“The casinos have taken so much money from us the gamblers and …”

The casinos have taken money from you? How so?

You missed an adjective in there Al, it’s “problem”. Can you guess where it goes? Very good, “problem gamblers”. And yes, the casinos have taken the money from problem gamblers in exactly the same way that the liquor and beer manufacturers have taken away the livers of problem drinkers. That is to say not at all. You go to the casino, you give them your money, you get the mathematically predicted (and experimentally proven) outcome.

So nobody “took” anything from you.

When I go to lunch here I often put $5 in one of the poker machines and I play while I’m waiting for them to prepare the meal and bring it to the table. Sometimes I win. Most of the times I lose.

On Friday nights, I go to see movies. I give them $5 at the admission booth and get a ticket. Sometimes I like the way the movie ends. Most of the time I don’t.

It’s exactly the same thing. You spend $5 to be *entertained*, not to make money.

Sounds to me like you suffer from a very bad case of gamblers fallacy. Here’s a simple test to see if you have it or not.

You’re playing poker on a video poker machine. You win with a royal flush. The odds of that are something like 1:65000 or something in that range (it’s been ages, can’t remember exactly). After you collect your win, what are the odds of you winning with a royal flush in that hand?

If you answer anything other than 1:65000 (or whatever the real number is) then you’re suffering from gamblers fallacy. The odds of any particular winning hand appearing are always exactly the same on every single deal.

For those of you not familiar with gamblers, they’ll even do stuff like carry around their nickels or quarters in plastic buckets with ice in them – convinced that the machines can sense the warmth of the coins. You see the belly lights and electronics on the games warm the coins up so warm ones have been recently won and they believe the machines don’t want to pay out to people who have just won.

Interesting industry. I enjoyed it when I worked in it but don’t miss it terribly either.

…while I’m ranting…

First the obvious point – the if the laws in the jurisdiction say “max payout is $2,500” then the casino can’t legally pay out any more than that or they’ll lose their license. It’s logical, it’s simple.

Second, every machine in every jurisdiction on the planet (that I’m aware of) is required by law to display the pay table if requested. They usually have to display the basic play/payout rules as well.

The pay tables clearly state that if you get win W then you get paid C credits.

If someone consentingly puts their money into the machine without reading the pay table and then expects to be paid an amount different than what that pay table says, they are a moron of the first degree. Plain and simple. There aren’t any “bad casinos” or “good guys getting ripped off”. There are merely idiotic morons who whine too much.

All this whining I’m reading about “oh the poor guy saw a big number on the screen”. The “poor guy” had all the possible game outcomes written down and available for him to read at the press of a button. How does that make him abused or defrauded or otherwise taken advantage of?

If the “poor guy” had a single brain cell in his body what he would have done is looked at the tag on the side of the machine that says who made it. Then he would have ignored the obviously invalid game result, gotten up and gone to other casinos and played the same game on the same machines. The bug might produce a $1,600 win which would not be detected as invalid. If said idiot didn’t plug in a player tracking card and rotated between casinos there’s a chance they could have milked the bug for multiple significant payouts for a couple of weeks before it was detected and corrected.

But no, people are so f’n greedy that all logic flees at the sight of a big payout.

When people find big flaws in games of chance they almost always blow it by exploiting it repeatedly for the maximum they can possibly get. There was a guy in Canada that figured out there was a flaw in one of the provincial lotteries. He hit 20/20 in keno. Then he noticed the same numbers showed up on certain days. The idiot tried to collect on something like 6 or 8 perfect wins in consecutive weeks. He could have hit 20/20 once every six months or once a year and it would have taken 2-3 years before they caught on – but no, he had be a greedy f’n moron… Same thing with the guys caught playing a flaw in the horse racing computers. They’d buy the most expensive ticket they could on the longest possible odds to ensure they wouldn’t have to share the prize. Of course the track spotted the strange circumstances right away. If they had bought a $1 ticket once a week they could have had a nice side income, but instead they chose a jail sentence.

Greedy and devious people == stupid people