Humans by our nature attempt to detect patterns in things. Here’s a question that tries to make sense of the perceived patterns:
Spending time at a local casino you see a pattern to times of the day slots are paying out and when they are cold. Also you see a bank of machines all hitting at the same time and then go suddenly quiet . How does this fit into the RNG theory?
Becky B.
Here’s a question I encourage players to think about. If a casino truly was offering better payouts at a certain time, why would they keep it a secret? Why wouldn’t it be a casino’s version of advertising cheaper drinks during happy hour? What’s the business benefit to giving players more money at one time vs. another if they’re going to keep it a secret?
Some players see more players winning on weekends, and think that means the casino’s paying out more. Others write us saying that casinos seem to pay back better during dead times during the week, presumably to woo players in during quiet times (but yet, no advertising to do that wooing, so it’s some sort of secret, whether well kept or poorly kept depending on how you look at it).
The randomness of slots means sometimes you can have bonuses clump together and other times have them seemingly disappear. The fact that any outcome can happen on the next spin means there’s no even distribution of it. Sometimes banks of machines seem like they’re hopping with a ton of bonuses and other times it’s crickets.
We’ve all felt it, and we start to attempt to detect those patterns, but there’s no patterns to detect. If slots could be beaten, casinos wouldn’t offer them, because it doesn’t work for their goal of having games offered being a way for them to make money. Casinos aren’t a charity and aren’t offering games that have loopholes if you seemingly are the only person in the world who can figure out they’ve done this.
The observed patterns are observations, but not actual patterns. Humans have a confirmation bias and selective memory that will be more likely to retain things that support their notions and back up what they believe to be the case.
Whether it’s machines closer to the aisles pay better or that 3 am on a Tuesday night is the absolute best time to be playing, each of us probably have some sort of thing we lean into because we’ve seen enough examples, and have probably forgotten a far larger set of examples that don’t follow our perception of things.
And as far as the random number generator being a theory, it’s not, and we can say so with confidence because it’s the rock solid core of the requirements a gambling machine needs to follow in various regulated markets to be certified to be offered.
Let’s just use Nevada as an example, as many jurisdictions looked to Nevada, as one of the first places to legally allow gambling and develop a robust and mature set of regulations, to set the tone. There are numerous regulations referencing the random selection, and the default process being the RNG (including a definition that’s referenced throughout the regulations), throughout the regulations to affirm that’s the industry standard for getting it done.
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