Resistance To Persistence: Inside The Changing Advantage Slots Landscape

If you had a literal vulture standing on your front lawn, plucking meat off the bones of some unfortunate critter that met his maker on your property, and you wanted the vulture gone, you’d probably do one of two things: loudly shoo the feasting bird away, or grab a shovel and a trash bag and get rid of its meal.

The first option is quicker and easier … and doesn’t solve your problem for very long.

The second option takes more time and effort … but actually achieves your long-term goals.

This is the conundrum many casinos are facing these days with the increasingly prevalent customers known colloquially as “slot vultures.” They are a specific breed of advantage player (AP), studied on which machines can become positive expected value (+EV) plays in certain conditions, and while some of them go about their business with subtlety and respect, others deliberately annoy and intimidate other casino players in effort to take control of a machine that’s entering or has entered a favorable state for the player.

This dynamic, quite obviously, is bad for a casino’s business. And a tweet posted last Wednesday by local Las Vegas journalist Scott Roeben from his @VitalVegas account that has over 200,000 followers shined a new spotlight on this ongoing problem:

According to slot AP Ben Rosenthal, author of the 2026 book Breaking the Slot Code, what Roeben is hearing — that “vultures have gotten so bad, manufacturers plan to reduce the number of persistent jackpot games they make due to complaints from casinos” — seems true to an extent. But it’s not so much that the persistence machines are going away. It’s that the types of persistence machines available are shifting. There are quick-hit games that advantage players love, there are longer-commitment games that advantage players like but find riskier, and there are “perceived persistence” machines that aren’t actually exploitable but are designed to appear that way. And it’s been apparent to Rosenthal for a couple of years that casinos and manufacturers have been migrating away from column A and toward columns B and C.

“The advantage games of the present — and surely the future — are often way more volatile,” Rosenthal said. “There may be an advantage at a certain point, but there’s also a lot of other game mechanics you have no control over, regardless of how advantageous a state the machine is left in. Manufacturers are doing this intentionally: giving the appearance of an AP machine, but the advantage is much less appealing.”

Not exactly a brand new concern

In a blog post from this summer, Rosenthal noted this is a conversation that’s been going on for at least two years. Acknowledging that it was third-hand information, he wrote that, back in October 2024, a “friend of a friend” got some interesting info from an executive who worked for slot manufacturer IGT, sharing the following:

“Spoke to an IGT exec. He said they definitely know about advantage play and they will continue to make those games (he calls them ‘persistent progressives’). Some casinos really like them, and it’s their responsibility to monitor their casino floors so people don’t bother uninformed players on those machines. Casinos like some of these AP games because they can use them to move and dictate the traffic within the casino. IGT will continue to make these games, but they will pull back a little. There are plenty of uninformed players. They will tweak some games to not make them as ‘advantageous,’ but IGT is the leader in making AP games, and others have followed, but IGT is going to slow down.”

In talking to Casino Reports this week, Rosenthal described and gave examples of the different categories of games.

A classic example of the older slots that APs love is Ocean Magic (a game famously hit online for about $1 million by a crew in New Jersey in 2019 when a programming glitch had it starting in an advantageous state). Certain spaces on the reel sometimes show “bubbles,” and when those bubbles appear, they work their way up the screen with each successive spin, making the game +EV for a handful of spins until the bubbles are gone. As Rosenthal said, “You either have the bubble, or multiple bubbles, or you don't.”

As an example of the second type of game — where there can be advantageous states, but you can chase the big wins for an extended period of time at great risk — Rosenthal cited Magic Rockets. There are numerous components to the game, including certain bonus features like the “Big Bang” and the “Spin Boost” that fit the “perceived persistence” categories, while one other bonus feature can offer actual value — in the form of a green pot and a gold pot that fill with higher and higher numbers and eventually deliver a strong enough likelihood of a big payout to make the game +EV. But it’s not like Ocean Magic, where you give it a few spins and it’s probably going to be profitable, but if not, all you’ve lost is the cost of a handful of spins. With games like Magic Rockets, you risk burning through a lot of money waiting for a bonus round that may never come.

And then are those games where all of the visuals suggesting a big hit is coming are nothing more than, well, visuals. Rosenthal used the game Quick Hit Link: Fire as an example. It’s a game where the three colored dollar signs on the screen show firecrackers lit up to different degrees, with the implication that one with almost all its firecrackers lit is set to explode. But that’s not the case. Those explosions are random, and a mostly lit dollar sign is no more likely to detonate than one that isn’t lit at all.

“I think these types of machines are what a lot of these manufacturers are going toward, but the problem with that is, in theory it sounds nice, but people aren't stupid,” Rosenthal said. “If I play one of these machines and the firecrackers were all the way lit and I got killed on it, and then I saw my buddy play one where the firecrackers weren’t lit at all and he did great on it, I think people are going to quickly realize that there’s no advantage, and I think that's going to take away from whatever effect the manufacturers or casinos are going for.”

Blowing smoke

For now, though, the casinos have a problem. They want patrons to have an enjoyable experience, to deploy their money at the expected rate, and to not feel harassed.

Bill Krackomberger, best known as a sports bettor who was profiled in the four-part Showtime documentary series Action in 2019 and has since parlayed that into sports betting media opportunities, first built his bankroll some 30 years ago with an advantage play on a machine in Atlantic City and still dabbles in hitting vulnerable slots from time to time.

But “Krack” abhors the vulture behavior and has his own term for them, “sour rooters.”

“They're pissed off you're on the machine. They come by it and they blow smoke at you, whatever it may be, to try to get you off the machine,” Krackomberger observed, saying this behavior has become especially prevalent the last 12 to 18 months. “If I’m a casino executive and these low-limit vultures are sitting behind my regular customer who just wants to have fun, but now he has these teams of people terrorizing him and he doesn't even know why, that’s a problem. You have your regular people that are coming into the casinos intimidated by these hustlers. It’s horrible. Horrible.

“So if I'm a casino executive, I go to the slot manufacturers and say, I don't want those type of machines. I want something that may appeal in different ways. Maybe it’s based on their favorite show, the Breaking Bad game, or Wheel of Fortune and The Sopranos and Willy Wonka and The Wizard of Oz. I want more stuff like that that doesn't have an advantage player mechanism to it. They don’t want those advantage machines because they're seeing fights in their casinos. Now, me, as an advantage player, I don't like to hear something like that, but I'm just looking at it from the other side of the counter. I think it's gonna be phased out more and more.”

The state of play

The topic of slot advantage play got a bit of attention toward the end of the summer, when popular slots influencer Matt Morrow, better known as “Vegas Matt,” confirmed he’d been kicked out of The Venetian for alleged advantage play, though he insisted he left the machine in a more advanced state than he found it.

Of course, as Rosenthal’s descriptions of the modern versions of persistence games makes clear, it’s possible to be attempting to vulture slots that are in a player-friendly state and not reap the rewards. So Morrow saying he left the machine better off than he found it doesn’t prove anything one way or the other.

Whatever the case in that instance, the reality is that there are more people attempting to make advantage plays on slots than ever before, and Rosenthal thinks it’s entirely logical that casino executives are of a mindset similarly to Krackomberger’s.

“I would think IGT, Aristocrat, any of these manufacturers are probably getting a lot of the same feedback from casinos across the country,” Rosenthal said. “They're saying, ‘We're having a problem with some overzealous advantage players and we don't want them — we want our regulars to win.’”

But the old-school exploitable games aren’t in much danger of going extinct, Rosenthal said.

“These games are still all over plenty of casinos,” he said. “A lot of it comes down to what casinos own versus what they rent. If you look at all these older advantage machines like an Ocean Magic, like a Scarab, like a Golden Egypt, a lot of the time if it's an older machine that's been in the casino for, say, eight years, the casino owns it at that point. So are they really going to want to just rip it from the floor and put in some new machine that they're going to have to rent?

“I don’t think these older machines are going away, but it's not a completely rosy forecast ahead either. I would expect the manufacturers are going to produce fewer of those games and instead go with more of these games like Magic Rockets. That’s the direction it’s been going the last couple of years.”