Slot Machines Don’t Think 

You’d be amazed at the number of people who think that their slot machine is a thinking mechanism. They might sit at a slot machine for hours or even minutes, but if it pays out they will either move away from the slot machine or they will stay with it. The first group believes that if it has just hit that it has to make back its money so it won’t hit again for a really long time. The second group believes that they should go for that slot machine because it obviously likes to pay out.  

Both of these scenarios give the slot machine a brain – a personality – the ability to reason that it has just paid out. This is simply not true. A slot machine is run by a Random Number Generator, which makes it completely random as to when the slot machine pays out. You might sit at a slot machine for six hours and not have it pay out, and the guy next to you might sit at his for the same amount of time and hit it constantly. It isn’t the slot machine that you are playing on, it is the RNG that determines whether or not it is going to pay out.  

If it is set to pay out a larger percentage of its winnings, the slot machine might pay out more often than one that is set lower – but again, this is something that is set in the slot machine itself, not in the genetic code of the game. The random act of the slot machine is that there is no way to predict when it is going to hit, or if it will hit at all. There are some slot machines that pay out all the time, and there are some that never do. This doesn’t mean that one is “nicer” than the other – this would be giving it a personality that it just doesn’t have. 

Some think that if a slot machine has just hit that it is going to take your money to make up for the money that it has lost – this is simply not the case and does not happen. You have as much of a chance of winning on that slot machine as anyone else in that casino. Slot machines don’t think – we might want them to, but they don’t.