There’s a lot of places that have games that look like slots, but aren’t actually slots. We’ve written about them here in the past:
- Class II (Bingo Machines)
- Historic Horse Racing Machines
- New York and Washington State (pull tab/scratcher) style machines
So when we get a question like this, we understand the confusion, but also why this may come up:
So I understand the random generator, but, I was playing the lil lady bug slot one day, a guy came and started playing the same game next to mine, he was playing a higher denomination, I hit the bonus and a couple spins later he hit. His bonus placement was the exact screen as mine. We watched, our games were identical. He made more, but we knew what every screen was going to look like, based on what my game did. How is that random and based on timing? What are the chances both random spin generators would be EXACTLY the same? What are your thoughts on that?
Nancy
Theoretically, a game with a predetermined bonus structure could go that way, but the likelihood of this happening on a traditional slot is quite low.
However, we have seen the Lil’ Lady slot theme in non-slot markets. And that means the games don’t work with an RNG but work differently.
We’ve seen reports in both New York and Washington, which both work on systems that are more similar to pull tabs or scratch tickets, where the same bonus plays out either on machines side by side or multiple times in the same night.
We’ve also seen people discussing Bingo machines and this happening as well, albeit less frequently.
What it comes down to is the non-slot slots don’t use the reels to determine their outcomes. Instead, their outcomes come from outside the machine. And the machine just uses the reels, bonuses, etc. to reach the intended destination that’s already been determined upfront.
As such, there’s often less combinations for certain scenarios. Imagine a $50.25 win – how many versions of that do you think will be programmed into the machine? It might be more than one, but probably not many, and if that’s the prize win that two different wagers accomplished, the next step might be the same bonus happening side by side.
We had a Rudie once share with us an example of three bonuses on an Ultimate Fire Link machine in one of these non-slot markets, and all three had the exact same outcome – the same balls, with the same values, in the exact same positions.
Games that could have relatively infinite combinations in their bonus get distilled down to much simpler versions when being converted to these non-slot variations, at least in some cases.
So that would be our hypothesis without any other information to work against – the bonuses are the same because you’re in a market where this is more likely to happen. The RNG, in this case, doesn’t exist.
And in the case that the RNG does exist because it’s a slot market, the other possibility is that the bonus itself was predetermined in that case, although we don’t think for that particular game that would be the case.
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How come I cannot watch you playing the slots on facebook anymore???
Hey Carolyn! We’re not sure – we still post videos regularly on our Facebook page!