Understand Slot Machines

3/29/2022admin

Introduction to Understanding Advantage Play Slots

As a slot machine enthusiast, have you heard intriguing rumors of the secret world of advantage players? Perhaps you saw the “Susan B. Anthony” used to reward a poorly treated casino reviewer at the end of the third Ocean’s movie? Here, I separate fact from fantasy. Let’s start understanding advantage play slots.

Slot machines are the most popular gambling game in most United States casinos, but the number of players who really understand how they work is terribly small. The purpose of this post is to explain what slot machines are and how they work in language anyone can understand. What slot machines are today is a worldwide phenomenon, from their U.S. Point of origin to Europe to Australia and the Pacific Rim. In the United States, where more than a million slots populate casino floors, they are a major profit center, long since having surpassed table games.

This article has the following sections:

Introduction to Understanding Advantage Play Slots
What’s an Advantage Play, Anyway?
Understanding Advantage Play Slots #1: Game Themes
Understanding Advantage Play Slots #2: Team Approach
Understanding Advantage Play Slots #3: Modern Casinos
Sooner or Later, Advantage Plays Stop Working
Summary of Understanding Advantage Play Slots

Keep Reading … or Listen Instead!

This audio contains commentary not found anywhere else!

Subscribe to my Professor Slots podcast at Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Spotify Amazon Music Amazon Audible Gaana Stitcher Pandora iHeart Radio Tune-In SoundCloud RadioPublic Deezer RSS and everywhere else you find your podcasts!

What’s an Advantage Play, Anyway?

In the gaming industry, an advantage play occurs whenever a gambler improves their odds of winning using gameplay knowledge not ordinarily available.

To help understand the general principle, consider a common non-gaming example: Credit card programs. Credit card companies exist offering cash-back for purchases. Chase Sapphire and Capital One Silver come to mind. Perhaps you’ve seen the television commercials with Samuel L. Jackson?

A credit card advantage play of such programs is to figure out how to make many, and I mean a lot of purchases to maximize cash-back. For example, perhaps you pay your rent or mortgage with that credit card.

Instead of paying directly with a credit card, which typically isn’t possible, you could find a reputable company that pays your rent or mortgage by check while you pay for the service via credit card. If the cash-back exceeds the small fee for the exchange, it’s an advantage play.

Or maybe you’re an entrepreneur with an Amazon fulfillment business. Perhaps you buy several items, put them together as a nice kit, then sell the package on Amazon. Why wouldn’t you purchase those single items with a cash-back credit card? If you sell at high-volume, you could push $10,000, or a whole lot more, through that credit card each month.

An advantage play example from the gaming industry, for table games, is card counting. This form of advantage play has a long and rich history. There’s even a major motion movie about blackjack card counting from 2008, 21.

But we’re interested in advantage plays involving slot machine casino gambling. In the next sections, we’ll work toward understanding advantage play slots, including my own relatively unique perspective for the modern casino environment.

Understanding Advantage Play Slots #1: Game Themes

The most popular slots advantage plays discussed online are about specific slot machine game themes. Every game theme has gameplay rules, which might have loopholes of which players can take advantage.

The essential approach to game theme advantage plays usually occurs during gameplay, although not always, which I’ll discuss in a moment. Class II competition-style slot machine game themes typically include a decision point for the player where there is a right or wrong answer.

Advantage players figure out in advance which answer is correct, sometimes only after extensive effort and research.

The difficulty with this approach is the assumption that it’s also an advantage play which applies to Class III Vegas-style games of chance at non-tribal casinos as well as Class II skill-based games typically only available at tribal casinos.

Do gameplay advantage plays exist for Class III slot machines? Once, they did. It was even somewhat prevalent, even as recently as 30 years ago. But, today? Not really.

What is my justification for this position? It’s based on thorough gaming regulations, including state-by-state testing of all game themes by independent laboratories. Very, very few game theme loopholes make it through such rigorous testing. See Advantage Play Against Slots (AP Heat Advantage Play) by Eliot Jacobson, Ph.D., published on March 6, 2017.

But I didn’t state that Class III slot machine advantage plays don’t exist. I said, they don’t really exist. What did I mean by this?

What I meant by this are the several circumstances where advantage plays can exist, if you want to expend the effort to find them. Just keep in mind that any serious advantage player carefully balances energy and cost with potential profit.

Put another way, figuring it out must be worth it. Some enterprising online individuals claim to have figured out a few game theme loopholes and share them freely. See Analyzing 4 Different Slots Advantage Play Methods by Randy Ray, published on May 11, 2019.

A few, usually new, audience members will ask my opinion for the best slot machines to play. My serious reply is those machines on which you win. Most of my audience agrees. In my opinion, looking for mistakes in game themes that made it past gaming regulators is a waste of time given how rare this occurrence has become.

However, lots of slots players think what casinos want them to think: Play your favorite slot machine game theme because, since it’s your favorite, you’ll win. Such an attitude from your casino isn’t gambling advice. It’s only marketing.

Understanding Slot Machine Lines

We’ve discussed game theme decision points and game theme loopholes, but there’s more. Another advantage play is to find slot machines with specific game themes played somewhat. A previous player could have paid for getting a slot machine closer to paying out.

A typical example is progressive slot machines with a must-win-by maximum jackpot. This amount is typically unknown. But extensive observation by an advantage player (AP) could allow them to figure it out, so they then only play progressives close to this limit.

The advantage play approach to progressive slot machines requires a great deal of patience to accomplish. If you’re interested in learning more about this approach, see my articles on progressive slots winning strategies:

Understanding Advantage Play Slots #2: Team Approach

Serious advantage players are typically part of closed communities. When an AP figures out how to take advantage of a slot machine, whether progressive, Class II, or otherwise, they are quite naturally secretive about it.

As I’ll discuss in a later section, many advantage plays are somewhat fragile. They are undoubtedly expensive in either time or money, sometimes both, to figure out. Therefore, APs will protect them like an investment.

But APs sometimes can’t figure out an advantage play without a team. Or they figure out an advantage play, as with a bank of networked progressive machines close to its jackpot limit, where every seat should have a team member sitting in it for the best chance of a return on investment.

Advantage players have figured out the cheapest way to learn a new advantage play is to watch known advantage players, then do what they do. These APs swoop in at the last moment to try to profit, such as taking one of those seats at an about-to-win bank of progressive slot machines.

Finally, it’s human nature to brag about our accomplishments. APs can and do make this mistake, but perhaps less often as they gain more experience at advantage plays. However, a regular slots player might put two-and-two together after observing an experienced AP winning. After all, most casinos are typically open to the public.

Another aspect of the team approach is the distraction it can provide. As mentioned previously, card-counting has a rich history. In the early days, one of the difficulties with card-counting was casino recognition from past winning sessions.

What was the card-counting APs response? Disguises. With modern casinos and a requirement for government-issued IDs, disguising an individual is very limited unless you happen to have an identical twin.

But you could explain the advantage play you’ve figured out to a team of trusted individuals, perhaps family members. They could then perform the advantage play for a pre-determined profit share.

Understanding Advantage Play Slots #3: Modern Casinos

With modern-day casinos and gaming regulations, slot machine advantage plays have undergone a sea change. It’s no longer possible to drop coins with a complicated pattern, which might cause a win, if that advantage play ever worked in the first place.

Using terminology from the Ocean’s 13 movie, a “Susan B. Anthony” con doesn’t matter any longer because U.S. casinos no longer use coin-operated slot machines. But that doesn’t mean advantage plays no longer exist. It means they’ve changed with the times.

Around 2012, slot machine manufacturers started offering operating systems to help casinos handle larger crowd sizes with ease, efficiency, and a smaller workforce. One of these innovations was a central computer server hardwired to every slot machine.

With it, casino operators could reduce their army of slots mechanics to a much smaller, and therefore cheaper, group. Instead of the mechanics changing the odds of winning every one to two weeks as needed to meet state gaming requirements, the computer server could do it electronically several times a day.

In this way, the casino saved money in two important ways: a smaller workforce devoted mostly to machine maintenance and a vast improvement in their ability to meet financial performance metrics from multiple weeks to several times daily.

Yes, slot machines still operate randomly under these new casino operating systems. But because the odds of winning can be remotely adjusted several times daily. Therefore, the odds of winning, while still random, are different before and after. And one is better than the other.

Understanding Slot Machine To Win

The task of the modern-day slot machine advantage player is to figure out which is which. Are the best odds in the morning, afternoon, or evening? Is it on busy days at the casino or non-busy days? On a holiday evening or the morning day after a holiday?

Modern casino operating systems have much more excellent control over slot machines than ever. While this slot machine control is by a computer, the computer is itself controlled by humans. And humans love to tinker. And humans also make mistakes.

Rather than explain my winning slots strategies based on casino business practices here, I’ll refer you to my many website articles and podcast episodes on that topic.

Sooner or Later, Advantage Plays Stop Working

The types of advantage plays are effectively endless, but they all have one common disadvantage: Sooner or later, they stop working. Why? Because sometimes an advantage play is a disadvantage for someone or something else.

If a business practice is an advantage play, or even if it’s going too well, it’s not uncommon for that business to shut it down. Sometimes, there’s also a time limit on how long it lasts, making it more of a promotion than a business practice.

Because individual advantage plays stop working eventually, successful APs keep working on the next advantage play. For APs, figuring out advantage plays is a never-ending process.

But, as with most situations, there’s an advantage play for this, too. Some advantage plays go unnoticed because they are not dramatic. Any disadvantage to the casino is so small that it goes unnoticed.

Put another way the weakest advantage plays last the longest. One massive jackpot would be wonderful, but does it matter if it takes a year or two to make the same gaming profit at a much less noticeable level? Being less noticeable now is better for future advantage plays.

Some advantage plays are a change in perspective. Casino operators see a reduced workforce and daily performance metrics as their advantage play. That some modern APs, such as myself, have turned those business practices on their head doesn’t matter.

As I’ve previously mentioned, advantage players consider the time and cost of an advantage play versus its potential profit. As advantage players, casino operators make these same calculations with their millions or billions of dollars in gaming revenue.

As with card-counting, casinos adapted to players using that advantage play. In return, card counters wore disguises. Then casinos added more decks. Players figured out the math for using packs of decks.

And so it went, back and forth, until we now have casino surveillance of card games pattern recognition, automatic shufflers of a large number of decks, or even infinite decks,

Slot machine advantage plays, although more secretive, have already had to deal with counter-responses from casinos. While casinos had good business reasons to switch over from coins to ticket-in, ticket-out readers, doing so had a major impact on coin drop sequence advantage plays, whether they were effective advantage plays or not.

Modern slot machine advantage plays which currently work will stop working because casinos will develop counter-measures or change their business practices for some other reason. They do that, you know.

I’ve seen this happen. For me, some significant advantage plays went away after nine months. But I responded by figuring out the next advantage play. That’s what all APs, modern or not, do.

And maybe the new slot machine advantage plays I’ve figured out and used successfully, my winning slots strategies, will work at other casinos for you. I’m sharing them for two reasons. First, I have a (well-paid aerospace engineering) day job, which prevents me from using my winning strategies elsewhere, outside of an occasional weekend getaway.

Second, I’m doing that thing which APs do. I’ve determined that it is an advantage play to share this information with you. With enough time and effort, there is a potential profit in serving a community of slots players. I hope so, anyway. I’ve got massive student loans to pay.

Summary of Understanding Advantage Play Slots

Advantage plays have always been a bit mysterious because sharing them is counter-productive to winning at slots when using them.

But sharing is caring, so I’ve written this article on understanding advantage play slots from a modern-day perspective.

Random Number Generator Programs and Why Slot Machines Don’t Cheat

The computer program that powers these results is called a random number generator. That’s almost always referred to by an acronym of “RNG.”

It’s a simple enough computer program. It’s just a program that continually thinks of numbers—thousands of them per second. When you press the spin or stop button on a slot machine, the computer program stops on one of those numbers.

That number corresponds to a combination on the reels of the machine.

The outcome has been determined by the computer program before the reels stop spinning.

This doesn’t mean that the machine is cheating. You’re not more likely to lose after a winning streak, and you’re not more likely to win after a losing streak. Every spin of the reels is an independent event.

The difference between the odds of winning and the payout odds for each bet is what creates an edge for the house. Cheating isn’t necessary for the casinos or the slot machine designers.

The math takes care of that for them.

I have a paranoid friend who literally believes the world is flat. He also thinks slot machines are rigged.

He’s wrong about both, but he’s less wrong about the slot machines.

They ARE rigged, mathematically, by providing payouts that are lower than the odds of winning.

But they work honestly in terms of providing completely random results and independent trials. In fact, in any jurisdiction where such games are legal, they’re heavily regulated, inspected, and audited.

Casinos make more money from slot machines than they’d probably make with a printing press that printed new money in that same amount of floor space.

The Difference between Short Term Results and Long Term Expectations

The mathematical examples I’ve used assume you’re interested in predicting results in the long run. That’s the entire point of gambling math as it relates to probability.

But long term expectations have little to do with what happens in the short run.

The long run can be defined as an infinite number of bets. Every bet you place brings you closer to the long run, but you’ll never get there.

The Law of Large Numbers is a mathematical principle that says the more independent trials you run, the closer you’ll get to the theoretical expectation.

In the short term, though, you’re possibly going to win. I’ve seen surveys that showed that roughly 20% of the gamblers at a casino leave with some winnings in their pocket on any given visit. The casinos don’t mind. In fact, they’re counting on it.

Here’s why:

If no one ever won, people wouldn’t play. And without gamblers, casinos make no money and can’t stay in business.

My best advice to someone who’s playing slot machines is to not spend much time in front of them. If you get a reasonable sized win when you sit down, be willing to quit and walk away.

The longer you play, the more likely you are to see results that mirror the long term expectation.

Your goal should be to take advantage of those short term aberrations called luck or deviation. You can’t count on that in any given situation,

but you can count on this:

The longer you play, the more your results are going to resemble the mathematically expected results.
And with a negative expectation game like a slot machine, you’re going to lose all your money if you play long enough. That’s how a negative expectation gambling game works.

What about the Other Bells and Whistles on Modern Slot Machine Games?

When I use the expression “bells and whistles,” I’m talking about features of slot machine games other than the standard 3 spinning reels. Some of these additions and changes are complicated, but some of them are simplicity itself to understand.

One example of a bell and whistle is the number of reels on a slot machine game. Traditional slot machines just had 3 reels, and one of the reasons for that was the size of the reels and the machine that housed them.

The number of symbols also used to depend on the size of the reels—the smaller the reels, the fewer symbols you can print on them.

Additional paylines are another bell and whistle on most modern slot machines. The traditional machine just has a payline horizontally across the center, but modern slot machines have various patterns similar to the various patterns you might use on bingo cards.

They might run diagonally, or they might run in a zig zag pattern.

To activate multiple paylines, you must make multiple bets. Each payline gets activated by a wager, and the payout is based on the combination that appears on that line and the wager on that line only.

On larger machines with lots of paylines, you can win on multiple paylines but still be a net loser. For example, if you bet a nickel on each of 20 paylines, you’ll have put an entire dollar in action. If one of those paylines wins for 50 cents, you’ve still lost 50 cents on the game.

But the slot machine still lights up and shows you the payout as if you were a net winner.

Multiple scientific studies have indicated that the human brain treats these near-miss results exactly the same as they would an actual win, which is one of the things that make slot machines so addictive.

Wild symbols are another example of a bell and whistle on a modern slot machine. If you’ve played cards, especially poker, you are probably already familiar with the concept of a wild symbol.

It’s a symbol that can be used to complete any winning combination. It acts as a replacement for the symbol that you needed to make that combination.

Scatter symbols are a little more confusing, but they’re similar to wild symbols. A scatter symbol is one that doesn’t have to be on a payline to trigger a payoff. You just need enough of those scatter symbols to show up somewhere on the screen at once.

Many times, on a 5-reel machine, you’ll get a payoff if 3 scatter symbols or more show up from left to right. They don’t need to be along a payline or anything like that. They can literally be “scattered” across the screen.

Sometimes scatter symbols and/or wild symbols trigger bonus games or free spins. Free spins are a simple enough concept to understand—they’re just extra spins on the reels that you don’t have to pay for.

On some machines, they’re always winning spins—the only thing in question is how much you’re going to win on each spin.

Bonus games can be more interesting, but they’re almost always entirely random. Often the bonus games involve choosing from a video display of multiple boxes or treasure chests. Depending on which one you choose, you get a prize amount.

There’s no skill involved in these kinds of bonus games.

Slot machine designers are now experimenting with design elements that borrow from video games like Space Invaders, though. If you get a certain number of symbols, you can trigger a bonus game, and the amount you win from that bonus game might depend on how many aliens you can shoot from the skies overhead.

Slot Machine Strategies and Systems Don’t Work, So Don’t Even Bother

If I could teach you only one thing about slot machine games, it’s this:

They’re entirely random. Each spin is an independent event. This means that what’s happened on previous spins has no effect on what’s going to happen on a subsequent spin. Most strategies and systems assume that the previous spins have some relationship to subsequent spins.

I once read an entire book of slot machine systems that were supposed to help you win at slots. The guy who wrote it was a total cornball. I’m not even going to mention the name of the book or the author here.

I will describe what he suggested, though. His first piece of advice was to track how many “naked pulls” you’ve had in a row.
A naked pull on a slot machine is one that results in no winnings at all.

His advice was to switch machines any time you get 5 or 7 naked pulls in a row. (I don’t remember the exact number, but it was something arbitrary like that.)

The idea behind this advice is that any machine which hasn’t paid out in the last 5 or 7 spins must be running cold, so you should find a machine that’s NOT running cold.

And as I’ve already pointed out, slot machines only run hot or cold in retrospect. There’s no way to predict what’s going to happen on subsequent spins based on what’s happened on previous spins. That’s just not how these games work. They’re not programmed to have hot and cold cycles.

He also offered advice about setting loss limits and win goals. This idea has some merit, but not much.

A loss limit is the amount of your session bankroll that you’re willing to lose before walking away from a game. 20% is a commonly suggested number. So if you put $100 in a slot machine game and lost $20, you’d cash out and walk away for that session.

A win goal is just the opposite. It’s an amount that you will win which will signal that it’s time to quit playing. You might have a 20% win goal, too, which means that once you’re up to $120, you’ll call it a day for that playing session.

This can help you avoid having huge losing sessions. It can also help you have book occasional winning sessions.

What it doesn’t do is change the odds in your favor in any way. In the long run, you should think of playing slot machine games as one long game that lasts for the rest of your life.

Eventually the odds are going to even out to a point where you see the kind of results the math would predict, regardless of what happens during those individual sessions.

I’ll confess that when I play slot machines, I do use a variation of this strategy. My loss limit, though, is always 100% of the amount I put in the machine. I either want to hit my win goal or lose all my money trying.

That’s as effective as any other loss limit, but people never suggest that.

Raising and lowering the sizes of your bets don’t change the odds on the machines, either. Don’t pay attention to any advice which suggests otherwise.

Other Lame Pieces of Slot Machine Strategy Advice You’ve Probably Heard (Or Will Hear)

One of my favorite pieces of advice from slot machine gurus is to try to find loose slot machines on the ends of the rows of slots at the casinos.

The idea is that the casino managers put the loose machines there to attract more customers.

I doubt this was ever true, but it’s old advice that’s been repeated for years. I’d be surprised if you could find a casino manager or a slots room manager who would confirm that this is really true.

Understanding Bingo Slot Machines

You’ll find superstitious types who believe that playing with you slot machine card inserted is also a mistake. They think having the card inserted makes it impossible to win.

They don’t understand how the computer programs in question work at all. They’re not connected. The random number generator determines the results of each spin. The card reader just tracks how much money you’ve put into action.

The 2 have no relation to each other.

In fact, it makes no sense that a casino would want to discourage you from using the card reader. They have a slots club for a reason—they want to encourage people to play at their casino.

In the long run, the math behind their games ensures them a healthy profit. They count on a percentage of their gamblers going home a winner.

They also want their gamblers to take advantage of the free stuff they’re earning with their slot machine club cards, because that means it’s working. It’s motivating them to play more.

Why Almost Every Other Game in the Casino Is Better than Slot Machines

The traditional way that gambling experts measure one casino game against the other is by comparing the house edge. The higher the house edge, the more the casino expects to win over time on average for each bet you place.

Slot machines generally have the highest house edge in the casino. Some of them might be exceptional, but you have no means of comparing them, because a slot machine is like a black box. You put money in and get money back.

Compare that to a video poker game, where you can calculate the payback percentage based on the probability of getting specific poker hands against the payout for those hands.

Since those games use a 52-card deck to determine your probabilities, it’s a simple enough matter to compare one video poker game to another.

Table games make it even easier to compare house edge figures.

But even if a slot machine had the same house edge as all the other games (or lower), it’s still one of the fastest-playing games in the casino. An average slot machine gambler makes 600 spins per hour.

This means slots players are putting more money into action and losing more money over time as a result.

Finally, slot machines are proven to have an addictive effect on the human brain. Addiction is bad. Alcohol can be fun. Some drugs can be fun, too.

But addiction takes something that would otherwise be fun and turns it into something that’s NOT fun.

Slot machines are the most popular games in the casinos, but that’s only because most gamblers are stunningly ignorant of how they work. You don’t have that excuse any more.

Understanding Slot Machine Games

2020-2021 NBA Season Team Win Totals Betting Odds and Predictions2020 Turkish Grand Prix Betting Preview2020 Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix Betting Odds and Preview2020 Tuscan Grand Prix Betting Odds and Predictions

Understanding Slot Machine Payouts

0 Comments

templumtoca1975.netlify.com