Question of the Day - 07 March 2021

I'd love to see some of those newsletters from the '90s, if only to see what I missed.  Thanks!

18 companies only? Would have thought more. Many RNG's are produced because there is no such thing as a Random Number Generator that is truly random.  Everyone making RNG's is trying to prove that statistically their RNG is more "Random" than the others.  However how differently random one is compared to another is not significantly different.
So as to your VP luck, that has more to do with how casinos program their payouts per hand and why all the so called VP "experts" state that one version of VP pays out better than another.  So the answer to your question, specifically in poker hands that can win a payout in a VP machine is only roughly 72 thousand hands out of the possible roughly 2.6 million hands an RNG could hit so YES you will catch literally millions of crappy hands to draw to and why so many tables exist telling you the best way to draw to a hand and despite the ridiculous claims of all of those VP 'experts" no one table of draw choices is significantly better than others.

Math is hard, Jackie?

For the longest sentence I've ever seen.

Sounds like a good project for a UNLV intern.  I hope you will do it.  Will preserve them also :)

Even in a game where the order of the cards matters (e.g. one that pays for a "sequential royal"), there are only 311,875,200 possible hands. My SmartWatch has a 1.15 GHz processor; at that speed, even if the "RNG" is 0, 1, 2, ..., 311,875,198, 311,875,199, then repeat 0, 1, 2, and so on, it would go through every hand in about 1/5 of a second. (It doesn't do this because anything slower than 1/1000 of a second is exploitable by people with a really good sense of timing.)

Also, in Nevada at least, any VP machine where every possible deal is not equally likely is illegal.

That when someone refers to "experts" in quotation marks, it's because they don't have the slightest understanding of what those experts have said?

The "experts" say the earth revolves around the sun.
The "experts" say that 2 plus 2 equals 4.
The "experts" say that the election was fair.
The "experts" say that giraffes are tall.

This "truth" and "facts" stuff is SO last century!!!

in those old issues, would be interesting to read the annual report on what's being built/remodeled/planned, and how many actually happened

black jack
For some it is.
why? Is it hard for you?

Sandra Ritter
A winner.
And I seriously doubt that unless you never attended any schooling.

That Don Guy
RNG's don't work that way, look up how they do work.
That means that according to you, every VP machine in Nevada is illegal.

Ahh Kevin Lewis,
I do so enjoy laughing at your comments.
"experts" in this case has to be used opposed naming any person(s).
But you of all people have bitched endlessly about the same issues and you never named anyone either.
Did I steal some of your thunder?

Check the paytable of the VP game you like to play.
Typically a straight or higher are the only hands that pay back more coin than you bet.
Three of a kind or less either pays back your bet, less than your bet, or nothing at all.
That means there are only around 72 thousands hands in VP that pay more than you bet.
Every VP machine in existence is a Poker 5 Card Draw game.
You get 5 cards dealt and you either hold the hand you got, hold some cards and be dealt replacements, or just toss the entire hand for a new one.  So you are given two chances to win with each hand which means with both hands you have 142 thousand chances to win more than you bet out of 2.6 million possible hands.  That is why so many wallet sized laminated card tables exist to help you choose the best choice for obtaining a winning hand. None of which are significantly better than any other.  Still, you will get dealt a lot of crappy hands.

That pile in Anthony's office has got to be more than a foot tall.  I've thrown away many issues; and I'm certain that if kept and stacked, they would be well over at least a couple feet.

The earliest issues I had were just two loose sheets of paper - a letter size inside a ledger size folded in half - which made six pages.

What do you mean 3 of a kind pays less than your bet? It pays 3 for each coin bet (or 2 in some games and even in deuces games). EVERY paying hand gets at least your money back.

I've actually read the description many times of how RNG's work, and the entire thumbnail description hasn't yet appeared in any of the comments. It's this: each one uses a "seed" for a starting point of the process and uses an algorithm to determine what the next number/result will be. So there will always be 2 human factors: the seed & the algorithm, which are not random. But what's important is whether the results that are produced QUALIFY as random, versus them following the repeating pattern of a math formula. I believe that it's been demonstrated that the results produced by current RNG's are equivalent to those that would be produced by a true RNG, and thus we are not being victimized by an unfair flood of bad hands. One thing that is true and thus expectable is that the results of different blocks of hands (whether you look at 100s, 1000s or millions) will not be the same; some will be worse than others, while on the other hand you could get 2 fantastic sessions back-to-back.

I don't support the phenomenon of considering a small number of people to be "experts" in any given topic. I've even heard the idiotic notion that some guy is "an expert on UFOs". (Stop for a moment and think about how nuts that is.) Such a phenomenon leads to the glorification and infallibility status of a few people while the rest of the population are labeled as "nonexperts", and whenever there's a disagreement between an "expert" and a "nonexpert", the former is always considered right while the latter is always considered wrong. That conclusion is baloney. (And who promotes that notion? "Experts", of course.) But the reason why what we're saying about RNG's is true is not because any number of "experts" says so, but because the math is simple and any layperson can verify it, and all competent + informed + rational people come to the same conclusion. Droughts (bad results) are "unfair" and unenjoyable, but they actually are statistically normal and thus should be expected. Alas.

She says to a CPA. It still was way too long.