Question of the Day - 02 February 2024

At least with video poker and table games, you can determine the house edge yourself (unless the games are rigged). Most people aren't going to do that though.

It's not just crappy payback percentages. Myriad times, cruise ship casinos have been caught cheating red-handed. I remember one quickly-hushed scandal where a player somehow got hold of a shoe that still had all the decks in it, counted it down, and found that twelve face cards had been removed (extra 2% advantage for the house). One dealer was surreptitiously filmed cheating, and not all that skillfully, either--he was dealing seconds from a handheld double deck, which unless done very expertly, can be detected audibly though not visually. Yet another dealer was caught shorting payoffs and the player who detected it and complained was forced to debark at the next port and not complete the cruise.

Only a complete idiot would gamble aboard a cruise ship, with its utter lack of regulation, oversight, and accountability. They don't fly the Jolly Roger, but they should.

"They’re not exactly repeat customers. Once they disembark,it’s highly unlikely they’ll be back, ever. Casinos have every incentive to slaughter rather than shear its sheep"

That's wrong. Onboard their current cruise & continuing after they've returned home, cruisers are bombarded with special deals to entice them to be frequent flyers.

Many people who cruise (especially the older crowd) go on multiple cruises a year, and cruise lines do everything they can to establish brand loyalty, just like Vegas casinos.

In addition to discounted fares, frequent cruisers are offered special perks like "exclusive" onboard parties & gifts found in their staterooms on arrival.

The dirty little secret about a cruise, though, is that it can be pretty boring. You can only eat so much or ride a water slide so many times. Like the raccoon who knows a trap with KFC inside is a bad bet, the lure of the slots to counter boredom, even with a 25% hold, like the fried chicken, becomes irresistible.

I was recently on the Celebrity Summit. I hit the Grand on a Rich Little Piggies and was surprised to be issued a W2G despite being in international waters.

My husband and I cruise once or twice a year.  Always on Celebrity.  I play video poker weekly at Southpoint.  On a cruise I never have an expectation of winning and wouldn't touch video poker.  So, for shits and giggles we play stupid slot machines, but only with the onboard credit we're given.  A cruise last summer had $1,000 in onboard credit.  We churned it through some slots enough times to be given a free cruise.  But yes, I would not gamble out of my own wallet.  

I was on a Royal Caribbean cruise last year. I actually saw a halfway decent blackjack game. $25 3:2 6 deck shoe. Pen wasn't great but not awful either. Seemed to be about 4.5/6 from what I saw. I was rusty and didn't have bankroll so I didn't play. The only other cruise I've been on was Carnival and they just had CSM games. 

... although a while ago, and it's long since been fixed.

The random number generator algorithm in today's games are "free running"; i.e., they're continuously making new numbers.  As been discussed here often, what you get when you pull the handle, hit the deal button, etc. is really random (or as close as they can make it; today's machines have more than one RNG running simultaneously).

The algorithms are fairly simple -- start with a seed number, add something to it, multiply it, divide it, massage it somehow, and get a new seed.  Power up a machine, and the RNG(s) immediately start screaming away, generating a new seed (or seeds).  When the game layer asks for 52 cards, or a number of reel stops, etc., That huge random # gets mapped down to what the game needs.

Well, we're talking now ... back then, the cruise ship machines had a "seed" that was programmed into the firmware.  And they powered off the machines as the ship returned to port.

The next cruise, power on, and the same sequence of game results would show.  Of course, some players quickly noticed ...

...I was on a cruise and was playing craps.  I noticed that the pit boss would call for "new dice" every time the shooter got "hot", and he would almost immediately seven-out.  If the players caught on and started playing Don't, they'd call "new dice" and suddenly seven just wouldn't come up.  I was down, switched to playing whatever the house was trying to produce, won my losses back, and quit craps for the rest of the cruise.  I played blackjack instead and lost slowly.  Lesson learned.

Later in the cruise, two guys much worse for wear, got into a brawl in the casino.  To their credit, the casino employees quickly broke it up.  Our question was how you "trespass" someone on a cruise ship, in this case on the two day run back to our port.

I think it is more that they are rumored to have dismal payback percentages because, as stated, they don't release them. 
I've been on half a dozen cruises during the past two years and I am in may cruise and Las Vegas groups on FB. I have seen just as many winners and losers on cruises as I do in Vegas.
As with just about everything the losses and bad streaks get more attention because people like to confirm their negative experiences.
It would be nice to get the actual data from cruise ships.
I know that I've been surprised by the details in the Las Vegas data.
For example, according to the article below, blackjack (which has a relatively low house-edge when played with even the most basic strategy that Anthony and Andrew have covered in their videos) players lost 14.82% of their money to the casinos. Compare that to nickel slots where players only lost 5.36%.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/casinos-gaming/what-casino-games-give-players-the-best-odds-at-winning-3006955/