I'm a little skeptical about "high rollers" playing on any machine at all, but the machines are, in fact highly regulated and highly controlled. I'm always amused to see ads about the "loosest slots in town." It's not really false advertising, because the slots are regulated and everybody sets them at exactly the legal limit.
But then there is what is allowed to happen when you don't win. If the machine has already calculated that you will not win on a particular "pull" it can manipulate the loss in advantage ways. For instance, it can land on 7-7-spinning..., spinning, one cherry away from 7. You just missed by 1! So close!
The world thinks they have uncovered a big new secret when they realize that social media sites study human physiology to optimize dopamine release in their victims^H^H subscribers^H^H account holders. Casinos have been at it for lifetimes.
I don't know why you would think there is a risk to the business if a casino lets a guest win an extra game or two.
It's unlikely there is any slot machine in Nevada "at the legal limit." Every gaming device must be set to theoretically pay out a minimum of 75% of wagers -- i.e. the maximum it may keep (or "hold") is 25%. This is, of course, a theoretical number, on any given day a particular machine may hold more, or it may have negative hold -- just like if you flipped a coin enough times, occasionally you'd get long streaks of heads or of tails, even though theoretically it should be 50/50.
In reality slot machines are typically configured to hold between 6 and 15%. A slot machine holding 25% would be an awful experience and simply not get repeat play. Slot manufacturers prepare each game with a range of options that the casino can choose from, but none of them would deliberately ruin their own game by offering a 25% hold option on a slot machine.
Nevada Gaming Control Act Regulation 14: 14.040 Minimum standards for gaming devices. 1. All gaming devices must: (a) Theoretically pay out a mathematically demonstrable percentage of all amounts wagered, which must not be less than 75 percent for each wager available for play on the device.
https://gaming.nv.gov/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=1...
Showing a “near win” for a loss is completely different than manipulating the odds in real time in response to the current user.
The displayed result is a loss and what matters is the chance of winning or losing must match the registered odds for the machine as an independent event.
> I don't know why you would think there is a risk to the business if a casino lets a guest win an extra game or two.
Because if they knowingly manipulate the odds of a game they’d be in violation of their gambling license and be shut down by the State.
An example of this is the simple claw machines. One was full of teddy bears and I knew the operator. He told me point blank the machine will drop 16/17 times, "someone's got to pay for the teddies, and he ain't me!"
First, he has to pay the machine that wasn't cheap to buy outright.
Second, he has to share revenues with the venue hosting the machine. That goes between 20-60% AFAIK.
Then there is the maintenance cost, time spent lubing and adjusting, and restocking + travel time.
So yes, overall, the operator better make sure you don't just pay for the teddies!
Slot machines, however, are opaque because the probability of hitting any specific combination is unknown to the public. The machine can promise that a 7-7-7 result will pay $5000 but you have no idea how often a 7-7-7 is supposed to hit.
Sometimes a casino will take some less popular machines and configure them with an extremely low payout percentage (3% for example) and because the players would not otherwise know this, the casino will put a sign up "97% payout!" to try to attract some value-oriented players, just like a retail store takes old merchandise and puts it in a bargain bin at 50% off.
They do analytics on all of this using Splunk btw (they can actually afford it, lol), there are some really cool talks out there if you look around.
In the US, almost all commercial casinos (Nevada, New Jersey, Mississippi, etc) use Class III games while native American casinos use a mix of Class III and Class II. Typically, Class III are preferred by casinos and by gamblers.
Here's another source: https://www.tahlequahdailypress.com/news/state_news/casino-1...
Edit: Clearly you don't misunderstand that, so what's the complaint?
Gambling has a very strange effect on the human psyche. I never hear anybody come back from Disney World bragging about how much they won. But I've met tons of people who "always win in Vegas". I know a few people who seem addicted to Disneyland. I never understood it. Season passes every year. Maybe one visit a month. Even when they don't have children. It seems weird to me. But the effects of gambling on people's brains is even more weird.
It is only criminally-adjacent in places that perceive a giant risk to people and so have made it illegal. Otherwise, it is as criminally-adjacent as any source of wealth or power that has an incentive to build barriers to entry and to stifle competition.
But the claim seemed to me to be about the present day. Today, I think the industry falls about the same place as big-oil or big-pharma or big-auto or big-politics. That is, plenty of people would call them all criminal-adjacent. But it still makes me wince a little. I'm sympathetic to them all being heckled, though.
Could it be a way to launder money? Jimmy "No Nose" comes in with $40k cash every weekend and loses it gambling, and "nobody knows" where a guy like Jimmy gets that cash so regularly.
[1] https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/print/The-money-launde...
[2] https://moneysmartathlete.com/betting-industry/money-launder...
If you like spending all your dime on drugs, dice and so forth then fine, but let's not pretend the guys selling it are fine upstanding businessmen.
'Criminally adjacent' means literally, adjacent to organised crime.
This is not the same thing as 'above bar businesses are 'adjacent' to anything that is not' , or 'aggressive competitive measures'.
Then supposedly Casinos put higher payout slots in high visibility areas such as the edge of a high traffic walkthrough, or with good sight lines. This would make a lot of sense from a marketing POV, make the winners more visible.
In Vegas, slot machines for example have a legally mandated payout rate. This means it is illegal for them to be random and therefore fair. They are required by law to be rigged.
You are positing a situation like, hey, that dealer just dealt that player two blackjacks in a row. Therefore for the next three hands we're going to take all the aces out of the deck to make sure there isn't another blackjack. Obviously this is not how casinos work, neither is a slot machine adjusting its odds to hit a specific payout target. The blackjack game, and the slot machine, don't have to, over the course of millions of wagers they are mathematically certain to get very close to that theoretical target.
Source: have worked with a situation which required me analyzing the process of getting betting software through regulatory approval.
Edit to add: Here's the relevant regulations in Nevada. https://gaming.nv.gov/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=4...
The thing to search for in the regulations is the "Theoretical hold percentage", which is the expectation for the house expressed as a percent. The fact that they call it "theoretical" is probably enough to demonstrate that it isn't a mandated rate, but the theoretical average rate.
You can set the odds of a fully random process, just take an rng returning a uniform distribution between 1 and 100 and set the bar at whichever threshold you want, or do the same with dice, the odds of any given face is 1/faces, so get however many faced dice you need then set the faces (or a threshold again for numbered faces) e.g. on a 20-faced dice you set the threshold at 3+ and you’ve got a 90% payout rate.
In your example, there is no guarantee that 90% of rolls will be a 3 or above. Statistically, over the long term, that will be the case, but I wouldn't expect the payout laws to be written in such a way that "eventually" you'll "probabilistically" hit your payout targets.
More likely it's something like "you must pay out X over time period Y". You can't 100% guarantee that with a random process. It's possible (and not even all that unlikely) that, over the span of a day (week, month, whatever), you'd end up with only 89.9% of rolls being a 3 or above, and that would violate the payout laws.
This is exactly how they are written. Except, there is no specific payout target (this game must payout 92% of wagers), there is a mandated minimum, any game which exceeds the minimum is lawful. Note the word "theoretical" in each of these:
New Jersey Admin Code 13:69E-1.28A: (a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, each slot machine game which requires a wager shall have a theoretical return to player (RTP) equal to or greater than 83 percent.
Mississippi Title 13, Chapter 12, Rule 12.5: Rule 12.5 Minimum Standards For Gaming Devices. All gaming devices submitted for approval:v(a) Must be electronic in design and operation and must be controlled by a microprocessor or the equivalent. Microcontrollers are allowed.v(b) Must theoretically pay out a mathematically demonstrable percentage of all amounts wagered, which must not be less than eighty percent (80%) or greater than one hundred percentv(100%) for each wager available for play on the device
Pennsylvania 58 Pa. Code § 461a.7: (a) A slot machine may not be set to pay out less than the theoretical payout percentage, which may not be less than 85%, calculated using the lowest possible wager that could be played for any single play, or equal or exceed 100%, calculated using the highest eligible wager available.
Firstly what is the payout rate against, I could imagine it being:
- Plays - Time - Stake
Secondly, how is compliance defined:
- Convergence in expected value - Degree of breach of threshold
On the second one, it's kind of interesting if the degree of breach is 'never breach threshold', because when a machine is 'first turned on' the first play must always be a win (crudely speaking), if the second play has a sufficiently large stake (such that a loss would break the payout rate threshold) then that probably has to be a win too, etc until people can't keep exponentially raising the stages... This is a boot-strapping problem really but still.
If compliance is in expected value then I think any of the rates can be made to work
For a rate in terms of plays or stake then you can just have a binomial variable with some probability. In this case each player/play would be exposed to the same probability; each play would be independent.
For a rate in terms of time the plays would not be independent because the duration of previous plays and payout would affect what payout with subsequent plays would be, so you would need a dynamic adjustment of odds over the time domain, but this can still converge.
For a threshold like you describe then at such a point you would breach the threshold you may need to payout in a situation where you would have not paid out when converging in expectation.
I think what you are saying is that this shunting of probabilities would make the process not random.
However, I think the probability that a 'shunt' occurs could itself be modelled as a random variable dependent on the play history. Assuming some random properties to the sequence of plays (which is a reasonable modelling assumption), this would still be random.
It wouldn't be 'fair' in the sense of giving each player the same probabilities or for plays to be independent, but it would still be random just a distribution weirder than a bernoulli one.
Also FWIW:
> I wouldn't expect the payout laws to be written in such a way that "eventually"
That is exactly how I'd expect them to be written, seems the most natural way to do things, with the same ultimate benefit.
This is why they are programmed to increase payout odds if there was no payout for long time, and this is why some players wait for such machines. (In modern casinos machines are pooled, so it’s actually more complicated)