5 ms·

Yes, when you setup a slot machine you select in the configuration menu exactly which percentage payout you want the machine to have over its lifetime (~3-5 yea

by feld 10y ago

Yes, when you setup a slot machine you select in the configuration menu exactly which percentage payout you want the machine to have over its lifetime (~3-5 years). In Wisconsin accessing this menu is highly secured: security guards, cameras, auditors all staring over your shoulder making sure what you set is correct. Also they must report that information to the state here as well as the checksums of the games. I think in 2007 they were doing MD5 still, but my memory is fuzzy on it. Fun fact: by being able to access the payout statistics menu and knowing the machine's installation date it was easy to know which machines would be "hot". I have witnessed machines that paid out poorly for a couple years (+ a few million USD) but would hit regular jackpots near the end of their expected lifecycle. edit: gambling is a scam, please don't participate

myowncrapulence 10y ago
Is this the case with card games at casinos? I'm under the impression card games are completely random and cannot have designated odds (except for basic rules like dealer holds over 17 in blackjack). In this sense wouldn't card games be a wiser bet than slot machines?
- ad-hominem 10y ago
  Yes, unless you think it is possible that the casino in question removes cards from their decks. For instance, playing black jack by the basic strategy is (from wizardofodds.com): > the probability of an overall win in blackjack is 42.22%, a tie is 8.48%, and a loss is 49.10%. I'm going to assume you wish to ignore ties for purposes of the streak. In that case, the probability of a win, given a resolved bet, is 46.36%. So yes, your best bet in the casino is probably blackjack, but it is still a losing proposition without counting cards. Face cards tend to favor the players (table), not the dealer. This is because a dealer hitting with a face card more frequently causes a bust than a player hitting a face card (because players don't have to hit when they might bust, dealers do). So a deck that is heavy with face cards is better for players. Poker, by contrast, the house has no real interest in whether people win or lose - they just get a % cut of each hand played so they win a little every hand.
- legostormtroopr 10y ago
  Not really, as the odds in games like Blackjack are relatively well known to the point where with a given strategy you can calculate the house edge pretty quickly. For most houses and most strategies, the house has an edge of about 0.3-0.4% which is just enough to make you go broke. If you can count cards, and they don't use a continuous shuffler you can get this to as good as 0.1% in your favour. http://wizardofodds.com/games/blackjack/calculator/ http://wizardofodds.com/games/blackjack/calculator/
  - vanattab 10y ago
    For those intrested games with a low house edge there is a game that beats (counted) black jack's pretty good edge by almost a order of magnitude. If you play craps at a table that allows 100x odds bets. You only bet the minimum on the pass line then the max (100x) on the odds when the point is set. This stratagy lowers the house edge to 0.014%. The only problem is it takes a large bankroll. If the table is a $25 dollar minimum you have to risk $2500 on every round.
    - WorldMaker 10y ago
      The casinos are smart enough that all of the bets with the lowest house edge require high stakes to keep it interesting to the house to participate. Baccarat is always a high stakes game not because it's "fancy" or "exotic", but because it is nearly the closest a casino will let you get to betting on a coin flip, for every player in the game.
- SaltyBackendGuy 10y ago
  Casinos also do things like add 6-7 decks to a shoe where each additional deck gives the house an additional edge. If they have a continuous shuffle machine the odds don't swing (in favor of the house/player), due to a constant probability of cards in circulation. Moral of the story is if you go to a casino with money expect to leave with out it.
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    > gives the house an additional edge Technically, additional decks reduce the expected edge of a card-counter who has only seen some number of cards. Which functions the same way...
eric_h 10y ago
> gambling is a scam, please don't participate I disagree. To some extent slot machines are more scam-like than the other games, but I think the table games (roulette, black jack, craps) all have well known odds and are generally honest games. They are not "fair" in the sense that the odds are stacked against you, but I don't believe that that's a reason to completely boycott them. Gambling is fun. As long as you know going into it that the odds are stacked against you (and how badly they're stacked against you) and you don't go into a game without being prepared to lose your entire stake, there's nothing wrong with gambling. Don't bet the farm, but go into it knowing you could lose everything, and enjoy a few hours of gambling and "free" drinks. Every once in a while you'll beat the house, and _that_ is quite enjoyable.
- sytelus 10y ago
  Nope. Every single game played in casino is a scam. If you figure out any way to beat them, you will be in huge trouble and even behind the bars. Casinos are powerful enough that they have made this in to actual law. Police will literally be after you if you ever beat casino consistently in any of their games. There are tons of stories on people figuring out how to beat casino in black jack and they were ruined by casinos because of that. This would sound ridiculous to most sane people but casino's have done great marketing and physiological twisting that people now go there with full knowledge of this and think losing is actually fun and its quite enjoyable. Basically what you are saying.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    If by "ruined" you mean "banned by casinos", then yes. Otherwise, excepting people who actually attempted to defraud the casinos by cheating in ways we'd all agree are in fact cheating, I think yours might be difficult argument to support with evidence.
  - cortesoft 10y ago
    No, a scam requires dishonesty; it is right in the definition of the word. A casino tells you the exact odds, and everyone is freely able to decide if they want to play given those odds. Yes, they are in the house's favor, but that is what a player trades in return for the whole setup (the casino, the workers, the free drinks, the entertainment, etc) You can still argue casinos are immoral, but they are clearly not a scam. That would be like saying cigarettes are a scam, just because they are bad for you.
EpicEng 10y ago
Gambling is fun. Thanks, but I'll keep gambling when I like and not delude myself into thinking it's supposed to be 'fair'.
nkurz 10y ago
Fun fact: by being able to access the payout statistics menu and knowing the machine's installation date it was easy to know which machines would be "hot". I have witnessed machines that paid out poorly for a couple years (+ a few million USD) but would hit regular jackpots near the end of their expected lifecycle. I'm dubious that there is a per-machine fixed sum over a fixed time like this. Apart from the "progressive" machines that have a jackpot shared across a network of machines, I'm pretty sure that the payout percentage is just a statistical prediction, and that by law each result has to be independent of all previous payouts. Do you have a reference that you could point to that would confirm your understanding? The sources I've found say that each play is random: http://www.vegasslotsonline.com/faq/#random http://www.vegasslotsonline.com/faq/#random. You might be right, but I wouldn't want you or someone else to rely on this information if it's a myth.
- feld 10y ago
  I was actually working on the casino floor for a year and configured, repaired, diagnosed, and twiddled with these machines all day. It was a terrible job, but gave me something to do while hunting for my next IT adventure. Other interesting observations: the machines based on Windows XP Embedded crashed all the time, the Linux ones were fine. The Linux ones from several mfrs used APNG for the slot machine graphics. This was my first exposure to animated PNGs in the wild. (~2007) The Linux machines loaded a kernel module at boot that was supposed to prevent/detect tampering with memory. Some also loaded their own audio driver stack which surprised me: wasn't ALSA or OSS. Very odd, specialized little machines. (Many were Pentium 3 with totally custom motherboards due to strange peripherals) Progressives cannot legally be removed from operation until someone hits the jackpot. (at least in my state)

by feld 10y ago

myowncrapulence 10y ago

Is this the case with card games at casinos? I'm under the impression card games are completely random and cannot have designated odds (except for basic rules like dealer holds over 17 in blackjack). In this sense wouldn't card games be a wiser bet than slot machines?

ad-hominem 10y ago
Yes, unless you think it is possible that the casino in question removes cards from their decks. For instance, playing black jack by the basic strategy is (from wizardofodds.com): > the probability of an overall win in blackjack is 42.22%, a tie is 8.48%, and a loss is 49.10%. I'm going to assume you wish to ignore ties for purposes of the streak. In that case, the probability of a win, given a resolved bet, is 46.36%. So yes, your best bet in the casino is probably blackjack, but it is still a losing proposition without counting cards. Face cards tend to favor the players (table), not the dealer. This is because a dealer hitting with a face card more frequently causes a bust than a player hitting a face card (because players don't have to hit when they might bust, dealers do). So a deck that is heavy with face cards is better for players. Poker, by contrast, the house has no real interest in whether people win or lose - they just get a % cut of each hand played so they win a little every hand.
legostormtroopr 10y ago
Not really, as the odds in games like Blackjack are relatively well known to the point where with a given strategy you can calculate the house edge pretty quickly. For most houses and most strategies, the house has an edge of about 0.3-0.4% which is just enough to make you go broke. If you can count cards, and they don't use a continuous shuffler you can get this to as good as 0.1% in your favour. http://wizardofodds.com/games/blackjack/calculator/ http://wizardofodds.com/games/blackjack/calculator/
- vanattab 10y ago
  For those intrested games with a low house edge there is a game that beats (counted) black jack's pretty good edge by almost a order of magnitude. If you play craps at a table that allows 100x odds bets. You only bet the minimum on the pass line then the max (100x) on the odds when the point is set. This stratagy lowers the house edge to 0.014%. The only problem is it takes a large bankroll. If the table is a $25 dollar minimum you have to risk $2500 on every round.
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    The casinos are smart enough that all of the bets with the lowest house edge require high stakes to keep it interesting to the house to participate. Baccarat is always a high stakes game not because it's "fancy" or "exotic", but because it is nearly the closest a casino will let you get to betting on a coin flip, for every player in the game.
SaltyBackendGuy 10y ago
Casinos also do things like add 6-7 decks to a shoe where each additional deck gives the house an additional edge. If they have a continuous shuffle machine the odds don't swing (in favor of the house/player), due to a constant probability of cards in circulation. Moral of the story is if you go to a casino with money expect to leave with out it.
- EdHominem 10y ago
  > gives the house an additional edge Technically, additional decks reduce the expected edge of a card-counter who has only seen some number of cards. Which functions the same way...

eric_h 10y ago

> gambling is a scam, please don't participate I disagree. To some extent slot machines are more scam-like than the other games, but I think the table games (roulette, black jack, craps) all have well known odds and are generally honest games. They are not "fair" in the sense that the odds are stacked against you, but I don't believe that that's a reason to completely boycott them. Gambling is fun. As long as you know going into it that the odds are stacked against you (and how badly they're stacked against you) and you don't go into a game without being prepared to lose your entire stake, there's nothing wrong with gambling. Don't bet the farm, but go into it knowing you could lose everything, and enjoy a few hours of gambling and "free" drinks. Every once in a while you'll beat the house, and _that_ is quite enjoyable.

sytelus 10y ago
Nope. Every single game played in casino is a scam. If you figure out any way to beat them, you will be in huge trouble and even behind the bars. Casinos are powerful enough that they have made this in to actual law. Police will literally be after you if you ever beat casino consistently in any of their games. There are tons of stories on people figuring out how to beat casino in black jack and they were ruined by casinos because of that. This would sound ridiculous to most sane people but casino's have done great marketing and physiological twisting that people now go there with full knowledge of this and think losing is actually fun and its quite enjoyable. Basically what you are saying.
- tptacek 10y ago
  If by "ruined" you mean "banned by casinos", then yes. Otherwise, excepting people who actually attempted to defraud the casinos by cheating in ways we'd all agree are in fact cheating, I think yours might be difficult argument to support with evidence.
- cortesoft 10y ago
  No, a scam requires dishonesty; it is right in the definition of the word. A casino tells you the exact odds, and everyone is freely able to decide if they want to play given those odds. Yes, they are in the house's favor, but that is what a player trades in return for the whole setup (the casino, the workers, the free drinks, the entertainment, etc) You can still argue casinos are immoral, but they are clearly not a scam. That would be like saying cigarettes are a scam, just because they are bad for you.

EpicEng 10y ago

Gambling is fun. Thanks, but I'll keep gambling when I like and not delude myself into thinking it's supposed to be 'fair'.

nkurz 10y ago

Fun fact: by being able to access the payout statistics menu and knowing the machine's installation date it was easy to know which machines would be "hot". I have witnessed machines that paid out poorly for a couple years (+ a few million USD) but would hit regular jackpots near the end of their expected lifecycle. I'm dubious that there is a per-machine fixed sum over a fixed time like this. Apart from the "progressive" machines that have a jackpot shared across a network of machines, I'm pretty sure that the payout percentage is just a statistical prediction, and that by law each result has to be independent of all previous payouts. Do you have a reference that you could point to that would confirm your understanding? The sources I've found say that each play is random: http://www.vegasslotsonline.com/faq/#random http://www.vegasslotsonline.com/faq/#random. You might be right, but I wouldn't want you or someone else to rely on this information if it's a myth.

feld 10y ago
I was actually working on the casino floor for a year and configured, repaired, diagnosed, and twiddled with these machines all day. It was a terrible job, but gave me something to do while hunting for my next IT adventure. Other interesting observations: the machines based on Windows XP Embedded crashed all the time, the Linux ones were fine. The Linux ones from several mfrs used APNG for the slot machine graphics. This was my first exposure to animated PNGs in the wild. (~2007) The Linux machines loaded a kernel module at boot that was supposed to prevent/detect tampering with memory. Some also loaded their own audio driver stack which surprised me: wasn't ALSA or OSS. Very odd, specialized little machines. (Many were Pentium 3 with totally custom motherboards due to strange peripherals) Progressives cannot legally be removed from operation until someone hits the jackpot. (at least in my state)