I would quibble even with this qualification. It depends what you mean by “iteration”. If you stand next to a table, watching the game, counting cards but not playing, then step in and play one hand when the count gets good, you have a very good chance of winning money, even though you “played” only one hand.
I’d been told that casinos effectively nullified card counting by using a machine that constantly shuffles the cards and contains multiple decks.
Though I’d also been told that they don’t actually want to discourage card counting per se, as most people are just really bad keeping track in such an environment, and people who think they have a system to win tend to bet more. And if you’re actually any good at it, they’ll kick you out.
A continuous shuffler does greatly decrease the advantage obtained by card counting but doesn’t completely eliminate it. If you’re sitting in the last position (“third base”) you can still count the cards shown by the other players in each hand and get a small advantage when it comes your turn to play. Of course, the pit bosses know this and probably pay more attention to the play of people sitting at third base.
It’s true that card counting is hard and most people who try it suck at it. The casinos try to set up the games so that a good card counter doesn’t have much advantage but a poor card counter doesn’t feel that counting is completely hopeless.
I used to play blackjack as a kind of hobby - not for large amounts and not with the intention of winning serious money, but simply out of interest, and whenever I travelled to a city that had a casino I would spend an evening there. I noticed huge differences in how widespread those shuffling machines were. In Europe, they’re almost everywhere; in Las Vegas and Macao, most casinos still relied on the old-school way of the dealer sputting hand-shuffled decks into a shoe and then re-shuffling as soon as a marker card comes up. I wondered why this was the case. A dealer once told me that those machines are surprisingly expensive and can easily go into five-digit amounts, but considering the amounts of money that casinos turn over, I doubt that this is really an obstacle. So I suppose some casinos intentionally want to create the impression that blackjack is beatable by card-counting, and therefore stick to the old method.
The machines themselves are quite easy to use, by the way, and don’t disturb the game at all. After each hand (or sometimes only after every few hands - I never figured out why this would be the case), the dealer would simply feed the used cards into a slot in the machine, and they would then be shuffled back into the deck. The machine would spit out shuffled cards, either individually or in sets depending on a setting, onto a tray. I always assumed that another reason for the adoption of those machines, besides the elimination of card-counting, was that casinos wanted to eliminate the time that a table was inactive because the dealer had to shuffle manually.
Even with the smaller 3-5 deck shoes you see with continuous shufflers, I’m guessing it’s nearly impossible to overcome the .5% or so odds the house has.
That said, I wouldn’t expect for continuous shufflers to take over as casinos love people who think they can count cards, but suck at it. If some of their tables have CSMs and some don’t, casinos oftentimes see that people gravitate to the tables without.
Many questions: How did this work? How did the machine know that you were “known” by the bar? Did the barworkers go over and adjust the machine every time someone “known” was playing? And then adjust it back afterwards? If they were “amusement only” then no money was awarded anyway so why would it matter?
If the bartender/manager knew you they would clear the points and give you the cash. “Amusement Only” was stamped on the machine for legal reasons. They (workers) would blank out the machine anytime a player walked away. Many people played them just for amusement. I never touched them (I don’t “get” gambling).
I went to a bowling alley that had one of those. You put your quarter in and watch the dials spin, and if a winning hand came up you would get nothing, because that would be illegal. Unless you were known and told the bartender that you were going to play for money and then you gave him a dollar on top of the quarter you put in the machine and if a winning hand came up you would get a pay out. Something like a pair would pay out a $1, meaning you only lost 25 cents. Other hands that paid more seemed pretty rare. People said it was rigged somehow, but I never saw anyone touch the machine before paid spins, and winning hands came up once in a while, just not very often.
Could be that it’s just not worth it compared to actual losses due to card counters. The traditional methods of catching card counters (surveillance, statistics) are also useful for catching cheaters, so it’s not like you can replace someone carefully watching the cameras with the shufflers. They’re an additional expense that might not be worth it.
I lived a block away from a major illegal gambling location, and I used to wonder that too. I never saw any illegal gambling …
After slot machines were finally legalized there, the local paper had an interview with a well known owner on his retirement, and one of the things he remembered was being proud of being the first operator on the strip to “have legal slot machines” 
Pinball machines fell into a grey area, where they weren’t gambling, but could be used as such (e.g. “I’ve got a dollar that says I can get a higher score than you”). Roger C. Sharpe’s Pinball! (E.P. Dutton, New York, 1977), has a photo of Fiorello La Guardia smashing pinball games with a sledgehammer when they were outlawed in New York in 1942. Apparently, they encouraged juvenile delinquency, gambling as described above, and used materials that would be better used in the war effort. And though the war ended, pinball machines remained illegal in many jurisdictions for a long time.
Later, part of the problem was that pinball machines were very similar to bingo machines, which had no skill component (outside of nudging the machine, and like pinballs, they had tilts that nullified the game if the player went too far), and other than that, were purely based on chance. Pinball machines had flippers, which let the player keep the ball in play; bingo machines did not. An excellent item on bingo machines is here:
Note that the author of that item frequently refers to “the betting phase.”
What bingos did do was to grant replays for achieving something. Pinballs did too, but not to the extent that bingos did. A very skilled pinball player might get three replays on a single game, a bingo player could potentially get hundreds. How do you play all those off? You don’t. You “sell them back” to the proprietor of the drugstore or bowling alley or wherever, who can then zero the number of replays he’s just bought. You may have spent a nickel, but you walk away with $5. Or you spend $1 in nickels, and walk away with nothing. Kind of like a slot machine, isn’t it? But bingo machines’ similarity to pinballs meant that both were looked down upon. That’s also why pinballs bore the legend, “A Game of Skill” on the backglass for years.
Bingo machines remain illegal where gambling is not permitted, though I did get to try one once. It was at the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, and it was made very clear, through a notice on the machine, that replays would be only replays, and would not be paid off in cash. Didn’t matter to me, as I was more interested in the experience of playing a bingo game. As it was, I won nothing playing a few games, and returned to real games of skill: pinballs.
This is really interesting, because this exact same thing is being done to video game «loot boxes» in order to circumvent gambling laws. Turns out the machine isn’t so novel after all.
Yeah, there were some laws (in China, I think) outlawing purchasable loot boxes, so instead you bought in-game cosmetics (ie new artwork for your character, or backgrounds for game boards, etc) and it came with a “free” loot box.
As a whole, the video game industry has been made worse by the presence of loot boxes and in-app purchases, but there doesn’t seem to be enough outrage yet to stop it, either via boycott or regulation.
I haven’t played a pinball machine in New York for a long time but last I did they were still in the mode where you could win extra balls to play in a game, but not extra games as is common elsewhere. The extra games were considered a payout to the player as opposed to the extra balls which simply extended the current game. Maybe they finally changed it. Matching the last two digits of your score for a free game wasn’t allowed either. It’s been a very long time since there were the old machines with no flippers that were just games of chance.
Many many years ago I did some weekend taxi driving (in London). One evening I had a collection from a Working Mans’ Club and the guy asked me to wait.
There was a row of one-armed bandits near where I was standing and I put a coin in one (sixpence if you are interested) and lost. I had a second coin, put that in and won a jackpot.
I was immediately subject to some abuse and a crowd gathered The club Secretary was called. I should not have played the machine because I was not a member, but that wasn’t the real problem. The main beef was that someone had put a load of money in before I arrived and “claimed” that he had only gone to the bar for more coins. His point was that he “knew” that the machine was about to pay out and I had robbed him of “his” jackpot.
There was quite an argument and eventually, I was allowed to keep a small part of my winnings.
I’ve been seeing these pop up in gas stations in Tennessee the last month (where gambling and slots are still illegal). They all have the letters “NCG” as part of the logo. I believe it stands for No Chance Games. Each individual spin is predetermined with no question on the result.
They seem to have a sticker on them from some regulating body from the Tennessee Govt.
Obviously it’s gambling, but at least some government bodies are allowing this now.
What a strange game. I found this:
Which says:
In the No Chance Game, chance has absolutely no role in any possible outcome. Each and every prize to be awarded is predetermined and placed in the list of prizes before the software is loaded into the machine.
The player may view the entire list of prizes that will be awarded at their balance, in the order in which they will be awarded. Therefore, every outcome which may entitle the player to money is entirely predictable by the player!
Missouri at least doesn’t seem to be buying it, but it may depend on how the lobbying goes:
Critics of the no-chance machines say the cleverly designed screens often lead to players rarely using the preview option to see if the next play will win.
Another reason players keep playing even when they do check and learn that the next spin loses is for the chance to inch closer to the winning spin. And then, opponents of the devices claim, there are some people who simply enjoy the thrill of gambling so much that they test their luck without being given the results beforehand.
So, make the preview inconvenient enough that people don’t use it. Sorta makes sense if the thrill of the unexpected win is the driving force. Might only work for casual players that put in a few spins each time they stop at the convenience store.
Penny Auction sites like DealDash have been said to attract people who like to play slot machines. At those you place bids on products you hope to buy at a low price but you have to pay for each bid win or lose. Apparently they control when you get to bid early on desirable items for a reasonable take for your money, but mostly you won’t get a chance to bid until the offers are up too high to give you a great deal. This doesn’t seem to bother the regular bidders, it’s that random payoff that is attractive, and a very low cost to keep playing, something like 60¢ a pop.
I once helped out in a series of bingo games put on by a charity. One part of that was selling break-open tickets, which came in blocks of 100 with a given distribution of prizes. There were two problems - when the big prize had been won, fewer people wanted to buy tickets from that particular block. Plus, the lottery commission warned the sellers to not simply pull the rest of the block when the cost of the number of tickets remaining was less than the value of remaining prizes - i.e. no cheap extra profit.
I suppose that’s a variation on “see what the prizes are”.
The problem with “preview next win” is that it’s still a 2-play game of chance, if you cannot see the next jackpot. You just have an option to stop before the second play. If you see too many jackpots in advance, then the play will reach a point where the payout sequence on display (assuming the machine makes money) is less than the value. But then it becomes an X-step game of chance… Sort of like playing 21; do you want another card, or will you hold?
My late mother used to support a cancer charity and each year they had a fair where she lived.
One year they had this “prize draw” with a prize of a very nice car. I don’t remember the details but the odds weren’t too bad at ten thousand to one or so. They only needed to sell five thousand tickets to break even, and it wasn’t just this one fair, it was scheduled to go on all summer from fair to fair.
Someone got their sums wrong, and the car was won after fewer than 500 tickets were sold.