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Comment by feld | Hacker News Reader

Yes, when you setup a slot machine you select in the configuration menu exactly which percentage payout you want the machine to have over its lifetime (~3-5 years). In Wisconsin accessing this menu is highly secured: security guards, cameras, auditors all staring over your shoulder making sure what you set is correct. Also they must report that information to the state here as well as the checksums of the games. I think in 2007 they were doing MD5 still, but my memory is fuzzy on it.

Fun fact: by being able to access the payout statistics menu and knowing the machine's installation date it was easy to know which machines would be "hot". I have witnessed machines that paid out poorly for a couple years (+ a few million USD) but would hit regular jackpots near the end of their expected lifecycle.

edit: gambling is a scam, please don't participate

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> gambling is a scam, please don't participate

I disagree. To some extent slot machines are more scam-like than the other games, but I think the table games (roulette, black jack, craps) all have well known odds and are generally honest games.

They are not "fair" in the sense that the odds are stacked against you, but I don't believe that that's a reason to completely boycott them.

Gambling is fun. As long as you know going into it that the odds are stacked against you (and how badly they're stacked against you) and you don't go into a game without being prepared to lose your entire stake, there's nothing wrong with gambling.

Don't bet the farm, but go into it knowing you could lose everything, and enjoy a few hours of gambling and "free" drinks. Every once in a while you'll beat the house, and _that_ is quite enjoyable.

Nope. Every single game played in casino is a scam. If you figure out any way to beat them, you will be in huge trouble and even behind the bars. Casinos are powerful enough that they have made this in to actual law. Police will literally be after you if you ever beat casino consistently in any of their games. There are tons of stories on people figuring out how to beat casino in black jack and they were ruined by casinos because of that. This would sound ridiculous to most sane people but casino's have done great marketing and physiological twisting that people now go there with full knowledge of this and think losing is actually fun and its quite enjoyable. Basically what you are saying.

If by "ruined" you mean "banned by casinos", then yes. Otherwise, excepting people who actually attempted to defraud the casinos by cheating in ways we'd all agree are in fact cheating, I think yours might be difficult argument to support with evidence.

No, a scam requires dishonesty; it is right in the definition of the word.

A casino tells you the exact odds, and everyone is freely able to decide if they want to play given those odds. Yes, they are in the house's favor, but that is what a player trades in return for the whole setup (the casino, the workers, the free drinks, the entertainment, etc)

You can still argue casinos are immoral, but they are clearly not a scam. That would be like saying cigarettes are a scam, just because they are bad for you.

"Malfunciton voids all pays and plays"

The house can claim malfunction on anything and refuse to pay you. You have little to no recourse. I've witnessed people having their jackpots declared invalid for ridiculous reasons such as a faulty door sensor on the machine (having nothing to do with the game itself.)

You're essentially gambling that you can win the game and the house won't deny your win.

Yes, a casino COULD commit fraud and say a game malfunctioned when it didn't, but that is also illegal, and they do get punished for that. In Nevada, for example, the gaming commission would certainly go after a casino doing that.

If you see a casino cheating, you should report it.

Scam does not require dishonesty and no one is saying anything about morality. I can tell you that you can play poker with me and because I'm so good at it, your chances of winning is 1 in 100. If you still decide to play, it's your choice and it's neither immoral or a scam. However, somehow if you turn out to be better player than me and suddenly I'm losing in droves and then I call police to not only confiscate all your winnings but also bankrupt you and then put you in jail. Now, that's a scam. Being able to pass laws through political lobby and making this whole process legal doesn't make it any less of a scam.

Card counting in black jack is not illegal, and you will not be prosecuted for it or have your winnings withheld (unless you're using a device to help). As long as you and the casino are playing the same game, you are not violating any law (at least in casinos on US territory, e.g. Vegas/Atlantic City, some quick googling suggests that some Native American casinos take a bit more liberty with this and not pay you your winnings).

If a casino catches or even suspects you're card counting, they are well within their rights to refuse to let you play that game anymore.

If, on the other hand, you and the casino are playing different games, e.g. the dealer is playing black jack, but the player is playing I-know-what-the-dealer's-down-card-is-because-of-manufacturing-imperfections-in-the-card, then is it really that unreasonable for the casino to have a case that they don't owe you the money that you won, especially if they can demonstrate intent? (I'd argue that they should give you a bug bounty, but that's a different story)

To address your poker example - say I'm your guest in your hypothetical and, were we playing fair poker, your 1 in 100 odds were correct. Let's also say that I have undetectable X-ray vision contact lenses, thus changing the odds such that I will always win - would you really consider it unreasonable to use the government to get your money back in that situation? The agreement was to play poker, a game which necessarily presumes hidden information from all players. If one player has all the information, the game isn't poker anymore, it's robbery/con.

I agree that the computerized games are a different story, though I believe that consumers have some protection in the form of the various gaming commissions. If you win a jackpot and are denied the payout, contact the gaming commission! The laws are very strict on the points of fairness of those machines, forged in the fires of decades of mafia controlled casinos (at least in Vegas/Atlantic City).

Gambling is a drug. It has all the health benefits of a recreational drug, but at least in (most of) the US, it's not a scam.

Obviously you have rather romantic and idealistic view of how casinos work. When I go to Vegas I often see casinos full of clearly lower middle class crowd wasting away hours on putting in their hard earned cash in slot machines in a hope to win jackpot. Those are the times I am glad I have had some education in math of probabilities and more importantly how powerful tilt rules in their favor.

https://knpr.org/knpr/2015-01/legal-or-not-card-counting-not...

https://www.google.com/search?q=casino+refuses+to+pay

My view is neither romantic nor idealistic. I understand that casinos do fuck people over, exploit addiction and use numerous tricks to cross the wires of people's (already flawed) internal statistical calculators.

Yes, sometimes casinos will use their political strength to not payout a jackpot (malfunction voids all play), but a player does, in fact, have some recourse if the casino is full of shit.

Regardless, if you're going to a casino intending to win a jackpot, you're doing it wrong (because math). If you take a measured approach and enjoy it for what it is (entertainment, not a way to make money), you'll have a much healthier relationship with a casino.

As an aside, there's another industry that uses it's massive political clout and every trick in the book to refuse to pay in situations where one would intuitively believe one should be payed: insurance.

I'm dubious that there is a per-machine fixed sum over a fixed time like this. Apart from the "progressive" machines that have a jackpot shared across a network of machines, I'm pretty sure that the payout percentage is just a statistical prediction, and that by law each result has to be independent of all previous payouts. Do you have a reference that you could point to that would confirm your understanding? The sources I've found say that each play is random: http://www.vegasslotsonline.com/faq/#random. You might be right, but I wouldn't want you or someone else to rely on this information if it's a myth.

I was actually working on the casino floor for a year and configured, repaired, diagnosed, and twiddled with these machines all day. It was a terrible job, but gave me something to do while hunting for my next IT adventure.

Other interesting observations: the machines based on Windows XP Embedded crashed all the time, the Linux ones were fine.

The Linux ones from several mfrs used APNG for the slot machine graphics. This was my first exposure to animated PNGs in the wild. (~2007)

The Linux machines loaded a kernel module at boot that was supposed to prevent/detect tampering with memory. Some also loaded their own audio driver stack which surprised me: wasn't ALSA or OSS. Very odd, specialized little machines. (Many were Pentium 3 with totally custom motherboards due to strange peripherals)

Progressives cannot legally be removed from operation until someone hits the jackpot. (at least in my state)

Is this the case with card games at casinos? I'm under the impression card games are completely random and cannot have designated odds (except for basic rules like dealer holds over 17 in blackjack).

In this sense wouldn't card games be a wiser bet than slot machines?

Yes, unless you think it is possible that the casino in question removes cards from their decks.

For instance, playing black jack by the basic strategy is (from wizardofodds.com):

> the probability of an overall win in blackjack is 42.22%, a tie is 8.48%, and a loss is 49.10%. I'm going to assume you wish to ignore ties for purposes of the streak. In that case, the probability of a win, given a resolved bet, is 46.36%.

So yes, your best bet in the casino is probably blackjack, but it is still a losing proposition without counting cards. Face cards tend to favor the players (table), not the dealer. This is because a dealer hitting with a face card more frequently causes a bust than a player hitting a face card (because players don't have to hit when they might bust, dealers do). So a deck that is heavy with face cards is better for players.

Poker, by contrast, the house has no real interest in whether people win or lose - they just get a % cut of each hand played so they win a little every hand.

Not really, as the odds in games like Blackjack are relatively well known to the point where with a given strategy you can calculate the house edge pretty quickly. For most houses and most strategies, the house has an edge of about 0.3-0.4% which is just enough to make you go broke.

If you can count cards, and they don't use a continuous shuffler you can get this to as good as 0.1% in your favour.

http://wizardofodds.com/games/blackjack/calculator/

For those intrested games with a low house edge there is a game that beats (counted) black jack's pretty good edge by almost a order of magnitude. If you play craps at a table that allows 100x odds bets. You only bet the minimum on the pass line then the max (100x) on the odds when the point is set. This stratagy lowers the house edge to 0.014%. The only problem is it takes a large bankroll. If the table is a $25 dollar minimum you have to risk $2500 on every round.

The casinos are smart enough that all of the bets with the lowest house edge require high stakes to keep it interesting to the house to participate.

Baccarat is always a high stakes game not because it's "fancy" or "exotic", but because it is nearly the closest a casino will let you get to betting on a coin flip, for every player in the game.

Casinos also do things like add 6-7 decks to a shoe where each additional deck gives the house an additional edge. If they have a continuous shuffle machine the odds don't swing (in favor of the house/player), due to a constant probability of cards in circulation. Moral of the story is if you go to a casino with money expect to leave with out it.

> gives the house an additional edge

Technically, additional decks reduce the expected edge of a card-counter who has only seen some number of cards. Which functions the same way...

Gambling is fun. Thanks, but I'll keep gambling when I like and not delude myself into thinking it's supposed to be 'fair'.

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