauderdale in southern Florida. The gaming control commission is the Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering within Florida’s Department of Business & Professional Regulation (DBPR).
There are over three dozen pari-mutuel wagering facilities in Florida for which the DBPR is responsible, including the eight sites with slot machines in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties hosting the cities of Miami and Fort Lauderdale and including:
- The Big Easy Casino in Hallandale Beach.
- Calder Casino in Miami Gardens.
- Casino Miami in Miami.
- The Casino @ Dania Beach in Dania Beach.
- Gulfstream Park Casino in Hallandale Beach.
- Hialeah Park Racing & Casino in Hialeah.
- Isle Casino Pompano in Pompano Beach.
- Magic City Casino in Miami.
Florida’s commercial racetrack casinos with slot machines have a minimum theoretical payout of 85%. Further, return statistics by month and commercial casino are publicly available by dividing Credits Out by Credits In and multiplying by 100%.
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But Florida’s tribal compacts do not require theoretical payout limits on their slot machines, nor do they required to make return statistics publicly available.
Florida’s Return Statistics for Slots
Return-To-Player (RTP) is a slightly ambiguous term. For some slots enthusiasts, it refers to the theoretical payout limit located in state gaming regulations. For others, it’s the actual return statistics report to the state by its casinos. Still others, including myself, see RTP as the personal performance of a slots enthusiast.
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Florida has a minimum theoretical payout limit of 85% for its commercial casinos but no upper limit unlike some other states. Therefore, payouts can be set above 100% by a commercial casino if it so desires, done on specific slot machines for marketing reasons.
Those aware of theoretical payout limits often make an unreasonable assumption that every casino will always set their machines to the minimum possible legal limit. This false belief is easily disprovable.
In fact, no commercial casino even gets close to the minimum theoretical payout limit. Florida’s 85% theoretical payout limit is effectively unused. Actual return statistics are a record of the results of slot machines.
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The eight casinos in Miami-Dade County report their returns to the state gaming commission each month after which the state gaming commission makes them publicly available on their Florida government website.
Monthly Player Win Percentages
The return statistics for the eight commercial casinos in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties are available monthly from when they opened, some going as far back as 2006.
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I’ve compiled all available return statistics for Florida’s commercial racetrack casinos and plotted the monthly player win percentage for each casino.
Note that Casino Miami had widely varying returns during its first three years of opening. These outliers make the win% from other casinos hard to resolve, so in the following graph I’ve “zoomed” in on win% between 89.5% and 94.5%, a 5% range in win%.
Looking at the history of win% over time is interesting in an academic sense, with more statistics as each casino opened from 2006 through the eighth casino opened in February 2014. But in the next graph, I’ve on the monthly returns since the beginning of 2019.
The monthly returns for Florida’s commercial racetrack casinos are found to be in three groups. Two casinos have the best odds, five casinos with middle-of-the-road odds of winning, and one casino with the lowest odds nearly consistently.
- Highest odds: Hialeah Park (green) and Magic City (brown)
- Middle-of-the-road odds: Big Easy (blue), Calder (orange), Casino Miami (gray), Dania Beach (yellow), and Gulfstream Park (light blue)
- Lowest odds: Isle Pompano (black)
Summary of Florida Slots Return-To-Player
If you suspected that Florida’s commercial casinos reduced their player win percentages after the pandemic, the state return statistics shows this to be factually correct. However, this reduction has long since passed.
Promotional dollars also decreased after the pandemic in 2020, also “saving” casinos money and, while not yet fully recovered at all casinos, this decrease has also passed.