![]() Newsletter Signup
Stay informed with the
NEW Casino City Times newsletter! Recent Articles
Best of John Robison
|
Gaming Guru
Ask the Slot Expert: The gongs of Fu Dao Le9 June 2021
Answer: What does it take to get the gongs on a spin? The RNG has to generate a result that stops the reels in places that display the gongs. What does it take to get the "Good Fortune" message? The RNG has to generate numbers that correspond to a reel combination that triggers the message. The combination might be a large win or the bonus round. How do these things happen a lot? The RNG has to generate the appropriate numbers a lot. How can a player get the RNG to generate the appropriate numbers a lot? A player can't. At least not legally and not without inside knowledge of the programming in the machine. When I was growing up, my next-door neighbor was a Lincoln Mercury dealer. One year Ford added a car called the Merkur to the Mercury line. He said that was a terrible name for a car. No one knew had to pronounce it. Is it mer-ker? Mare-coor?The first hurdle in selling a car is for the buyers to say they are interested in it, and buyers were reluctant to say they were interested in the Merkur because they were afraid of mispronouncing the name. I'm surprised to see a few machines with anglicized Chinese names. I'm not sure how to pronounce some of the words. But I guess you don't need to be able to say a machine's name to play it. Heck, many times you don't even know the name of the machine you're playing. It's been a long time since I've played Fu Dao Le, so I watched a few YouTube videos to refresh my memory. These videos of players playing slots are a godsend. They frequently save me a trip to the casino. In addition, I can see machines that are not available in Las Vegas. I can see bonus rounds without having to invest time and money and, if I watch enough videos, I can see all of the bonus events on a machine. Many of these videos include a lot of filler along with the sizzle. I just spent about half an hour watching crappy spins to see the eight or so that led to the gongs free spins bonus, the good fortune message, or the coin-matching bonus. A sizzle reel with just the good parts would save me time. But it would also give the wrong impression about a machine, that every spin is a big winner. Too bad the YouTube videos don't have index marks in them to let you skip to the good parts. The shows I download from SiriusXM are indexed so I can jump to specific sections in the show. Yes, I know I can jump to different points in the videos, but unless the creator gives timings in the comments, finding the bonus rounds is like finding a needle in a haystack. Does anyone know if any of the video formats supported by YouTube allow embedded index marks? Some streaming services give me the ability to skip over a show's intro, but I don't know if that's accomplished with an embedded index mark. Getting back to your question, if there's nothing you can do to make gongs or good fortune happen a lot, it goes without saying then that things people do to make them happen don't work. One video that showed winning the Major jackpot was subtitled "Tickling the babies works." No, it doesn't. Neither does altering your bet, altering your timing, or touching the screen when you have two gongs to try to coax out the third gong. What does it take to get the gongs a lot? Good luck. Wait a sec. Come to think of it, there is something you can do to get more gongs. Play more. If three gongs come out, say, once out of 100 spins, you'll tend to get more instances of the three gongs if you play 2000 spins than if you play 1000 spins. The probability of getting the gongs is the same, but you get more gong bonuses because you played more spins. You increased the sample size. Speaking of sample size.... A few weeks ago, Dr. Jen Ashton on ABC explained the difference between a vaccine's efficacy and its effectiveness. It sounds like the two measures are the same, but they're not. Efficacy, she said, "measures the difference in risk within a study." Effectiveness measures how well the vaccines perform in real life. In other words, efficacy tells how well a vaccine worked in a trial study and effectiveness tells how well the vaccine works in the real world. In terms of sample size, efficacy is like session results and effectiveness is like long-term payback. A clinical trial has few participants relative to total population and a typical session has few spins or hands relative to the total number of outcomes possible in a game. Long-term payback is based on the total universe of outcomes and there are many people in the real world. The analogy doesn't hold in other aspects -- fortunately. A session's results don't tell us anything about a machine's long-term payback -- the same size is way too small -- while the results in a clinical trial give us a very good indication of how well a drug or vaccine will work in the general public. Here are the latest figures from https://www.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totalcases. Click here for the latest Covid data. Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com. Because of the volume of mail I receive, I regret that I can't reply to every question.
Recent Articles
Best of John Robison
John Robison |
John Robison |