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

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.