If I play cards at a bar I want Card odds not Bingo odds.

Back in my school days they ran a Bingo game night 1 - 2 times a year and I swear it was rigged every time. The kids or people form the well off families always won no matter what even on a multi way payout.

I won a turkey on year but didn't get it because of a multi win situation where me an indian buddy of mine and one rich kid won. All previous multiplayer wins were either equal way splits or in the case of unsplittable items like turkeys, hams, merchandise or whatever it was standard A - Z alphabetical order.

Not that time. My indian buddies first and last names put him in the alphabetical win no matter what. I was middle no matter what and the kid from the well off family by same rules was last. Nope. Not that game. they went reverse alphabetical order Z - A so the rich kid got it.

After that the next turkey and ham they had for prizes were multi player wins too only they settled them in standard A - Z alphabetical order payout.

 

I would need to see hard evidence these numbers do in fact pay off, or even pay off in a higher ratio over any other set of numbers

They play the numbers and always reports "winnings". They never reported the NET or the IN/OUT. They were happy with the numbers, I was happy with them, and I'm an infrequent player. I can tell you my normal numbers may come up more than these, but, when you need more to win, you might not meet that threshold. After all, it's called gambling for a reason.

Hey, if those numbers hit ONCE for someone for big money, good for them. If they take 20 dollars to lose and they do ... nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The guy who made up those numbers, by watching the keno board, reported quite a number of winning 1200 for a 25 cent spin over the years.

I can tell you a couple of Filipino women whose taxes I did, always had the W2G gambling form. I always checked their in and out for the year to see how much we can write off, if any. The most I seen was a guy who visited Vegas .... he had about 33 of those w2Gs, That was over a half-million in winnings. I think all of those were offset by the losses.

My first incidence with a W2G was for about 40 grand. I asked if the woman used her player's club card and she did. So I called the casino and had them fax me her record. My jaw dropped when I saw she lost a quarter of a million that year, her husband was shocked, then the woman told me she only been going up there for about six months. Then I remembered how those one armed bandits work. You drop your 20 in and pull the handle. You re-invest your minor winnings and keep your larger winnings. So it's easy.

When I go to the casino, I know how much I put in, and when I'm done, I check my points on the card. You earn 1 point per ten dollars spent. I may walk out with more than I went in with, however, the points may indicate I turned about 800 dollars over to get that 125. My initial investment was 100. My net for those three hours was a minus 675. Most people would report they won 125.

By far, that wining on their dime was the best. Zero money invested, 8750 won. Yes, I cashed out.

 

That's true but it's 'nice' knowing the actual bandit your playing took your money not a Class II machine bingo game randomization at a central location. Here "video lottery" is a Las Vegas style’ Class III machine. If I play cards at a bar I want Card odds not Bingo odds.
http://www.grandronde.org/news/smok...gas-style-slot-machines/#sthash.qA1qC9XO.dpbs
Either way, ‘you pay your money, you take your chances’

Odds of winning a huge lottery jackpot are about 1 in 50 million,
odds of winning at the MegaBucks slot machine game are about 1 in 25 million

The odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in a million.

Trivia:
The most popular slot machine game in any casino is Wheel of Fortune.

Why?

Spoiler

The game reminded them of watching Wheel of Fortune with their grandmother.

And my partially deaf Grandmother insisted that the host's name is Pat Paycheck.

 

When I go to the casino, I know how much I put in, and when I'm done, I check my points on the card. You earn 1 point per ten dollars spent. I may walk out with more than I went in with, however, the points may indicate I turned about 800 dollars over to get that 125. My initial investment was 100. My net for those three hours was a minus 675. Most people would report they won 125.

You put $100 into a machine, when you leave you have $125. That is a profit of $25. That you churned thru some $800 of game play to achieve this goal is immaterial.

You also earned some 80 (=$800/$10) player points which have some value, perhaps a free soda for the ride home.

 

You put $100 into a machine, when you leave you have $125. That is a profit of $25. That you churned thru some $800 of game play to achieve this goal is immaterial.

You also earned some 80 (=$800/$10) player points which have some value, perhaps a free soda for the ride home.

I love the guys who talk about the payback rates of different casinos.
PayerA: "I was at casino A and they pay 98% on slots."
playerB: "the casino I went to paid 99%."

If bother players play long enough, the only difference is that player B got to play twice as long before losing all of his money.

There are also different strategies that casinos use to pay back,
- many small wins vs fewer bigger wins

Also, there are many patents on slot machines that include strategies to keep the player entertained longer - if you read them, you soon realize how they are patenting the manipulatin of human emotion, not novel technology. Even deciding what patterns of losses should appear on the video screen to keep the player feeling like he was close to winning, the timing of how the losing pattern should be displayed. I am amazed manufacturers patent this stuff instead of keeping a trade secret.

Your strategy to stick with table games/poker is better from a stats point of view. You know you are playing against a randomized deck of cards and, in the case of poker, an individual trying to lie to you. In slots, you are playing with a randomized machine and a team of social researchers/social engineers convincing the player to keep playing one more time.

 

I quite agree Gopher. I do play slots solely to entertain my wife, who loves to play them and prefers we play together. She is quite happy to play for hours for moderate losses. I have seen her donk off her remaining cash into a machine that is not paying out so she can end her session. My method is to play for small stakes (but always max bets) and to cease play if I actually make a good hit.

There is a fascinating book called "The Eudaemonic Pie" about a bunch of grad students who successfully built a series of computers in a shoe (a formidable take in 1980) to predict the fall of a roulette ball into one of 8 sections of the wheel. When it worked this gave them an overwhelming advantage when not getting shocked by the battery packs and several other bugs. They went onto fundamental research into chaos theory (I recognized some names in Gleick's book) and now work wonders on Wall Street.

The book contains a graph of "winning" expectation vs bets placed. They properly came up with the best strategy possible for playing roulette: gather together every single penny you will ever bet on roulette and place one single bet with that money. This avoids the tyranny of the hose rake over time.

Now poker is completely different as when properly played has a demonstrably positive expectation, which I illustrate with my graph from the days when I could play at home:



True this is for small stakes, but the rake (house portion for laying the game) is higher. I moved up in stakes after this with indifferent results, though with rakeback (where you are paid back a percentage of the rake just for playing) I achieved some modest profits, perhads 4-5K plus a very nice (for the time) iPod I still use.

 

Also, there are many patents on slot machines that include strategies to keep the player entertained longer - if you read them, you soon realize how they are patenting the manipulatin of human emotion, not novel technology. Even deciding what patterns of losses should appear on the video screen to keep the player feeling like he was close to winning, the timing of how the losing pattern should be displayed. I am amazed manufacturers patent this stuff instead of keeping a trade secret.

They should have never done away with the coin drop then. That is what lost it for me. I'd rather scoop out a handful of coins than have credits added to my card.

 

You put $100 into a machine, when you leave you have $125. That is a profit of $25. That you churned thru some $800 of game play to achieve this goal is immaterial.

You also earned some 80 (=$800/$10) player points which have some value, perhaps a free soda for the ride home.

That's how I play.

I go to a machine with a fixed loss value set and if I hit that value before recovering more than I started with I leave it but if I recover more than I started with I might leave or I may just play out my original intended loss value and see if I win any more.

They should have never done away with the coin drop then. That is what lost it for me. I'd rather scoop out a handful of coins than have credits added to my card.

Yea, that rather took the fun out of it for me plus gave me every reason to be suspicious of them doing other things to make me lose more while on the property. They couldn't track a pail of unmarked coins/tokens very easily but I know they can track me and a bar coded ticket or cash money with ease.

 

That's how I play.

I go to a machine with a fixed loss value set and if I hit that value before recovering more than I started with I leave it but if I recover more than I started with I might leave or I may just play out my original intended loss value and see if I win any more.

On the very small handful of occasions I've gambled (they have always been the electronic slots/poker machines and when the only reason I was there was because I was with someone else, with one exception in the airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico where I consciously decided to get $50 from an ATM for the sole purpose of playing Roulette, the only time I've ever played any table game) I have gone in there with two numbers. My loss limit and my win stop limit. Typically my loss limit is $20 and my win stop limit is $10. If I reach my loss limit before I win my win stop limit, I am done. If I get ahead and am above my win stop limit then I separate out my original "investment" and my win stop amount and then I am free to do whatever I want with the rest -- which usually means that I end up losing it all. But at that point I know I can walk out and honestly say that I came out money ahead.

Overall I am about even -- but that's due to a single decent win of about $200 in one of the local gambling towns that prompted me stop with enough to buy me and my parents a nice lunch plus pay for all of us to take an interesting tour of the Molly-Kathleen gold mine on the way home.

As for scratch tickets and lottery play -- I just don't do it. My parents would buy a couple of lotto tickets a month and my Dad was fond of pointing out that their odds of winning were exactly the same as the person that actually wins; of course I would then point out that my odds were only marginally worse.

When we were up at the gambling town I got to talking with the casino manager as he was working on a slot machine that was giving him problems. It took a while for him to open up, but once he realized that I was just a geeky engineer interested in the technical details and not someone trying to get information to try to game the system, he explained how the slot odds are controlled and licensed. He said that, for slots, the best payout odds were actually the $1 and $5 machines at about 99% and the worst were typically the nickel slots at about 95%. He said if they moved the odds much below these then they would quickly notice a loss in profits as people would get discouraged too quickly and leave -- "We've learned to milk them gently and slowly," was his comment.

He said that penny slots were in a different league because they were often used as teaser machines with payouts of up to 105% on a handful of scattered machines, often near the entrance, and it wasn't uncommon for all of the penny slots to pay out at least 100% -- the losses to the house were minimal and easily made up for by putting people into an, "I'm lucky tonight," mood.

Now consider the state lottery. "Payout equals 50% of sales" So they are already starting with a house take some 50x what a casino could keep customers playing on a $1 machine. Then they actually only pay out about 40% of the winnings (the cash option) since that is also effectively about what the annuity costs them for people that choose that option. So now they are only paying out about 20%. Then they will hit that for taxes, which for Colorado are about 5%. So the state gets to keep about 81% of every dollar played.

It's worse for the player, of course. If they are in the 25% tax bracket then for every $100 they earn they get to play $75 of it. Then they get 20% of that back in cash winnings, or $15. Then the feds will take 25% of that and the state 5%, leaving them with a grand net of $10.50. Yet people -- many of them in poverty and on government assistance, meaning that they are playing with taxpayer money -- will line up around the block to give their money away.

 

I go to a machine with a fixed loss value set and if I hit that value before recovering more than I started with I leave it but if I recover more than I started with I might leave or I may just play out my original intended loss value and see if I win any more.

Similar to my Blackjack strategy. Also similar to WBahn's.

I go in with a small amount. Call it a threshold. Typically it is $40.

I bet until I lose the forty. If I am winning, when my bank is above the threshold, I take $40 off the table and pocket it. I repeat this strategy until the is nothing left on the table. Then, I leave the table to cash in the chips in my pocket.

 

You put $100 into a machine, when you leave you have $125. That is a profit of $25. That you churned thru some $800 of game play to achieve this goal is immaterial.

You also earned some 80 (=$800/$10) player points which have some value, perhaps a free soda for the ride home.

If I'm playing slots in Nevada it's usually $1 machines for points churn and possible profit but there are some penny machines I play for just fun like Sharknado at the local casino.


I'm headed to SoCal, Disney, Vegas and Reno this summer on Vacation. The Disney leg of the trip will be more expensive on a total cost basis and I won't get comp'd with rooms, meals or drinks while waiting for the rides and spending money on expensive food and trinkets.

 

He said that penny slots were in a different league because they were often used as teaser machines with payouts of up to 105% on a handful of scattered machines, often near the entrance, and it wasn't uncommon for all of the penny slots to pay out at least 100% -- the losses to the house were minimal and easily made up for by putting people into an, "I'm lucky tonight," mood.

About 10 - 12 years ago I went to Las Vegas with my Mom and brother and Mom always played the penny machines. Went for hours on $10 to the point it was annoying waiting for her.

Then she it it big one night. 2500 0r 5000 pennies. I can't remember which but it was a bucket load and reminded me of the old lady from Circus Circus years before that but not quite as much to carry out.