What to do if you find a malfunctioning progressive?

thlf wrote: "I think if this machine were not contributing to the progressive then it also would not register the correct pay out for the win. It would default to a standard pay out."

well, it does make the progressive payout. but it does not contribute to the progressive amount. this progressive has progressives for the royal, aces, aces with kickers, low quads and low quads with kickers, so there have been plenty of times this has happened.

and it appears that no one at the casino cares.

my question is should we care?

I personally will avoid the machine unless I know that on the first "spin" Im going to hit a progressive amount. but if I am playing the machine for a period of time, I would like to know that a portion of my play is going to the progressives that I might hit in the future.

So this one machine....is truly not a progressive right? The payouts never change up or down?

Give us the payouts so we (or someone) can calculate if the payouts are large enough for this to be a +EV play

let me explain again:

1. the machine is on the bank of progressives
2. the machine will pay the progressive amounts if you hit a progressive
3. but when you play the machine, it will not contribute to the progressive pool

example: a player is at the machine and no one else is at this bank of machines. as the player plays each hand, the progressive jackpots do not increase. this is because the machine is not contributing to the progressive pools. but, when this machine hits a progressive (as slapinfunk witnessed quad aces with kicker) the progressive jackpot for the hand was paid, but the progressive jackpot did not reset back to 2000 coins for this machine or any of the others on the bank.

I got this in Reno. The progressive for the four of a kind in Aces didn't reset to $160 after I got this win so I kept playing and watched the progressive for the four of a kind in Aces climb to over $700 at which time a crew of about 7 or 8 people including slot techs and floor supervisors open up every machine (bank of 10 machines) and manually reset the progressives to the correct $160 level. I ended up getting up and out of there before they asked me to repay them the difference for the malfunction.

I played a bank of machines once where the quad progressive didn't reset after it was hit. We kept playing and it kept increasing. Finally, about ten or fifteen minutes later, poof, it reset back to the base amount (and ate everything we had contributed between the last hit and that point).

We couldn't really complain, as we were playing in the hopes of hitting the quads again and getting the "extra" amount in the progressive, so we weren't cheated out of the amount lost to the black hole any more than we were hoping to get extra out of the casino. (Before anyone gets bent out of shape, it was a quarter game -- we're talking about maybe $5 or $10 here.)

MoneyLA- It would seem to me that if the progressives were high enough, it might be a better play to switch over to the machine that isn't communicating properly (it sounds like it's receiving the progressive amounts, but it's not sending anything out to the bank in terms of progressive increases or "I've hit the progressive, reset it."). While your play wouldn't increase the progressives further, if they're really high and you can hit the same one twice, that would be good for your pocket.

If you've notified the casino once (or more times than that) and they've failed to do anything about it, I don't think there's any ethical issue with playing that machine when it could give you an edge. It also boggles my mind that they wouldn't fix the issue after being made aware of it.