We don’t talk about advantage players here on Flip The Switch as most players aren’t going to the casino specifically to beat the system. But we do get questions like this on occasion, and decided we wanted to tackle it:
I know of a professional gambler and his wife (an advantage player) that said there’s no such thing as a Random Number Generator. There are algorithms that are coded by people. He and his wife figured out/memorized the algorithm patterns on some of their favorite games they played for many years. They did this in 3 Vegas casinos. They won A LOT and those casinos figured what they were doing and they got banned from those three. Makes sense to me. What do you think?
Susan
The professional gambler is splitting hairs. While yes, it’s true that the RNG isn’t truly random because it’s human created, it’s pseudo-random – good enough to do the job it needs to do. And that means not being able to “memorize” patterns, because there’s no pattern to memorize, as that’s not how the numbers are generated. Aside from the lack of a pattern, when numbers are being generated 100s or 1000s of times a second, there’s no way a human can keep up.
AP players generally do something a lot more straightforward – they learn about games that build what’s called “equity,” based on how a game’s state evolves. At certain points, the equity built will be sufficient enough that the game is more likely to be a winner for a player than a loser, at least for some limited window of time.
A simple example is the game Scarab – it works in a 10-spin cycle. Over the 10 spins you collect borders on spaces on the reel, based on where scarabs land. On the 10th spin, all those bordered spaces turn wild. Some players get up after spin 6, not realizing they’re leaving those borders behind for the next person.
There’s much more complex scenarios, but there are players that will learn how to look for this. Some casinos don’t want those players, so they’ll be banned accordingly.
Machines that build equity still make money for the casino – they still have an overall house edge baked into them – so casinos will just target the player vs. removing the machine, although some casinos will take that extra step if they think it’s hurting their regular customers.
If there was a truly “beatable” slot machine based on knowing when the slot machine would pay, those games would disappear. In fact, such a scenario happened a number of years back with older Aristocrat machines. But this was a reverse engineering of the code that generated the numbers, not some memorized pattern.
And despite the level of sophistication needed to execute on this, the end result was many of these old machines were removed from casino floors from casinos that were skittish about this risk.
So no, we don’t believe this player and what they have to say, but gambling has generated all sorts of nebulous stories over the years. Usually the simpler answer is most likely, and in this case the player just probably learned how to spot those best slot machine moments, the casinos realized he wasn’t a moneymaker, and decided they didn’t want him to play there anymore.
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