Right on! You cannot turn a negative (or zero) into a positive one by any betting scheme and it doesn’t matter if you or the opponent chooses the strategy. At least no finite strategy.
As for slot machine payouts, you have to remember that the house isn’t gambling, they know they’re going to win and so the only question is finding the payout level that maximizes profits but pays out enough to keep the customers coming back for more.
It obviously works at a very basic level. We put in a dollar and “win” nine dollars and all we think about is the win, not that you’ve already put in ten dollars before you got that “winner.” So the point for the casino is to keep those “wins” coming at a regular pace that keeps you going until you’re out of money.
In the UK fruit machines have to tell you what the average payout is; it varies between 70 - 85% IIRC.
Even though you may argue that would make me a fool to play such games, I do (or used to) from time to time, because the UK-style ones are more of a game. They give you the illusion at least of playing something like an electronic board game, which can be entertaining for a few minutes.
Yeah, there’s plenty of them out there. But all the ones I’ve seen were outside the US. Worldwide, they’re not rare at all. They may even be more common.
A lot of the US ones are going that way as well. I’ve seen a Clue (UK Cluedo) slot game where there actually was some elimination-based process in the bonus games. That was also the first one I saw where you created a username/password in order for the game to do Xbox-style Achievements, which provide no actual value but no doubt encourage at least some people to play more.
I’ve also seen a game hunter themed machine where the bonus rounds had a choice between normal random spin stuff, or actually taking one of the connected light guns and trying to shoot the moving targets on the screen.
Probably a demographic shift. As the people with the disposable incomes to go to a casino start coming more and more from gaming backgrounds, the more they’ll look like video games.
In the US, it varies by state. Here in Illinois, they are required to publish their payouts. For example, here are a bunch of payout tables across various states. Typically, cheap penny slots have lower payouts than the high stakes slots. It’s typically around 90% for the cheap slots, and up to the high 90s for the expensive slots. ETA: That’s in casinos. I have no idea what the typical payout rate is for slots that you might find at a bar (which only was recently made legal here in Illinois.)
This reminds me of the problem of the society that wants boys. If each child has a 50% chance of being a boy, and everyone wants a boy, so they keep having kids only until they have a boy. (If they first have a boy, they have no more kids.) What will be the eventual, steady state distribution in the society?
50% boys
It doesn’t matter how long you play, or how long you outlast anyone. If the odds say you win 50% of the time, you will eventually win 50% of the time.
You need to go back to the folks you had lengthy arguments with and concede that they were right.
And even when the bells go ringing and the word JACKPOT!!! is flashing on the screen for all to see, the casino may still decide to tell you that there was a software bug and you haven’t actually won anything.
Happens more often, apparently. In this case the casino did eventually agree to pay the guy a cool €1million, but that was still only a small fraction of the amount which the machine told him he’d won.
How does that work? In your example, 50% of the population will have one boy, 25% will have one girl and one boy, 12.5% will have two girls and one boy, and so on. Even taking into account the small percentage of people who have five girls (I have five daughters!) or more, won’t they still be outnumbered by the boys?
No. There isn’t any family with more than one boy (discounting twins and contraception failures), but in a large enough population you may encounter families with 20 or more girls. If you work through the math, you will see that the average family has one girl and one boy - the families with only boys are exactly balanced out by the families with multiple girls.
I have a buddy who worked IT on slot machines recently. He claims that whether or not you will win is set before you hit the button or pull the lever on a digital machine. However it isn’t like someone is watching you through the various cameras and make an individual machine win or lose.
Us Dopers are over-thinking this.
Sure there may be government regulation, and engineering analysis of chips, etc, etc,etc.
All of which is designed to make sure the the machines take only 1% or 5% profit, etc…
And us Dopers then go on to calculate the odds, point out why it’s illogical, etc, etc…
But there is a much simpler answer:
People who play the machines trust them because they physically see the winners.Lots of winners.
An individual sitting at the machine (like the clicheed blue-haired grandmother) does not care if the house keeps a huge chunk of her money: The only thing she cares about is that during the past half hour she has seen other people winning 100’s or 1000’s of dollars.
So she has absolute trust that somebody is going to win— and she could be the next somebody.
I had to work it out manually, but SmartAlecCat is right.
Let’s take 8 random families: 4 will have boys first and stop. Two will have a girl first and then a boy and stop. The last two have two girls each, and for the third child, one has a boy and one has a girl. Grand total: 8 boys, 7 girls.
You might think that’s not even, but try it again with 16 families:
8 have boys first.
4 have girls first, then a boy.
2 have two girls and then a boy.
Last two: one has three girls and a boy, the other has four girls.
Grand total: 16 boys, 15 girls
As you scale up, there will always be one extra boy, but the ratio will get as close to 50% as you want.
I confess. You are totally correct. I too lost the forest for the trees. Thank you for the correction.
I count 7 boys and 7 girls there.
I think that’s 15 boys and 15 girls.
And the same math works for slot machines – if the odds say the house will win 50%, the house will win 50%, regardless of how many people always blow their entire stash or how many walk away.
I am SO busted! :eek: I had to count the girls because it got so complicated. But I figured every family has exactly one boy, so I didn’t bother to count. :smack::smack::smack:
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I was wrong and the deep pockets argument is correct. The easiest way to see it is to reduce it to the simplest case that you have one chip and the house has two. Let p denote the probability that the house wins and then 1-p is the probability you win. The first roll will either break you (half the time) or reduce the house to where you were when you started (the other half the time). So p = 1/2 + (1/2)*(1-p) which solves immediately to p = 2/3.
If you want to explore this at greater length (which I did not), let p(n,m) denote the probability that the house wins if the house starts with n chips and you with m. The relevant equations are that
p(n,m) + p(m,n) = 1 (so that p(n,n) = 1/2 as you expect)
p(n,0) = 1 for n > 0 (p(0,0) is undefined)
p(n,m) = (1/2)*p(n+1,m-1) + (1/2)*p(n-1,m+1)
Deep pockets don’t matter – if the odds are that you win 50% of the time, you will win 50% of the time.
Every bet is independent. It doesn’t matter how long you play, or when you walk away.
Hari, the deep pockets argument is irrelevant because the players, as a group, have more than enough money to be considered a deep pocket. No casino is going to bust all of the players that walk through their doors, certainly not in an level-odds scenario. There are far too many bets for a level-odds system to swing far enough to bust everyone, the chances of that happening are incomprehensibly small.