In a previous reel from Brian Christopher and an article here on the site, we shared the advice not to stress which machine in a bank you play, as you can expect the payback to be the same. Some didn’t quite understand:
Then how come I can play on a slot machine for an hour and lose 2 hundred dollars? But I move to another machine and win and win, and play for 6 hours and don’t have to still put more money in it!
Bobby B.
A slot’s payback is determined over the long term, not over a single session. This is how a player can get a jackpot and leave a winner on a slot that’s designed, over time, to make the casino money.
If you went to that casino every week and played the same two machines, over time, we’d expect that you’d have different results on each machine each time. Sometimes machine 1 would be better for you, sometimes machine 2 would be better for you, sometimes they’d both be hungry and take your money quickly and there’s always the chance both would give you a nice long run.
No one session can give you enough information about a slot machine’s payback. Millions of spins are needed to help a slot approach its intended long term payback. A single session can experience variance that’s better or worse than the machine’s intended payback.
So those times you play and win and win for hours, you’ve had a good run. Those times the machine takes $200 in an hour is worse (but that itself could still be good, honestly, depending on what your per spin bet is). But just because you had a good run on one, doesn’t mean it pays any better than the other. You just caught a nice run, and it’s worth celebrating, but that doesn’t mean the other machine can’t do the same on another occasion.
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