Sometimes players struggle to wrap their head around how clumps of winning and losing runs can happen with randomness. The random number generator (RNG) is often a focus of that thinking:
As I understand the slot or even video poker RNG, the moment you press the button lands on a number, and that number determines the result.
Is it fair to say that the RNG isn’t picking from 10,000,000 or so possible outcomes in that moment, it’s more like a few hundred or few thousand, so that could lead to times of the day when the series of numbers ready to be picked by the RNG are a good result and some times when all the numbers are going to be losing spins, hence there is a “luck” factor in you could be playing at a time when the RNG range is just cold or maybe cooler.
I get that there is no dark art here but if this is true, it could go someway to to explaining why sometimes you put $100s in , to get one or two rubbish bonuses, think 3x to 5x, and other times when you get 5 bonuses in an hour returning 20x to 150x?
Steven J.
So first off, one note about how the RNG works: It’s constantly running, so it’s not landing on any number – it’s the number on deck that coincides with when you press the button.
Another thing about how the RNG works: The point of it is that any outcome that the machine is programmed to offer is possible on any spin. The idea of focusing on a few hundred or few thousand outcomes would violate that aspect of how it needs to work to ensure fairness.
The explanation for rubbish bonuses in succession, and good bonuses in succession, goes back to that “luck” factor you mentioned. Because it’s truly random, four bonus attempts in a row can be below average (or heck, the lack of a bonus at all), whereas other times the bonuses can be coming more frequently and with above average outcomes.
That’s precisely why the randomness is important – the machine isn’t obligated to pay on a cycle, or provide a good bonus after x bad ones, or any other “patterns” that would shape a gambling session in a very structured way, but also probably put heavy limitations on what could be possible.
While we see lots of various ideas about what could be happening, the simplest explanation is the winner here: The slot has n number of possible outcomes, and the RNG is randomly cycling through numbers that can connect to any one of those outcomes. Over the long term, each outcome will happen about the same number of times, but when is random enough that clumps of wins and losses aren’t unusual.
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