Im a craps player myself but had heard something interesting about slot machines recently and was wondering if anyone knew anything about it. Most slot machines have a coin tube that fills up to allow payouts. Once this fills up, the rest will be diverted to a box below making a different type of sound (The splash of coin on coins). This guy maintained that a slot machine is more likely to payout when this tube is filled. I know casino’s can change the “looseness” of their slot machines but was wondering if slot machines could auto-regulate. There is the possibility of course that this guy was a victim of the fallacious “law” of averages and assumed because the machine hadn’t paid off in a while it was “due”
KC,
false “law”, or not, there is only one way to perhaps ( and it’s a BIG perhaps) increase your chances of picking a machine that
maybe will pay while you are chucking coins down its maw.
some machines have upwards of 6 meters on them.
these meters record coins in, coins out, total turnover, total payouts, etc.
look carefully because the meters are not obvious.
they can be located either above the screen, or tucked away
in the recess above the coin return tray.
sometimes they will be unreadable because the gaming operators will have slipped covers over the counters,
assuming you find the meters it then is a simple matter of arithmetic, but you need to know one very important thing.
the thing of the thing is " what percentage payout is the machine set at?".
this is usually 90-92%.
so look at total in vs. total out, calculate % and if it is BELOW
92 then the machine is maybe, perhaps, if the gods of chance are with you and your karma is good ready to spew goodies at you.
nothing is foolproof, but it is nice to get any advantage you can.
Flano, in order for what you say to be true, the machine has to regulate it’s likelihood of winning based on it’s past payouts. If a slot has been paying an avg of 85% for the past, say 100 pulls, and the slot is “set” to a 95% payout, that doesnt mean you’ll necessarliy have a better than 95% payout unless the machine watches the percentages and changes them accordingly (which I doubt). Unless the machine auto-regulates, then expecting a better than 95% payout in the future is akin to expecting black to start coming up more than 50% (not counting green) of the time if red has been coming up for the last 15 spins of the roulette wheel. The crux of the argument is if slot machines are a true Bernoulli trial or if they readjust on the fly.
I’ve heard people speculating about slot machines being more likely to pay out when the coin tubes are full, but I think it’s just an extension of the idea of the law of averages.
I did a brief spell of work for a fruit machine company when I left college; the machines had sensors at the bottom of the coin tube (so they wouldn’t give jackpots or try to pay out if the tubes were empty), but the sensors were quite low down in the tube and(because of the preset payout ratio - something like 72% IIRC) it would be very unusual for the machine to ever run down to that level anyway.
So I suppose he was right in the sense that it is ever so slightly less likely not to pay out if the tubes are full, but this would normally only occur if the machine had been completely emptied (by the management; not as a result of payout).
Also, one of the engineers told me that when you get the ‘double or nothing skill shot’ type of features, where the light is flashing very rapidly between ‘Win’ and ‘Lose’, the machine has determined the result before you press the button; don’t know if that was true or not.
It is such a common thought amoung gamblers that the chances of winning increase as you lose more that all the statistical explanations in the world won’t help.
I spent some time as a contrator doing some electrical safety work for one of the big machine manuafucturers. I’d tell you the city but it would give the company, and me, away.
I talked to them about how to beat the slots and they said simply to stay away. The one time it really happened was when a guy from the casino was collecting money from the machine, he swapped the e-prom that had the payout schedule so the machine had a pay off above 100%. After he closed the machine, his friend made sure he was the first to sit down, and then palyed the machine the rest of day by switching off friends making sure to keep control of the machine. After a day, the casino realized the machine was paying too much, switched in a new e-prom, watched the tapes and the guy was caught.
All this mumbo jumbo about waiting until the machine is behind in it’s probablity of payouts is wrong. Don;t you figure the casinos alraedy know about these theories and make sure they doesn’t work.
The casinos probably start these rumors as a way to keep losing players at the machines waiting for the mythical payout.
Flano1,
Where are you getting the idea that most slot machines are set at 90-92% payout? I always hear various figures on this, and when I ask people about it they are never sure. I just saw a Travel Channel ‘Secrets of Las Vegas’ program the other day that said almost all slot machines in Vegas are set at about 75% payout unless otherwise stated and that generally only a handful of machines (almost always dollar slots) have the 98% payout. The Travel Channel states that the Nevada Gaming Commission sets the minimum payout, so all casinos, as you might expect, choose to offer the minimum to maximize profit.
I can’t say they are right, but I was just curious where your figures come from…
Ex arcade guy who knows redemtion machines well and I have read alot on slots and thier bretheren.
Simple, no.
Some casino’s will have 100% payout slots or will mix very loose slots into sections to get people excited that they might win too. The looseness is set by adjusting the payouts in relation to the probability of a given combination appearing. IIRC “auto regulating” machines are illegal. People who wait for a machine to stiff a few people are operating under the assumption that random number generators are not random, or that dice have memory.
Nope
http://www.slots-it.com/slot-machine-payout-percentages/
http://www.iplayslots.com/slotschron/payouts.html
I can go on…
Remember, the magic word is competition. Casino A say my slots pay 90% Casiono B is 85%. So casiono B says yeah right and sets theirs to 91%. People now flock to the “higher payout” casino. If it was known that a casiino averaged 75% payout they would have no customers.