Photo by Anthony Shaw on Unsplash
draftkings casino new yorkI like to think that I'm a pretty analytical person. I try to make all my life decisions using hard data rather than feelings or emotions, because feelings and emotions can lie to you. Hard data never does (even if it sometimes fails to tell the whole story).
This approach has served me well in the casino. For example, I know that if a game has a house edge of 5%, your chances of getting a card totaling 21 in blackjack are exactly 4.83%, and that hitting the jackpot on a slot machine is 50,618,800-1, so I never get my hopes up in either of those situations. I also know that roulette looks great on the surface but actually has two games with very different houses edges—one with 2.7% and one with 5.26%. Knowing this, I always play the version with the low house edge.
There are lots of other ways to tilt the odds even further in the casino's favor, though. Here are five psychological tricks that casinos use to separate you from your money--and how to avoid falling for them.
197…You Just Won 197 Times Your Bet!
Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash
First let's talk about that slot machine. You probably think you know how it works. You put in some money, you hit a button or pull a lever, and then something speaks eloquently to your inner five-year-old. But do you really understand how it works?
Sure, you know that the point of putting in money is to have a chance to get more money back, along with some entertaining flashing lights and noises, but do you know how likely that is to happen? Do you know how likely it is to win enough money to get your money back? Or how about getting enough money to pay for a nice dinner? What about a new tablet? A down payment on a car? A cottage in the Berkshires?
Probably not, right? Because if you did know, you might not play quite as often.
Here's what you need to know. A typical slot machine has 10 symbols on each reel. On the inside of the machine, however, there are actually many virtual reels. The exact number is a closely guarded secret for each machine, but let's just say it's somewhere between 10 and 100. Each of those virtual reels contains a digital record of which of the 10 physical stopper things on the outside of the machine should be "on top" for that instant in time. And each virtual reel has a history of how it has "rolled."
When you hit the button, all of those virtual rolls are saved away, and the three "winning" ones that you see on the outside are the ones that get advanced to the top of their respective stacks. In other words, you don't really win ($10) or ($50) or ($10,000)). What you're doing is advancing one of several hidden cards, which reads either "WIN ($x)$" for some value of (x) or "LOSE." When those three matching "WIN ($x)$" cards make it to the top of their respective stacks, you win (or "hit") whatever (x) is.
The percentage of the time the set of three matching "WIN ($x)$" cards advances to the top of their stacks is what we mean by "odds." So when the machine says that you just won 1,975 times your bet, what really happened is that you advanced two cards that read "WIN 1,975X" and one card that read "WIN 1X," and those advancements took several thousand attempts.
How many attempts? Well, that's the second thing they don't tell you, and that's where the money is. All that matters to the casino is the overall ratio of vacations in the Berkshires to dollars invested. Exact odds aren't even programmed into the machines--they're stored as rankings. To understand why, check out this excerpt from a job listing for Bally Technologies, one of the largest manufacturers of slot machines and the software and chips that run them.
Chipod Engineer
Did you know...an Internal Game Dodger costs the casino $212,500, while an external one only costs $56?
Position type: Regular
Business Type: Public
Number of Employees: 1,001 - 10,000
Free Spins No Deposit Required Canada 2023 - Best No Deposit BonusIndustry: Computer Games (Ex. Google)/Toys (LEGO)/Gambling
Job Description: • Collaborate in a Agile/Scrum environment• Participate in planning and sprint review meetings• Establish and maintain good communication with QA, Supply Chain, and other cross functional teams• Create and maintain technical design documents• Troubleshoot and resolve production issues• Mentor junior engineers• Perform other duties as assigned• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or equivalent experience required• Minimum 2 years of experience with C# and .NET required• Strong problem solving skills required• Experience with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) preferred• Experience with firmware programming preferred• Must be authorized to work in the US without need of now or in the future.
What is WPF? It's a programming interface to Windows forms. In short, it lets you write the software that advances those virtual roll cards that I mentioned earlier. The interesting part is the job posting. Near the bottom, Bally technically requires a Bachelor's degree in computer science or electrical engineering, plus two years of industry experience--but then goes on to list several highly preferred qualifications that would take five years or more to acquire.
So, how long does it typically take to become a competent WPF programmer? Let's be conservative and say four years. That means that Bally is looking for people who have been learning on the job for two years...but who also have another two years or more of experience under their belts before they start this particular job. Essentially, they're looking for experienced veterans of the field...who are recent college graduates.
The reason they can get away with this blatant contradiction is hidden in the job description, in that single sentence near the beginning: Bally is an extremely large company by gaming industry standards ($1.37 billion in revenue in 2013), but it's tiny in the world at large. They have only around 1,000 employees, of whom roughly 250 are engineers and chip designers. In fact, it's possible that the person reading your job applications is the same person who writes code that's installed in every machine.
casinos in pennsylvaniaIn such a small company, everyone does everything. The CEO empties the trash, the guy who answers the phone at 1-800-BALLY-CUST-SVC (yes, that's a real number) makes coffee for the programmers in the morning, and the programmer who writes the dodge chips for Bally's video poker machines helps the quality assurance team play slots so they better understand what the programmers go through on a daily basis. At a small company, everyone pitches in wherever help is needed.
So when Bally's job posting says "must be able to troubleshoot and resolve production issues," they're not kidding. You could be fixing a problem one line of code of which appears half a world away in a slot machine in some dark, smoky casino. Incidentally, that's one big advantage of working for a small company--you get to do absolutely everything, which gives you a much broader perspective on the project than if you were relegated to a single, narrow task. Small companies can't afford specialists; you have to be a generalist who understands the big picture and how his or her little bit of code fits into it.
But I'm digressing. Why does Bally need a chip pod engineer to Understand Odds? Consider the following scenario. Suppose that you're a hacker (in the original, non-pejorative sense of the term), and you manage to obtain one of Bally's secure NAND chips containing the secret ranking information for advancement of those virtual roll cards. You open the chip, photograph the die pattern of the ranking information for one game, and close the chip and reseal it undetectably (not easy to do). Now you're a rich man (or at least, a man of leisure, since spending $10,000 on 500 chips isn't exactly pocket change). Every time you play this game, you advance the ranking by five places--from 10th to 5th--for every spin. Instead of hitting that jackpot once every 50,618,800 spins, you hit it once every 6,184,800 spins--about five times as often.
Would the casino notice? Probably not, at least not right away. Those secure chips aren't really that secure, and the difference in wear rates on the mechanical parts (gears, switches, etc.) might conceivably give the hacker away after a few hundred altered chips were in the wild, but certainly not after only one.
Okay, so that's an extreme example. More likely is the "Internal Game Dodger" and "External Game Dodger" chips described in U.S. Patent 6,321,706. This patent describes a way of detecting whether a game is being accessed within the same casino network where its odds are stored (internal), or from outside that network (external). No self-respecting slot-machine hacker would ever be caught without both of these chips in his toolkit. An internal game dodger chip causes the game being played to revert to the most financially beneficial version for the casino (probably the one with the 5.26% house edge). An external game dodger chip causes the game to revert to the version that maximizes the jackpot, say, from 1,000 to 10,000 to 1 million to 10 million. Again, the patent doesn't actually specify what actions the EGD chip takes, but it's not hard to guess. There's also a less serious form of chip dodging called "cat scratching." If you carefully short a couple of internal pins on the connector, you can sometimes cause the machine to malfunction in interesting (to a cat) and lucrative (to you) ways. For example, you might be able to short together two pins that ordinarily supply +5 volts and ground, boosting the voltage temporarily above the threshold of whichever input the CPU was going to sample next. That input will now read "high," whatever its actual voltage may be. If you time the short carefully, you can make that "high" reading occur precisely when the CPU is polling the input that tells it whether a coin has been inserted. Voila! Free play.
These are all fairly crude methods compared to the sophistication of today's integrated circuits, but they don't need to be sophisticated. The goal here is not to hide the theft--the chip dodger is freely advertised and sold over the Internet, and cat scratching is done in broad daylight, usually with other patrons of the casino standing right there watching. The reason is simple: fear of prosecution is removed when theft has been legalized. Since the chip maker or the operator of the slot machine knows that the modifications can be detected but choose not to pursue the matter, the thief is effectively told, "Go ahead. We won't prosecute." In short, they turn a blind eye.
If a thief steals a car, that act is clearly illegal and is pursued vigorously by the authorities. If a thief cracks a safe, that too is clearly illegal and pursued vigorously by the authorities--unless he'sSAME. In that case, the authorities turn a blind eye.
Why the difference in treatment? Simple: You can always buy another car, but if the existence of copying SAFESTRACK software is denied by Secure Action Management Enterprise, then Larry Bloomfield, president and CEO of SAMA Enterprise, knows that his business model has been fatally compromised. In the slot-machine business, thieves are given essentially a free hand. After all, they're only "misappropriating technology." Big deal, right? You can always make another chip.
Now that we know how the numbers work, let's come back to earth and look at what those numbers really mean.
Let's say you've decided to play a penny slot machine, one where you have to hit the "play" button after each "spin." You put in a $5 bill, hit the button once, and nothing much happens. You hit it again, still nothing. Hit it three more times: bingo! You've "won" 10 cents.
So you're up a cent. Great! You're almost certain to win again next time, because the odds of winning are vastly different than they are for losing. In fact, the odds of winning any specific amount are vastly different from the odds of losing that much.
But hold on--before you slip that penny into the machine for the next "play," ask yourself a question: How much of that one cent was "winnings?" Remember, when the machine seems to speak to your inner five-year-old, what really happens is that you're advancing one of several hidden cards, which reads either "WIN x cents" for some value of (x) or "LOSE"--and those advance those cards thousands of times before you get that magical "WIN 10 cents" stack alignment. How many times? Who knows? Who cares? All that matters is the net result: Did you end up with more pennies in the tray when you were done than you had when you started? Yes? Then you won. No resentful spouses to divorce, no vacations to pay for, no regrets. Good times.
Naturally, eventually you'll want to move on to bigger things, and that's where the second psychological trick comes in:
The Law of Very Big Numbers
Photo by Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash
Most of the time, when you hit the "play" button on that penny slot machine, nothing happens. You don't win a damn thing. Occasionally, though, you win a penny. And every so often, you win a dollar. An even rareder event is to hit that jackpot, currently set at $6,664.10 ("Autumn Bonanza").
All of these are examples of rare events. Mathematically, they're all equally rare, because rareness is defined by the odds and, except for the jackpot, the odds for winning one penny and one dollar are the same. As for the jackpot, sure, it occurs "only" once every 50,618,800 tries, but then again, you can hit "play" maybe 20 times per minute, which means given your own personal slot machine to yourself, you're only slightly less likely to win the jackpot in 30 minutes than you are to win a dollar at the regular, honky-tonk odds of 8,000 to 1. In other words, if you plan on playing just one machine for no more than fifteen hours a day, you're probably in it for the long haul. You might as well go for the jackpot.
Best Real Money Roulette Sites in the US 2023This is known as , and it's used by casinos to justify those huge jackpot payloads, which can run several hundred dollars apiece. After all, if the odds of winning the jackpot are the same regardless of whether the payload is set for a penny or several hundred dollars, why not make it several hundred dollars?
Well, yes and no. While it's true that the individual odds of winning the jackpot are the same regardless of size, the are most assuredly not. To see why, consider this:
Suppose you have exactly $20 in slot machine currency (bills and coins) and you're willing to spend it all in the service of winning that jackpot. Further, let's assume that you're so enamored of The Simpsons that you're willing to drive clear across Nevada to find a slot machine with a Springfield theme and that big honkin' jackpot. Springfields are reportedly rare birds, though; your geeky friend who swears by Every Casino tells you that your odds of finding a Springfield theme are about 2 to 1 against. That's okay, though; you're in this for the long haul, so you rent a U-Haul, fill it with twenties, and head for Vegas.
Case 1: Jackpot Set to 1 Cent. In this case, the 2-to-1 odds of finding a Springfuk theme are totally irrelevant, because you can play 8,000 times on a penny machine for the price of that Springfield unit. In fact, you can play 1,600 units before you run out of money, so your effective odds of finding a Springfield unit are reduced to 0, which means you'll never have to worry about the jackpot because you'll starve to death first.
Case 2: Jackpot Set to $1. Same argument as Case 1, except now you can only play 16 units of the Springfield, so your odds of finding one are a somewhat less discouraging 121 to 1 against. Still pretty bad, though.
online casino nyCase 3: Jackpot Set to $10. Okay, now it gets interesting. At $10 per try, you can only play 2 units of the Springfield machine, so your odds of finding one are a mind-blowing 500 to 1 against. You're much much better off staying home and searching the Internet for a Springfield machine than you are trundling across the desert in your U-Haul.
Case 4: Jackpot Set to $100. Two units of the Springfield machine will cost you the entire $20, so you'd better find one fast. Your odds of doing so are a mind-numbing 1,000,000 to 1 against. Stay home and keep surfing.
Case 5: Jackpot Set to $6,664.10. Surprise! You wins! In fact, you win the jackpot on the very first try. Your geeky friend was telling the truth; Springfield themes really are that rare. Your odds of finding one were...well, let's not get silly here. The point of this thought experiment isn't to determine the odds of finding a Springfield theme; it's to demonstrate how the size of the jackpot pays inverse proportion to the likelihood of finding that theme.
You see, the issue isn't the individual probability of winning the jackpot; it's the number of tries required to win it that counts. The law of very big numbers guarantees that somebody, sooner or later, is going to walk away with a new car...provided, of course, that they're willing to make the necessary number of tries. But to find that lucky winner, the casino must try an awful lot of losers. Indeed, the law of very big numbers tells us that for every winner of the $6,000 autumntime bonanza, the casino must try...
- 50,619,797 plays at a penny
- 5,061,900 plays at a dollar
- 507 plays at a $10 prize
- 61 plays at a $100 prize
- Seven plays at a $6,664.10 prize
Whoa! Hold on just a doggone minute! Are you trying to tell me that for every person who wins the autumn bonanza, the casino must...well, okay, let's not get silly here, either. The point of this thought experiment isn't to determine the number of tries required to win the bonus (although that's kind of interesting in itself). The point is to show something that's far more important: How many times losers like you and me have to press that button before...somebody wins.
In other words, all that glitters is not gold. Those enormous jackpots cost the casinos a fortune, and someone has to pay. Would you rather have walked out with a net gain of 10 cents...or spent $20 driving to and fro and eating roadkill in Sherman, Nevada?
Good question.
Before we leave this topic, let's examine one last variation on the theme: What if those odds of 8,000 to 1 weren't really the odds at all? What if those ranks were off by just one, so that theadvantage was really 7,999 to 1 in favor of the house? The mathematical expectation of winning that jackpot is still a very long 50,619,797 tries from now, but you'd win it once every 49,389 tries instead of once every 50,000. Is that a big deal?
Try this little mental exercise. Flip a fair coin once: tails. Flip it again: heads. Pretty even, huh? Now flip it 99 times and get heads every single time. On mere consideration, a single heads in 100 tosses is not all that remarkable. But 99 heads in 100 trials is downright spooky. You'd feel mighty uneasy sitting at a blackjack table if the dealer gave you 100 consecutive hands, each of which contained a face card. That's really unlikely, guys. Really.
Back to our slot machine. Would you feel cheated if you put a dollar in and tried the slot machine 100 times and didn't win a cent, but on the 101st try, you hit the jackpot? Of course not. That's exactly what's supposed to happen: You're supposed to lose all your money as soon as the machine recognizes that you're a loser and refuses you access to the jackpot.
Do you know what "ATM machine" stands for? It doesn't mean "automatic teller machine"; that's its common name. Its proper, formal name is "private data communications network emulator," and its official acronym is PDCNE. Likewise, a CTM is not a "carbon terminal model," any more than an MDM is a "mobile device portal." These are formal, bureaucratic names dreamed up in board rooms and executive suites. Out on the shop floor, we call them ATMs, CTMs, and MDMs, respectively. Formal names and acronyms are rarely used or understood by the people who use the devices on a daily basis.
Nobody believes that an ATM is going to miraculously spit wads of twenty-dollar bills at them when they punch the right sequence of buttons. Nobody believes that a CTM is going to let them talk directly to an application (whatever that might be). And nobody believes that an MDM is going to miraculously cause rogue applications to appear on their PDAs. These things are too complex for ordinary mortals to understand. They're like computers and the internet: We use them every day, yet most of us have only the vaguest idea of how they actually work. The important thing is that when we slide that ATM card home and key in our secret number, we expect the machine to eat the card, swallow our money, and spit back the correct amount of folding green in twenty-dollar wads. Period. End of discussion. Anything else is a failure.
Slot machines are no different, and this brings us to psychological trick #3: