I was out walking for exercise and my iPhone rang. Had I looked at the caller ID, I would have seen “UNKNOWN,” usually a tip to avoid answering, but I was busy doing nothing at all important so I hit the green button and heard a recorded voice saying, “Now is the time to refinance your home because . . . ” I never found out what the specifics of the offer were. I hung up after nine words.
I find such calls mildly irritating. They take up a few minutes of my day, but to me they’re not a big deal. However, I’ve been around other people who slam down the phone in anger and loudly curse the machine making the call, “Why don’t you take your &%#!@& offer and shove it up your dial tone?” Or something like that. As though the machine making the phone calls cares.
The machine is dialing numbers according to a list, or perhaps according to a formula. When the last person hangs up, for whatever reason and with whatever emotion, the next one is called. Whether the current person places an order or not, the next call will be made as soon as the current one hangs up or perhaps is transferred to a real person. The machine will keep on calling as long as it has numbers to call and it’s within the hours prescribed for it, which might be something like 10 a.m. through 8 p.m.
A video poker machine is like that. When a new hand is triggered (which might be by hitting the deal button), the machine looks at its internal clock (in nanoseconds), checks one other “seed” (which is required for a random number generator to work, varies by manufacturer, and isn’t important to this discussion), and deals the cards. Sometimes people will say, “The machine is in a cold streak.” Nonsense. The machine is just dealing cards. The fact that you haven’t won in a half hour is totally irrelevant to it. One lady I knew said things like, “Sixes are running today,” and usually when she played accordingly, it didn’t help.
Others will say, “I hit two royal flushes yesterday so it’s making up for it now.” Nonsense. The machine is just dealing cards. Or, “Because I’m (pick one or two: on a winning streak, on a losing streak, fat, Armenian, over-drawn at the bank, using a slot club card, divorced, voted for Trump), the machine is . . . ” Nonsense. The machine is just dealing cards.
I think that people ascribe human emotion or motives to video poker machines because these people are trying to understand their results. They lost today and they won yesterday so it must be because . . . They’ve lost six times straight, so the reason must be because . . . Or perhaps they use the machine’s “behavior” as a good reason to change machines, or denomination, or change games within a machine. Or instead of trying to understand their results, perhaps these people are attempting to assign blame. Such as, “It was not really my fault. The machine was colder than a witch’s elbow. Nothing I could do about it.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the last explanation above is one that I might use. AFTER a session is over, it is possible to assign descriptive terms to that particular session. You can say it was “hot” (meaning that you won), “cold” (meaning that you didn’t), “so so” (meaning it was so so), or whatever. MIDWAY though a session, you can describe what the session has been so far, but there’s no way in the world to predict how the rest of the session is going to go. The “best guess” of what the future will bring is the average of what this type of machine under these particular conditions (i.e., dollars, NSU Deuces Wild, at a casino that pays .25% cash back, on a day when double points are being offered, during a month when you get a jacket if you hit a royal flush) typically offers over a million hours of play, given your particular skill level. You ARE PRETTY SURE the “best guess” will be high or low this time. You just don’t know which (i.e., Will it be higher or lower than normal this time?), and by how much, until after you are finished.
To make your next year of play better than your last year of play, you can choose better games (e.g., if one returns 98.9% on average and another returns 99.6% on average, the second is “better” than the first), stick to the good game once you’ve identified which one is best, practice that game on a computer or by studying a Winner’s Guide for the game, play at casinos with good slot clubs, and do most of your play only during good promotions. Doing these things will help you. Believing in such things as “The reason this machine started to pay off is because it was on a dry spell and the dam finally broke,” won’t.