Yup. Usually something like that for the bonus features also.
Calculated? They are SET!
Years ago Bally was a customer and I had a brochure for one of their slots. Right there they said its payouts could be set anywhere between every pull to never. So a machine can be hot or cold, but management knows it, too.
There is usually a legally mandated minimum, though. But, yes, individual slot machines can be tweaked. As I said above, many states require casinos to publish their payout tables.
Went to a nearby Indian casino last week, I could tell if I was near a bank of older-type machines or newer-type ones by the concentration of secondhand smoke.
A while back there was a thread asking if younger generations have more of an aversion to gambling–several people claimed that people nowadays are more used to gaming and want things more complicated than bar-bar-bar reels.
Now, I questioned then if gambling ever really was targeted towards the young, but the more complicated machines are almost certainly are a result of the casinos keeping up with their demographics–as more people coming in are more used to interactive video games, more slots will have interactive elements.
My favorite from my last Vegas trip was one based on Airplane!, where the bonus games included picking your inflight meal (bonus round ends if you pick the fish), and autopilot Otto was wild, and would inflate to fill the entire column it was in.
If the machines were properly random in their behaviour (or at least uncontrolled - in the way the old-fashioned pure-mechanical one armed bandit machines were/are), this would be true.
In modern machines, though, the reels are driven by stepper motors and the stopping positions of each spin are determined by a computer inside the machine - in this case, there’s no particular reason to assume there is no relationship between successive spins.
The issue of pokies has been a hot topic in Australia recently. I understand that we have more per capita than anywhere else on earth. They have taken over not just casinos, but pubs and clubs in nearly every state. This has been at a cost to the live music industry and has led to significant problem gambling. On the other hand, pokie revenue purportedly funds sport and community services supported by not for profit clubs.
The minority government recently reneged on an agreement with independent MPs over the rollout of a mandatory pre commitment scheme, which would have seen players register for limits on gambling amounts. The scheme was due to be rolled out this year, but has been shelved for a trial in the ACT instead, following a hysterical campaign by the pub and club representative bodies, which dragged in the national football codes (AFL and Rugby League).
Here’s a song by The Whitlams which was a reasonable hit in the early 2000’s written about the band’s former bassist who killed himself after losing everything as a pokie addict. It’s called “Blow up the Pokies”.
Last time I was in Denmark, I was riding a ferryboat. They had slot machines that took copper tokens (10 per kronor, or whatever). You could “win” tons of tokens-but they had no cash value. What was this all about?
You mean other than the law, the specs of the manufacturers, the programming and the Gaming Regulations?
Actual gambling was probably not allowed. Almost anywhere you could operate a casino where there is no possibility of winning. Which is odd, because in real casinos the probability of winning is so slight anyway.
Yep. This is exactly how I felt on my one and only visit to Vegas back in 1996. Its almost as if the people chained to these machines are uttering a silent plea for help as they glance at you as you pass by.
And the other thing I hated about them is that they are omnipresent in Vegas. They are everywhere…restaurants, the airport, convenience stores…that racket haunted my dreams as I attempted to sleep in the Vegas airport due to my flight home being cancelled…it was horrible.
Are you nailing this to a specific geographic place? because none of those things are the same the world over - and some machines are programmed to dynamically adjust the payout scheme so as to fluctuate about a target payout rate (which means that they are more likely to pay out if they have not been doing so for an extended period.)
I’m a keen gambler but I consider slot machines (pokies in Australia) a waste of time and money. I tell people it would be easier to nominate an amount and then just burn notes to that value in an ashtray. However I don’t think they are any worse that casino table games (with the exception of poker), they are equally mindless and the players seem to be having no more fun than slot machine players, just aimlessly shoveling chips around.
Mind you I shouldn’t complain as I have made a lifetime profit playing roulette. I have had a total of 8 bets, each time one chip on one number and have won 4 times, 3 times with 27 and once with 2. I actually won the first 3 bets I had over the space of several years.
Yep. My comments were specific to Nevada, actually. Sorry about that.
Were you able to exchange those tokens for something of value elsewhere in the ferry? I’ve played the slots on the ferry from London to Calais on my 21st birthday (I was traveling along to Slovenia). It was only the second time in my life I played slots, and somehow I ended up winning the jackpot, which I believe was 200 or 300 pounds, via a high-low bonus game. It was a nice birthday present, as it paid for my whole trip from Wolverhampton to Slovenia. 
Funny enough, I won another 30 pounds later while showing some Americans how to play those slots. I just threw in a pound coin, for demonstrative purposes, and hit a minor prize. Lady luck was good to me that day. I’ve only played slots a handful of times since (with a $50 personal bankroll limit), and have lost every time but one, when I came out $10 ahead.
As someone who has a great time gambling I concur that this is usually true. It’s odd the number of times someone will complain because I’m smiling while playing and get possibly a little giddy when I win.
Other interesting things people could do with their money in Las Vegas:
Just leave it out in the open and see who takes it.
Arrange amateur competitions with cash prizes.
Tell people you’re with President Obama’s Socialist Muslim Task Force and it is your dawah to redistribute wealth.
Pay for an entire row of people’s meals.
Use it as toilet paper.
Tell tourists you’re a drug smuggler, give them bills and that the guy making the pickup will be back in 5 minutes, then run off and observe them.
Deface it in creative ways.
Go to a public library and hide notes in what you think are worthy tomes.
Buy provisions for the people living in storm drains underneath the city.
Buy lots of chocolate and make sculptures out of it, then give those scupltures to children.
And if someone would be entertained by doing any of those things, then by all means they should do them.Such is the nature of money spent on entertainment.
Again, this seems to be a putting forth of the idea that if you, personally, are not entertained by something then it is stupid that anybody is entertained by it. Personally, I have no interest in spending money to go watch someone play music for 2 hours. But I don’t then advance to thinking that people who do are stupid or wasting their money.
Now, people who gamble (except in those relatively rare conditions where you can have an edge) not for entertainment but as a way to escape their current life condition, or out of compulsion, or in a misguided belief that they are making money over the long term, then those are things better examined.
Fair enough. No probs.
In a related story, when New York first started scratch-off lottery tickets, I bought one at gas station. I won $20. The following month, I was at the same gas station and bought another one. I again won $20. The third time I bought one, I was visiting a friend who worked overnight at a mini-mart. I won again, and have not bought a scratch-off ticket since. Another friend of ours saw that I won and heard the story, and has since more than repaid the State of New York for their largesse to me.
I just want to take a moment and appreciate this sentence.
Other than the Nevada Gaming Commission (or their counterparts in other jurisdictions).
As dropzone correctly notes upthread, the overall payout rate is determined by the factory settings of the payout table and random number generator inside the machine’s rusty innards.
Although a machine could be programmed to take prior outcomes into account, every thing I’ve ever heard or read indicates that that isn’t the case: each spin is an independent trial, just like flipping a coin, rolling the dice or dropping a roulette ball. The ball has no memory and neither does the slot machine.
There’s a widespread superstition that casino management can dial up payout odds when they feel like it (turning a knob from some shadowy office), but it just ain’t so.