Most of the images I use on this blog are stolen from other sites on the Internet and used without permission.
When I looked for an image for this posting, I used Google’s image search on these keywords: gambling slots.
It’s funny that one of the images that came up was on an article titled, “Strategies for Playing Online Slots.”
There is, of course, no strategy for playing most (almost all) Class III slot machines. Well, there’s not supposed to be, anyway.
On a Class III slot machine, every spin of the “wheels” is supposed to have the same odds of hitting any particular combination as any other spin. The only sane “strategy” according to what I’ve told you is to plan on losing and be pleasantly surprised if you do not.
Until a couple of years ago, I had only been in casinos three times in my life. They were all in Las Vegas.
My total gambling scorecard for the three visits was around a negative $400…
First visit: Stayed at the Mirage overnight on Easter in 1992.
I got the “I Love Jesus” discount rate of $40/night!
Monday morning, I paid $200 to learn how not to play Craps. Here’s a tip: Don’t play craps at the empty table.
Those of your with mathematical sobriety just snickered because you know that having people at the table with you cannot change the odds of throwing any particular combination using dice.
Those of you who have ever played Craps in a casino just snickered back because you know that some people get hot, for whatever cosmic reason, and will win and win and win until the casino offers them a free ANYTHING to leave the table.
“We’d like to offer you a private audience with the Pope, but your plane leaves in 20 minutes.”
Those of you who know anything about how casinos operate are snickering because you know that a casino wouldn’t be worried about any individual winning at craps. In fact, they like it when someone is winning because they get excited and that draws more people to the table and in Craps, you can bet against the person throwing the dice. There are always people willing to bet on the end of a streak.
“This can’t go on forever!!!”
So, as people bet against the person throwing the dice, and make wild bets on particular combinations, the house makes money faster. Even if a particular person wins until they can no longer keep their eyes open, the casino still wins in the long run based on their pay multipliers compared to the odds of a particular combination being thrown.
The casino has set their odds based on hundreds of thousands of games, or millions of games. You might luck into making money over fifty or sixty games, but the house always wins against the whole population of gamblers.
Recently a friend explained a strategy of covering your losses while playing Roulette.
If you bet $1 on a particular number coming up on a Roulette wheel, and it does, then the casino will give you $36, but there are 35 others numbers which are much more likely to come up.
If you keep betting that number and it comes up in the first 35 spins, then you’re going to make at least a $1, right? If it comes up on the 36th spin, then you’re break even!!
In her strategy, you increase your bet at certain points and continue to gamble. The increased bet will cause a win to cover your previous losses and pay you back a little.
This makes perfect sense, of course — you’re increasing your odds of getting money back by buying those odds.
If you had unlimited money and the house would allow you to continue to increase your bet until the end of time, then it’s pretty likely you would eventually be able to pay off the national debt. But, the house will not allow that — they have table maximums. If the table minimum is $10 and the maximum is $100, then that limits their exposure to people covering previous losses.
Ok, the odds are 1 in 36 that your number is going to come up, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to in YOUR 36 spins, anyway. I’m sure there are commonly streaks of hundreds of spins where a particular number never comes up. And I’m sure there many times a day when a particular Roulette wheel will come up with the same number twice. I bet in a week the same number comes up three times in a row at least once. I bet they’ve seen four times in a row before.
I’m just guessing… I’ve never watched a Roulette wheel for longer than one spin.
On Roulette, a mostly conscious person can roughly calculate the odds of what’s going on. Oh, they may try to read into the numbers based on the past spins: “It’s been Red three times in a row, Black has to come up eventually!” and that person is right… eventually Black has to come up. And the casino doesn’t care if you’re right, as long as you’re betting. Heck, they’d love to see Rainman kick their ass for 25 minutes.
If you’re playing Superball Lotto, for instance, and you saw 42 come up three times in a row, the programmers are screwing with you. They’re trying to make you think you see a pattern. Those numbers are NOT picked randomly — they tell you right on the front of the machine.
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