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
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.
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.
The house can claim malfunction on anything and refuse to pay you. You have little to no recourse. I've witnessed people having their jackpots declared invalid for ridiculous reasons such as a faulty door sensor on the machine (having nothing to do with the game itself.)
You're essentially gambling that you can win the game and the house won't deny your win.
If you see a casino cheating, you should report it.
If a casino catches or even suspects you're card counting, they are well within their rights to refuse to let you play that game anymore.
If, on the other hand, you and the casino are playing different games, e.g. the dealer is playing black jack, but the player is playing I-know-what-the-dealer's-down-card-is-because-of-manufacturing-imperfections-in-the-card, then is it really that unreasonable for the casino to have a case that they don't owe you the money that you won, especially if they can demonstrate intent? (I'd argue that they should give you a bug bounty, but that's a different story)
To address your poker example - say I'm your guest in your hypothetical and, were we playing fair poker, your 1 in 100 odds were correct. Let's also say that I have undetectable X-ray vision contact lenses, thus changing the odds such that I will always win - would you really consider it unreasonable to use the government to get your money back in that situation? The agreement was to play poker, a game which necessarily presumes hidden information from all players. If one player has all the information, the game isn't poker anymore, it's robbery/con.
I agree that the computerized games are a different story, though I believe that consumers have some protection in the form of the various gaming commissions. If you win a jackpot and are denied the payout, contact the gaming commission! The laws are very strict on the points of fairness of those machines, forged in the fires of decades of mafia controlled casinos (at least in Vegas/Atlantic City).
Gambling is a drug. It has all the health benefits of a recreational drug, but at least in (most of) the US, it's not a scam.
https://knpr.org/knpr/2015-01/legal-or-not-card-counting-not...
Yes, sometimes casinos will use their political strength to not payout a jackpot (malfunction voids all play), but a player does, in fact, have some recourse if the casino is full of shit.
Regardless, if you're going to a casino intending to win a jackpot, you're doing it wrong (because math). If you take a measured approach and enjoy it for what it is (entertainment, not a way to make money), you'll have a much healthier relationship with a casino.
As an aside, there's another industry that uses it's massive political clout and every trick in the book to refuse to pay in situations where one would intuitively believe one should be payed: insurance.
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. You might be right, but I wouldn't want you or someone else to rely on this information if it's a myth.
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)
In this sense wouldn't card games be a wiser bet than slot machines?
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.
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.
Technically, additional decks reduce the expected edge of a card-counter who has only seen some number of cards. Which functions the same way...
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.
I get what you mean, but what you said means something different, in a way that leads to an interesting question.
The odds are not supposed to be completely random. The odds are supposed to fixed in most (all?) casino games (and in most non-casino games). It is the outcome that is supposed to be completely random in casino games, distributed according to the fixed odds.
That raises a question. What would a game look like where the odds were random? The odds are determined by the rules, so would the game have to have rules that are changing at random?
But if you are given the distribution of the random numbers that determine the rule changes, you could still work out the players odds for the overall game. So do we have to have the distribution that the random rule changes use be completely random, too? But the distribution used to generate the random number used to pick the distribution for picking random numbers to drive the rule changes...do we need to pick that at random....is it going to be random distributions all the way down? My head is starting to hurt...