Some casinos do not issue coins at the change machines. If your ticket is $16.23, you will get the $16 in bills, and a voucher for the 23¢. Some casinos will give you the “opportunity” to donate that change to charity, and if you agree, the voucher isn’t even printed. Different states have different rules as to what the casinos can do with this un-collected money.
You can redeem these vouchers at the cage. But that takes time, and many people will often conclude that their time is worth more than the time it takes to collect a few pennies. So, they leave these tickets behind. Anyone walking by is welcome to take these tickets and cash them in. And I do pick them up, but I don’t immediately cash them in.
When I was strictly a video poker player, this rarely happened to me. After all, I usually play big enough machines so that there are no pennies in any cashout ticket I receive. This isn’t always the case today because sometimes I play quarter five play Multi-Strike 9/6 Jacks or Better at the South Point. While this is a $25-per-play game, the cashout ticket can print with an ending of 25¢, 50¢, or 75¢. When this happens to me, I generally keep playing. With the slot club paying 0.30% and the game I’m playing returning 99.79%, it is very slightly positive to keep playing and I do until the pennies disappear. On average, one in four of these tickets will end with zero cents, and I’ll quit then. On occasion I have lost more than $100 getting rid of the cents, but I have also won more than that. I’m playing a long game and those swings don’t affect me much.
South Point is one of the many places I play penny slots in addition to video poker. Almost always, when I cash out a ticket from such machines, the ticket includes some non-zero number of pennies at the end.
I will have a “master ticket” for the day, and any of the small tickets I accumulate get added in. When I cash in at the end of the day, I’ll collect some number of dollars and one ticket for change. If I have change in my pocket, I’ll frequently go to the cage and add enough change to my ticket to make it into an even number of dollars.
No ticket is too small for me to pick up. It’s all going to go into the machines. I once picked up a ticket for $3.16. I figured it was left behind intentionally, and kept it. Another time I found a ticket in excess of $700. I turned it in. There was no way somebody left that on purpose. Although tempting to keep it, the person who left it likely needs it more than I do. Plus, if it’s reported and they remember where they left it, the slot shift manager might search for it using surveillance cameras. I’m fairly well known in all casinos I frequent (because I’ve received W-2Gs plus I usually go back to the same casinos over and over again), so if I’m spotted on camera pocketing such a ticket, it’s almost certain I won’t like what happens next.
One year ago, more casinos paid off pennies in vouchers than do today. The vouchers are unpopular with customers, plus it encourages vagrants to hang around looking for and collecting these tickets.
I end up with one voucher of less than one dollar per casino. When I visit the casino next time, I’ll put the old voucher in at the start as a part of my “ammunition.” Sometimes I do not return to a particular casino before a voucher expires. No big deal. It’s a small amount, and overall, the practice of picking up and holding onto these vouchers pays off.