Ask the Slot Expert: Rebutting an article about why slots are not random - Part 2

Question: My father had a near mint working condition Treasure Tunnel slot machine. It was stolen from his estate. How can I get a value on it?

Answer: I remember playing Treasure Tunnel machines many (many) years ago.

I would start by Googling (or Binging, if you want to chat with Microsoft's AI) for used slot dealers near you. I don't know where you're located, so I can't help you with this task. If there isn't one near you, you can try any used slot dealer. Find out what they'd pay for the machine.

Another option is to try to find one for sale. I found this auction from 2016 in which the winning bid was $615. And then there's.... Nothing more. Sigma had more success with its Derby horse race game than with its slot machines.

Any slot machine from this era that boots up and operates properly is probably worth at least $200. But given that it's Sigma and not IGT or Bally's, the thief may have done you a favor.

Last week I rebutted some of the statements I found in an article about why someone believes slot machines are not random. Those statements showed a common misconception about random events. We can know quite a bit about the big picture of a random event. The only thing we really don't know is what will happen next. If casinos couldn't depend on slot machines holding a certain percentage of the money played through them in the long run, why would they operate them? Casinos are in the gambling business, but they're not gamblers.

This week let's look at some of the author's experiences that he says show non-randomness. (I'm reminded of an article Bob Dancer wrote many years ago. He wrote that experience is a poor teacher in gambling.)

I have played certain online slot machines where the "Payout" or money won amount is displayed BEFORE the bonus game spins end.

Let's separate the online slots from the slots in casinos. I don't know what regulations govern online slots. I'll go one step further and give my usual disclaimer: I'm writing about RNG-based games (Class III in IGRA parlance).

There were a jurisdiction (I think it was Washington) in which they wanted one poll of the RNG to decide the entire outcome of a spin, even if there was a bonus round. At the time, the jurisdiction also required you to use a stored-value card to play machines. A reader wrote to me to say that he had pulled his card from the machine before his bonus round completed and the amount won in the bonus was already added to his card. This is an example of how a machine could display the result of a bonus round before it has ended and still determine the outcome randomly. The jurisdiction has since changed the regulation to allow multiple polls of the RNG for a play.

The machines you find in Nevada, New Jersey, Mississippi, etc., can't display the amount won in a bonus round before the round ends because -- it ain't over till it's over.

Anyone who's played certain slot machines, for example, could not fail to notice how you don't see ANY certain symbols on the reels for ages, then suddenly they are everywhere!

This is the streaks are not random misconception. Streaks are actually a requirement for randomness.

Here are two sequences of numbers: 1-1-1 and 2-8-5. Which sequence is random?

Most people will say that 1-1-1 is not random. Have you ever tossed a coin and gotten three heads or three tails in a row? Was that coin toss not random?

The game played could be an important factor in this observation. There are some machines that fill positions on their reels with a randomly chosen symbol for each spin. I used to play a machine (Fire Ball something or other) at the Westgate years ago. It was really exciting when the Fire Ball symbol was the randomly chosen symbol and a bunch of them appeared on the screen. That stroke of luck was extremely rare. The machine almost always chose a lower-paying symbol and the screen wasn't filled with one symbol.

If the author was playing one of these machines, it would not be unusual to suddenly see a certain symbol everywhere.

Let's continue with streaks. Say you put your music player on shuffle. If the algorithm is choosing randomly from the songs in your playlist, you could get the same song twice in a row. Most people don't want repeats. Instead of choosing the next song to play at random, the algorithm could sort the songs in the playlist into a random order, and then play from that random sorted order. No repeats.

It's important to know what is being randomized.

On some progressive jackpots linked to a bank of slot machines, the jackpot has to be won before a certain amount of money is reached. Now, if this is the case, how are they REALLY random if they have to hit before the jackpot reaches a certain amount? Completely random means they can hit at ANY time. They must be programmed to do that if they have to hit by a certain amount.

I've played some machines with must hit by progressives. (An advantage-play technique is to play these machines only when they're close to the max amount.) On these machines, the progressive is not awarded based on a combination on the reels. The progressive is randomly awarded on a spin, winner or not.

In all the slot regulations I've seen, every jurisdiction requires that the outcome determined by the numbers generated by the RNG must be displayed without alteration. There's no way to force a progressive hit on a machine when its time has come.

So how do machines award must hit by progressives randomly?

As I said about shuffle play, it's important to know what is being randomized. For these progressives, the random element is a trigger value. Each bet on each machine adds a certain amount to a running total. The player whose bet pushes the running total over the trigger amount wins the progressive.

The RNG was used when the progressive reset to pick a new trigger amount. It is not used on each spin to determine whether the player won the progressive. If that were the case, there would be no way to have the progressive hit by a certain amount. The author is right about that. The progressive could hit at any time.

Here are the latest Covid data. There is a difference in the hospitalization data for US versus NV. The CDC reports total number of Covid hospital admissions. Nevada reports current hospitalizations, not total admissions.

All data comes from the CDC (https://www.cdc.gov/covid-data-/-*tracker/#cases_totalcases, https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admissions), except for Nevada current hospitalizations (https://nvhealthresponse.nv.gov/).