Ask the Slot Expert: There is no magic in a slot machine

When I was about 10 or 11, my best friend and I were very interested in magic. There was a store that sold magic tricks a few towns away from where we lived.It wasn't quite as impressive as Iong's magic shop in Now You See Me 2, but it was definitely much closer than Macau. We got all of our tricks there.

Most of the tricks it sold -- at least the ones we could afford -- were kind of cheap and cheesy and trite, like Linking Rings and Cups and Balls. Some of the tricks were not exactly stage or even kid-party quality, but that was okay. We didn't have any dreams of being professional magicians.

Nevertheless, there were two performances. One was a joint appearance in the living room of one of my father's co-workers whose daughter was recovering from a car accident.

The other was my solo performance doing some of my tricks for the nephew of my sister's first husband, who is Chinese. There's no tougher crowd than a dozen kindergarteners with limited English.

We didn't have many options to learn about magic. There was no internet. We never thought to see if the town library had any books on how magic tricks work and, of course, there was no Amazon. The only way we could learn the secrets behind the tricks was to purchase them from the magic shop.

They say you should never meet your idols. You'll be disappointed because you might learn that they are just flawed people too.

Let me digress and say that I have been fortunate that this hasn't been the case for me. Other gaming writers like John Grochowski, Jean Scott, Henry Tamburin, and especially Frank Scoblete could not have been nicer. In the late 1990s, after some sort of gaming convention in Texas (Austin? San Antonio?) I ran into Fred Norris from the Howard Stern Show in the airport when we were both waiting for the flight back to Newark. He happily gave autographs to the few people who recognized him. I've been to meet-and-greets with David Gerrold, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin, and Rick Wakeman and they all seemed genuinely happy to spend a few minutes with their fans. End digression and name dropping.

You should never meet your idols. And you should never find out how a magic trick works. You will be disappointed. What seems to be the result of wizardry or sorcery is really just a result of misdirection, illusion, contortion, clever handwork, and sometimes some physics.

On the other hand, even though they will also be disappointed, slot players should know how slot machines work. There's no magic in how the machine determines which symbols will land on the screen. The machine doesn't take into account how much the machine has paid out, how much you've won or lost, whether you're using a players card, whether it's a holiday, whether the casino is crowded, whether you have your lucky charms, whether you tap on or caress the screen, whether you're wearing your lucky underwear or socks -- or any of the other factors players sometimes say affects a machine.

The symbols that land on the payline and the cards you are dealt are determined by numbers from the Random Number Generator, a mathematical algorithm that generates a stream of numbers that appear to be random even though they really aren't. The numbers are the result of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and maybe some functions you thought were useless when you learned about them in math class.

It's all pretty mundane stuff, just like the mechanics behind a trick.

There's no magic in how a slot machine works. The reality is much less interesting than players' fantasies.

If you would like to see more non-smoking areas on slot floors in Las Vegas, please sign my petition on change.org.

Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com.

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