TEMPERATURE'S RISING - From the IGT Vision Series. This game is based on coin-out, not coin-in. The LED screen will have a temperature gauge on it. Hit a line pay for 5 coins and the temperature on the gauge will go up 5 degrees. Hit for 10 coins and the gauge will go up 10 degrees, hit for 100 coins and the gauge will go up 100 degrees, etc.
So we'll use a two-coin dollar IGT Ten Times Pay machine with a temperature gauge on it. Move the gauge up to 600 degrees and you get a 100 coin bonus. On a 90% machine the math would look like this:
100/600 = 16.67% of payback is in the bonus.
90% minus 16.67% = 73.3% of payback is in line pays.
16.67% + 73.3% = 90%
The 90% holds up because of one feature of the machine. Let's say you got real lucky, caught lighting in a bottle by catching the top line pay, 10X-10X-10X, betting two coins. You look down and the payscale says it pays 10,000 coins. You are actually going to get paid at least 11,600 coins because the temperature gauge will wrap around at least 16 times, maybe 17 times depending on where the temperature was at when you caught the top line pay, so you collect all those 100 coin bonuses too. This is true of the lesser pays too. Any time you wrap the gauge around you get those multiple 100 coin bonuses.
So let's see if we can find the breakeven point. The easy way for me is to figure the cost of each one-coin spin. In this case it's 1 minus .733 = 26.7 cents to put 1 degree in the temperature gauge. The cost to put 375 degrees in the temperature gauge would be right at $100.
600 minus 375 = a breakeven point of 225 degrees in the temperature gauge. But there is no way I would play the machine on that low a number. I'm breaking even if I don't pull the money out of my pocket-and a Ten Times Pay machine has a ton of variance. No, I would play it with about 400 degrees already in the gauge. The average cost would be about $53 to chase a $100 bonus. My time has to be worth something.
Unless there is a big chop on the payscale I spin these plays off one coin at a time to get into the long run on the line pays twice as fast.
