Which Are Most Popular: Slots or Table Games?
The battle between slots and table games has been going on for decades, and the truth behind which side is winning may surprise you, even if you think you know the answer.
If you look at any casino, whether it's brick-and-mortar or Internet-based, you'll find a very sharp divide between two types of games. On one hand, you have slots. On the other hand, you have table games. Before slots were invented, table games made up everything that you could find in casinos overall. However, things have changed in a major way in the past several decades, and the effects of these changes have shifted the tide on the competition between these two genres.
What Does It Mean To Be The Most Popular?
Before we really dive into this, we have to point out that there is no single definition of what's the most popular in the context of casino games. It could mean the games that receive the most individual bets, or it could mean the games that get the most volume of wagers. Is it the genre that has the most different types of games available? It's not so easy to define once you think about it. Because of this, we have to really look at the nature of these games and where the technology is heading to see which is the most popular overall.
Betting Metrics
Let's start by looking at a few betting metrics. First off, the games that get the largest individual bets and the most play from high rollers are still table games. Baccarat in particular often gets its own line item in financial reports for land-based casinos because the win or loss on that one game for the house can be large enough to change their stock price for a quarter. There are no slots that can compete with this in terms of the individual bet sizes or the total amount of money wagered on a global basis.
On the other hand, more slot wagers are placed than bets are placed for all other forms of gambling in the world combined. A big part of this is because you place a lot of bets per hour when you're playing, and it's to the point that betting between eight and ten times per minute isn't uncommon. It's clear from this data that slots get the most bets, but table games get the largest bets, so you can't really determine which is the most popular from that information alone, but it is clear that more people are playing slots more of the time.
Advances in Technology and Game Preference Shift
Something that's really interesting is that technological advances have changed how people play casino games. Online casinos were the first big shift in that they focus primarily on slots. Many sites will have hundreds of slots comapred to just a few table games, for example. Now that things have started to move over to the mobile sector, the distinction is becoming even larger. It's a simple issue of slots fitting on mobile screens much easier than table games, and since many casino sites are reporting that most of their play is coming from mobile at this point, it's easy to see how that affects the popularity of the games.