Video slots

[soko]

This isn't a question so much as I don't believe anyone can give me a definitive answer but it is something that I've thought about for the last year I've lived in Vegas.

As far as slots go they seem pretty retarded, you're a guaranteed loser in the long run with no way to know what you're EV is per hit is.

Now with video slots we know they are basically computers and nobody knows how exactly the computer decides to pay out.

So there is a paradox that begins to take shape. In order for a machine to be profitable, you need players to play a lot and lose. In order to keep players coming back they need to win and think they are always going to win.

So the question is, what is the ideal time to payoff a player to make them addicted to the idea of winning before tightening up and making the player keep putting money in to "win their money back"?

Do you think it is more profitable for the slot machines to be programmed to always give a house edge of say 5% and be totally random and mechanical on how it pays out so everybody is just playing with variance and some people are lucky and some are just not?

Or

Do you think it might be more profitable through research to find out how a first time gambler would try the machines for the first time. What kind of bills they put in the machine, how anxiously they press the max bet button, etc and then pay out a little extra to players who fit the pattern of a first time gambler to give them the high of winning so that they won't want to stop playing and are more likely to return?

Such programming is quite possible and if the computer couldn't tell what kind of player it is, it would just stick with random variance, but I've had evidence in my slot experience to point me towards the idea that machines are trying to sense how you feel about the machine and are more willing to pay off somebody who doesn't take the machines serious more than somebody who keeps degenerately putting 20's in the machine.

Ideas?

[CORed]

In all jurisdictions, payoffs are required by law to be random. I also think that this is actually pretty close to optimum for inducing people to keep playing. The sort of programming you are suggesting would be illegal.

Also, even the reel slots that you find in casinos are all run by computerized random number generators now. The reels are really just a display device. The original slot machines were mechanical, pulling the lever spun the reels, and where they stopped spinning determined whether you got payed or not. For awhile some slots were electro-mechanical: An electric motor started the wheels spinning, but where the wheels stopped when they ran out of momentum still determined whether you got paid. The electronic random number generator is what made the huge jackpots possible. You can't set up a mechanical slot to have a low enough probability to allow multi-million dollar jackpots.