Comments on: Help! I’m Losing

By: Clare

Clare — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 12:54:07 +0000

I also smell a rat. I was in Vegas last weekend for 4 nights, and it was the worse ever in 10 years of playing. We are recreational .25 players but skilled at our core games. We don’t expect a big win, just a good time. Although we weren’t playing 24/7, I only got 1 quad the whole time I was there. And that was my biggest VP hit. Not much give and take, just mostly take all at once. Finally gave up on it and played wheel of fortune slot machine, where I hit 250 quarters after only $5 put in. My husband doesn’t want to go back so I’m afraid my Vegas era has sadly come to an end.

By: dhoppell

dhoppell — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:20:26 +0000

Steve Bourie of AmericanCasinsoGuide.com has interviewed Gaming Commission personnel in both Nevada and New Jersey and written about it. There is a nice video about the randomness of slot machines at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Wkubf1PrWg

He has a rather lengthy article about gaming machine procedures that insures that the machime configuration approved by the gaming commission cannot be altered to cheat the player. It is at:
http://www.americancasinoguide.com/Tips/Slots-Honest.shtml

The part about gaming procedures starts about a quarter of the way down with the paragraph beginning with:
“The five-story State of Nevada office building …”

My take on whether the video poker has been altered to reduce Royals and Quads is: “I don’t think so and I hope not”. According to the Steve Bourie article, it seems that the procedures are in place to insure the games cannot be altered without some chance that a casino will be caught and getting caught will be worse than running a fair game. Casinos don’t like to gamble with things like losing their license, and employees don’t like to gamble with getting put in jail and blacklisted from their profession for life. And for that matter, hacking into a EPROM that you don’t have the source code for and reprogramming it so that a gaming official with an EEPROM comparator couldn’t detect a parity difference or a CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) difference isn’t that easy. And the fact no skilled technicians haven come forward as a whistleblower (of course Larry Volk (mentioned in the Steve Bourie artcle) did get a bullit in his head before he could testify) suggests that there are no such
technicians out there (at least that are alive;-).

There are enough clueless players playing poorly that a close to 100% EV fair machine can still make money. If a machine isn’t making enough money (i.e the skilled players are hitting that quarter Double Bonus Poker 100.17% machine too hard, they simply downgrade the pay schedule on the machine legally or reduce the points earned on it, or pull the machine and put in a reel slot machine that earns them a better percentage and the professional players will go elsewhere. Isn’t everybody always complaining about the above 100% machines going Missing In Action? And if the locals casinos were cheating, why are they all going bankrupt?

With that said, I’m a fairly recent convert to VP using the Bob Dancer method and I’m losing this year also. I met a local in El Cortez last year that said there was a big switch in the backroom that the boss would throw every once in a while to make the machines pay out. If I believed him or that machines were rigged, I would stop playing VP immediately and go back to Blackjack. But what if some face cards been removed from that deck, and is she always dealing me the top card and … is it paranoia if they are really out to cheat you?

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 31 May 2010 14:04:12 +0000

Can I get an answer from someone who actually KNOWS to this simple question_
“Do the regulators actually perform random, unannounced tests to confirm that the chips in VP machines at casinos are not gaffed”?

By: Jennifer Podkowa

Jennifer Podkowa — Mon, 31 May 2010 12:48:46 +0000

I was playing at a casino in Indiana when the vp machine next to me went blank. After it went blank a computer screen came up and different colored squares were flashing and getting highlighted. Could it be that these machines can be remotely controlled from a mainframe? Is this why I lose when I play on my card but win when I play on a friends card who do net gamble at all?

By: Kevin Lewis

Kevin Lewis — Sun, 30 May 2010 01:04:31 +0000

To answer your question, bluechip, all that would have to be done to make a +EV game -EV, without changing the paytable, would be for the RNG to assign different “weights” to each card in the deck. In a true pseudo-RNG (for mankind has not yet invented a true “random number generator”), each card has equal weight, i.e., chance of appearing. But the RNG could be altered to assign a weight of, say, 99 to A/K/Q/J and 100 (the default weight) to the other cards. This would affect the frequency of both high pairs and royals–there would be slightly less of each. This would be completely undetectable: the player would never notice the difference, since it would take literally millions of hands to produce results that would suggest an aberration that could not be easily explained by simple negative fluctuation, and the flawed RNG could simply be loaded as “firmware” on the controller chip, and lost when the machine is powered down. (Not that a single solitary Gaming agent could detect a change in the chip’s programming anyway.)
It used to be that casinos could blithely reduce the pay schedules and people would still play anyway. In certain markets, such as the Vegas locals’ casinos, this is no longer true. People simply stay the hell away when all they can find is 9/6 DB and 7/5 Bonus. It would be much better for the casinos if they could offer “full-pay” machines that were, in fact, subtly non-random, to the players’ detriment, in the way I’ve described above, or a thousand other completely undetectable ways.
The thing to be very, very afraid of is that NONE of the three reasons why “the casinos would never cheat” actually apply: legal, moral, or financial. Legally, they would never get caught. Morally, we’ve already seen that casinos have no ethics whatsoever. Financially, they are currently frantic to do anything to boost the bottom line, even if it’s a bit risky.

By: Bluechip

Bluechip — Sat, 29 May 2010 18:55:25 +0000

The prospect of casinos using a chip to reduce the frequency of royals doesn’t sound likely to me. While it might be technologically possible, the FAQs section at VPfree says Nevada and Mississippi casinos are forbidden by law to have non-random VP machines. Rather than run afoul of the law, casinos reduce the pay schedule.

VP strategy derives from the assumption that every card has an equal chance of appearing. If the frequency of the royal is somehow changed, wouldn’t the frequency of other hands hitting have to be altered as well?

By: Kevin Lewis

Kevin Lewis — Sat, 29 May 2010 09:35:27 +0000

The debate over whether the casinos CAN alter paybacks by fiddling with the RNG is over: they can, and they have. The American Coin scandal is the most widely known, though that was a slot route vendor (convenience stores and such), not a casino, doing the gaffing. There have been dozens of other reported incidents in “regular” casinos, as well.
The debate over whether the casinos WOULD alter paybacks by fiddling with the RNG is ongoing: some people say that the casinos “would never” alter the RNGs, because “they would lose their licenses”. First of all, Gaming has NEVER revoked or even suspended the license of ANY Nevada gaming operator for cheating. This obviously means the casinos never, ever have cheated, LOL. Oops, how about the Venetian rigging its drawings? Wow, they must have pulled the Venetian’s license for that!
The only empirical test we have–since we are not likely to get the casinos to open up the machines and let us inspect the chips–is our results. As I’ve said above, every single person I know who I consider an expert–because of the high level of observed play, and positive results over the years–had, despite their expertise, a losing year in 2009. How do I know, by the way? I do their tax returns. When twelve consistently winning players ALL lose in a given year, it MAY be due to simple fluctuation–but something does start to smell bad when their losing streaks continue into the next year. Luck actually has very little to do with results over a large enough sample size, as net return will converge on expected value over time. This many bad results over this long of a period suggest an increasingly small probability that luck is a factor in those results.

By: Pilot 1953

Pilot 1953 — Fri, 28 May 2010 16:40:20 +0000

It looks like most of you do not think the machines have been tinkered with, only the paytables are worse. Maybe. It just does not feel right, though.

By: cheryl

cheryl — Fri, 28 May 2010 06:43:33 +0000

Im thinking your hitting less because overall the machines are being played less so you are having to put all those hands into machines that may have had double the play before. All those unskilled players havent loaded the machines up for you.

By: Mikey

Mikey — Fri, 28 May 2010 02:03:45 +0000

Money management is as important when you are losing as it is when you are winning. Sometimes players get overly aggressive at pursuing royals or play at a higher than normal denomination with the hope of making a quick comeback. Instaed, you can end up digging a much bigger hole.

I feel a better appraoch is to recall the days when you were ahead and the good disciplined play that got you there. The jackpot hands will come around again. And don’t keep returning to play at “losing” casinos. You will be luckier at some places and not at others.