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Comment by daned | Hacker News Reader

I can't accept the one off 'hacking the slot machines' comment.

Yeah, I didn't get that one either.

The game is rigged: anyone with any understanding of math knows that. The house always wins.

Unless he's opening the thing up and downloading firmware, he's not 'hacking' anything. He's just losing money. And if he was somehow up money for the night as he claims, he just got lucky. The expected case is that the house wins.

..., I figured I could at least nickel and dime the casino.

This means SHE was avoiding the losses not actively trying to make a profit. That's how I read first time and still how it reads now. I guess the use of the term "hacking" in this sense wasn't a great idea.

The term is being used like life-hacking.

I have to be in the casino,

I have to play slots (no blackjack)

How do I make this work?

... I play for penny stakes instead of dollar stakes.

The fact that she did actually win something was just dumb luck.

You should really go back and read the rest of it, it is well worth it.

Einh, she specifically claims she had a system.

"I walked out of the casino at a profit just by being aware of what the actual odds were and sticking to a system that would milk the machine of as much money as possible. That it did this bit by bit was irrelevant. Cash is cash."

It's certainly conceivable that the A.C. slots have a negative vig under some circumstances, but I'm skeptical. My conclusion from the references to the slots is that the author probably isn't as smart as she thinks she is. Preliminary finding.

I agree that this usage is idiomatically consistent with the HN-standard use of "hacking", though.

Reading the thread she says that she was given credit by the machine owners. She could not cash out those credits, but she could cash out the winnings. Thus, spend all the credits on low-stakes machines and cash out any win over 10c. She claims a return of 60% to 70%. She's aware that with her own money that's a loss, but it wasn't her money.

It is used in the term "life hacking", yes. Originally I had an explanation in the post but I cut it for length (and relevancy) so here's what I was up to: Casinos give out free "slot credits" like candy. I got $30 dollars for taking the bus to AC, $80 for eating at a certain restaurant, etc. The trick is you cannot cash out your credits, only play them, but you can-- of course-- cash out your winnings.

Except the odds of you winning anything over pocket change are astronomically low, so most people gamble away not just all their credits, but all their winnings and some of their own money to boot. That's why the casinos are so eager to give you free credits for everything.

What I was doing was playing the penny slots on the lowest bet level and cashing out anything over ten cents. I was making about 60 to 70 cents on the dollar ... which sucks if it's your dollar, but the whole point was it WASN'T. I was using the slots to convert the casinos free credits to cash.

......Not what I would have done if given free choice of activity, but like I said, my friends wouldn't let me play blackjack :D If I have to sit for hours while the bride-to-be brags about her bullshit "system" for hitting jackpots, I might as well make a little money.

Cool. Where are you getting these deals? I stumbled into Casino Royale a month or two ago and got one of their fun books. The problem was that the only way to cash out was if you got one of the jackpots. So your expected value is > 0, but of course the chance of winning is very low. My email's in my profile if you feel this has now spiraled sufficiently off-topic.

My experience with this (in Nevada) has been that the slot will keep track of your total credit value and cumulative winnings, so if you play a $30 credit for 10 minutes and hit "cash out," it should give you your total winnings, while keeping the remaining credit in the machine. ie. you don't need to print a cash out voucher every time you win.

For anyone in the bay area, Grand Sierra in Reno has the best promotions I've encountered for free play ($50-100) and free weekend hotel rooms.

The theoretical payoff of sticky bonuses is one minus twice the house edge [1]. The house edge of slot machines varies between 5-15%, so with optimal play you should be able to get out $.70 to $.90 per sticky bonus $1. By cashing out earlier than optimal, you get less return at a steadier rate (a reasonable tradeoff).

[1] http://wizardofodds.com/gambling/glossary/#sticky_bonus

I could be wrong, but I always thought it was possible to "hack" the algorithm that the slots use, as in notice how it might not be totally random and exploit that (but not like that story of the poker-machine bug). For example, people are saying it's totally random, and you can't win, but is it really? Slots are programmed, and I believe they are programmed to give the near-misses that the article talks about.

One pattern I noticed once is that after a few plays (5-20), I would often get a small win, sometimes more than what I'd played already. If I stayed on the machine, the next small win would be after I'd played those profits and a few more plays--I was losing money. But if I got up and switched machines after the small win (usually, but not always, with a small profit), I could get another small win on a different machine much quicker. Once I made about $20 on 25cent slots this way. Another time, I lost $5 trying and gave up. These 2 data points happened 5-10 years ago, I don't go to casinos often enough to claim to know anything. I could be just another gambler with a "sure-win" strategy. Or maybe that was a "naïve" algorithm used by the early video slots and it was too easy to figure out and has since been replaced by different ones. We'll never know.

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