[ Home ]

[ Slots News ]

Random, Yet Programmed

Even to experienced gamblers, slot machines hold a certain mystique, if you will. Fruit machines are like instruments of Fate itself: push a button, and watch the wiles of Chance take over. Part of what makes the slots seem so inscrutable is the simple fact that the vast majority of players simply do not understand how they work. There is, perhaps, no other form of gambling surrounded by as much myth, superstition, and misconception as the one-armed bandits.

Most slot game fans know that the devices’ outcomes are random – even if none of them will give up their pet beliefs about what factors could possibly make the machines more apt to work in their favor. It’s also hard to miss the fact that these machines are programmed by the casino or gambling establishment, to payout a certain percentage of the time. If you think about it, this seems to be an oxymoron. How, exactly, can something be random, and yet programmed?

It’s entirely possible, actually, because the two factors (probability vs. payout) are completely different from each other. If you flip a coin, for example, long-term results are going to show heads versus tails having a fifty/fifty split. Yet, individual coin flips make no differentiation for what came before them, so it’s possible to have winning and losing streaks. (It’s the same reason that most families with large numbers of children still have more of one sex than the other.) If you bet fifty cents a flip, and not only keep your half-dollar, but gain forty-five cents from the house per accurate coin flip, you have a payoff percentage of ninety-five percent: the average in casinos. Over a long period of time, your payback will be ninety-five percent, regardless of how many heads or tails you earn in a given sitting.

Back to October 2008 Archive.