Working out hold
The casino's hold for the month is what it kept for itself, divided by the handle, then multiplied to make a percentage. That is all. What if the state regulator publishes 20,000 dollars in revenue for the month on a handle of 6,000,000 dollars? Let's break this out into the steps the operator does in its books, and then show the result. The terms revenue and handle are light on maths, so only the opaque statistic for the month has a name. The two terms in the bookkeeping all have plain English. The regulator reports that an extra 6,000,000 dollars was added to the millions already in the player bank, but that it could not make up the deficit because 20,000 dollars were taken out. The result is a hold of a small percentage, which the report will greet us as a small percentage. That is the same as saying there was a return of a high percentage, if the casino wants to put it that way. But the language of accounting would call that a small portion being retained. The two measures show up as return on display when the operator states one, and as hold percentage when a regulator documents the other, but they are arithmetic resultants from the same calculation. The operators report the same numbers, but with a different focus, when reporting the return percentage for a game and a regulator states a hold.
Realised against theoretical
Both of these statistics show one statistic in a report that matters to one party. An operator pays the return percentage back to the player, over many spins, in many sessions, many banks, many weeks, many years. The theoretical return is the profit margin in a game. The hold is the cash kept by the casino over the period. Similar figures from other industries can be enlightening as well. In banking, a margin also holds at the market rates: the extra the bank takes on a margin loan, as a cut, as a fee, and whatever else it calls it, even though no element in the flow of money is identified with that piece of the management fee. A better measure of the owner value comes from a valuation a lender makes, pegged to the customer, using the same logical construct as the algebra used in a casino's internal player club account of a game's return to player, to bet one book against the other. In retail and streaming, the cash used by the operator is bottlenecked in its ability and likelihood to migrate from one party to another, even though the figures in bookwork are the same on the balance line. Think of a user listing an item for sale, only to see the retailer keep the model in stock. In casino gaming, the theoretical return to player is presented once the game is live by the operator as a playing card, given out by the dealer. The hold, in the reports of regulators, is the retrospective view of what happened, on the average player, to their stake, seen across the house. The hold in the report, or return in the app display, is real business cash, but not the same cash as the retailer keeps. For the two need not balance, reporting what the operator kept of the wagers directed to it, spread out to the account of every player, every session of every player, every games of every session, the sum of whose stakes are a handle that cannot be the same as the amount of money deposited from the player's card to operator's bank.
Four reasons they diverge
The hold of the operator is based on the average of all hands, and cannot describe any one of them. The four major differences between the revenue-based lookback at a backward-running window of actual cash, versus the game-based estimate looking forward, are: the mix of games played in the month. Frequent players may have higher returns, rare players may have lower returns. The customers who spun the most has been calculated to explain more variance in the casino's income than any other single factor. The total amount of bonus money during the month, because the total pile includes money that the operator can promise to return, not money that comes in from credit cards, ACHs, or ewallets. So handles will run higher, and holds lower, if and when there is an uptick in the number of bonus piles over the threshold. We refer to a "large jackpot" when we talk about hold because the same dollars of total income can show as any one of:
There is a large casino jackpot. There is a roll-up of players before a jackpot. The same statistic will demonstrate the same thing, only looking out at it as it roles up. Track the account balance at the spin: it reflects the same metric, as a single sample. Track the account before a spin, even when it concludes later: we learn the relationship to the same metric.
