Cheating Fruit (Slot) Machines

ebbdr writes "Ever think that fruit machines cheat you? You would be right, at least in the UK. This article provides proof that fruit machine outcomes are predetermined and that the players inputs have little, if anything to do with it. And it lets you download the emulators and machine code required to test the hypothesis for yourself...."

Comments

Vegas Machines??

[Anonymous Coward]

for the love of god, does anyone have the ROMs for the machines in vegas?? i'd love to see what the hell is going on there

where'd they get the rom from?

[Wakkow]

I can't seem to find -where- they got the ROM from? Seems like a crucial part of it to say what particular model/version.. I mean, even the screenshots have different quality graphics.

Not to say they're lying, but I'm not convinced of their "proof". Anyone else see something I missed?

Re:where'd they get the rom from?

[terpia]

That's exactly what I was wondering from minute one of reading the site. They make not only make no mention of how they obtained the roms, but there is nothing saying "we'd like to, but cannot disclose how these roms were obtained/delivered". These are the only ways that I can think of:

• 
  Someone unlocked a machine and stole the board, and put the chip on a rom reader and dumped the code. Obviously, highly illegal.
  
• 
  Someone has a connection on the inside with someone who has access to the raw code. Not likely, (job security issues) unless someone with access to the code recently got sacked or is otherwise disgruntled. Again, obviously highly illegal.
  
• 
  This could simply be a hoax.
  

Of course, if the Roms were obtained illegally - there's a perfectly good reason as to why they wouldn't disclose how they were obtained. But nonetheless, when someone is accusing a big money industry of something so severe and underhanded it seems to me that they shouldn't take the readers who are keenly interested in this for granted and expect them to believe all of thier accusations without some sort of vague effort to let the readers know that the information they are relying on is in fact somewhat trustworthy.

Plus, if they disclosed their methods, people may be able to test the Vegas and Reno machines in the same manner, which suck up more money than all of the UK machines easily, at least I'd imagine they suck up more money given the extraordinary volume of machines and players in Vegas.

Re:How else would they work?

[jon_eaves]

In Australia (or Victoria at least) it's 87%, and it's done by manipulation of the payoff tables. So, a Royal Flush pays 500-1 when in fact the odds are much higher. (For video poker type machines)

The industry is heavily regulated and government monitored. I had a friend who built the hardware and software for some of the systems, and they have hard-core maths people working for them.

Very funny story though, there was a machine that was in one of the suburbs that had a very high frequency of migrants (Vietnamese) that was consistently paying out above the 87%. The company was suspicious they were doing something illegal causing the machine to pay out when it shouldn't.

Turns out the guys playing the machine were statistics professors (from Vietnam) that had analysed the payoff tables and found a weakness in the payoff and under certain "unusual" circumstances (like breaking 3 of a kind and throwing away 2 Kings to go for Royal Flush) the payoff could be increased.
The maths guys at the company were somewhat embarassed as they had to change the tables to account for this.

Don't Trust Machines!!!!

[yintercept]

The problem with digital gaming machines is that it is too easy for the programmer to add twists to the algorithms that tweak the odds. It seems odd that they would bother, since the laws of probability come out in the casino's favor, they don't need to tweak the algorithm, just do a little basic math first.

As I recall, the Nevada casinos are required to post the expected payout and odds on the machines. For example, the expected payout might be 98%. That means the casino collects on average 2 pennies every time a patron shakes the hand of a one armed bandit with a dollar bet. The casinos don't need to pull any tricks beyond calculating the expected payouts for the different states of the machine and make sure the expected payout is less than one.

It is disconcerting knowing that there are machines which go even further.

As I understand, a well run gaming commissions tries to assure that casinos don't bend the rules any further than that.