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Gaming Guru
Random or Not?13 June 2023
The casino is filled with players who think the games are not random but are controlled, perhaps, by some mysterious force that the casinos have plugged into. A roulette game where red has hit four times in a row on the wheel is often thought to be “biased” in favor of red. Is it? No. All sorts of streaks, some of them quite weird, quite long, can happen in random games. This is no less true for slot machines. We all know that slot machines are ruled by the RNG (the random number generator or pseudo-number generator) but that doesn’t stop machines from hitting an enormous number of times in a short period of time. It also doesn’t stop the machine from being ice cold for a prolonged period of time as well. Randomness can be a mess in terms of short-term results and it would be a rare, if not unheard of, gambler who would chart millions upon millions of results to see the reality of randomness in a slot machine. Indeed, that seeming sense that something non-random is happening can mess up the minds of casino players. It can cause them to think they have hit upon ways to beat the games. I know plenty of slot players who think cold machines will turn warm or warm machines will turn cold and that they can predict when these trends will happen. There is no such thing as a hot or cold machine; the machine is just playing out its random generator. Sometimes that is good for the player (the machine is “warm”); more often it is bad for the player (that machine is “cold”). The RNG doesn’t care about what’s good for the player or bad for the player. It doesn’t care about anything at all. It is merely a device for selecting random numbers that will translate into symbols on a machine. No betting system can beat a random game unless that system can uncover “non-randomness” at times (as card counting at blackjack can) or manipulate the game (as dice control can). Few blackjack players can count cards and far fewer dice controllers can actually control or influence the dice. Those are simple facts; sad facts indeed. So why are so many players fooled? It probably has to do with our inherited tendency to see patterns in events. We are pattern-finding creatures. [“That tiger who ate Morris was just a random occurrence, right? Uh, I don’t know, John Charles was eaten there last week. Maybe we should avoid that trail? Danielle was eaten there a few days before John Charles. Yes, from now on we definitely avoid that path!”] [Next week. More randomness.] All the best in and out of the casinos! Frank Scoblete’s web site is www.frankscoblete.com. His books are available from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, e-books, libraries and bookstores. This article is provided by the Frank Scoblete Network. Melissa A. Kaplan is the network's managing editor. If you would like to use this article on your website, please contact Casino City Press, the exclusive web syndication outlet for the Frank Scoblete Network. To contact Frank, please e-mail him at fscobe@optonline.net. Recent Articles
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