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Gaming Guru
What's Your Shot at the Slots?5 May 1997
For starters, slots that look, sound, smell, and feel alike can be set up differently. So, what applies to one may not hold for the next. Compounding the confusion, the question doesn't have the same meaning to everybody. One player may want to know the chances of any size win on any particular try, another may be interested in the odds of earning a profit during a certain length session, someone else may care only about the probability of hitting the jackpot, and a bettor who's too shrewd by a half may be asking for the "house advantage." Ambiguity also results because three parameters, which a manufacturer can specify independently, combine to define each machine. The payback percentage with one coin in play is 76 percent of the money bet. With two coins and the progressive meters at the base or "reset" values of 500 and 1000, payback rises to 85 percent. When two coins are played and the progressive jackpots are 1700 and 3400, the machine offers players 101.6 percent of the handle. The hit frequency is 14.2 percent, regardless of coins in play or jackpot size. Players can therefore expect 142 returns of one size or another every 1,000 tries. Expressed in an alternate way, the odds against receiving a payout on any round are 6-to-1. There's no magic in raising the odds of hitting a jackpot by playing longer. The catch is the correspondingly steeper odds against breaking even or making a profit without such a stroke of luck. For instance, in 20 tries, players have about 40 percent probability of being out of the soup on this machine if they don't hit a jackpot. In 100 rounds, prospects are roughly 30 percent. After 1,000 non-bell-ringing plays, the likelihood of being ahead is only 4 percent. And after 5,000 pulls, the chance is essentially nil - and half of all players who haven't made either of the top two scores will be over 1,100 bets down. The songster of the slots, Sumner A Ingmark, summarized this situation splendidly when he said:
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