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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.