Retirement as a full-time RVer is great. You either have lots of spare time to waste, or you're involved in days of heavy, concentrated, mind-exhausting driving, or you're being tested by your rig's many idiosyncracies and hi-tech challenges for hours at a time. Right now I'm in the time-wasting mode, as we're comfortably set up at another RV park for at least a few weeks.
As such, today I read a post on vpFree which had a video of none other than my good buddy and co-host of the Bob Dancer radio show heard weekly by at least ten people--Mike Shackleford. In it he gave a very articulate description of how slot machines operate. I was interested in this because I may have played slot machines ten times in my life, and because they really don't interest me I thought I'd check in with an "expert" to see what I was actually doing when I played them.
Well, the first item made sense. He said the higher the denomination you play, the better the payback, and the crummier and further away from the STRIP the casino, also the better the payback. I did get this. Hip hip hooray! for The Wizard!
Then, in true advantage player form (which he has always said he is--even to me in person when he interviewed me for his site, which would be a highly educational read for any of you) he served up a helping of hypocrisy. He proclaimed that as soon as you hit the bet button or pull the handle, the machine's RNG would randomly select numbers for each individual reel that would correspond to a symbol, and those randomly selected symbols would them appear on the screen for the player's results.
However, he then went on to say that each machine's payback % is controlled by an EPROM chip, such as 95% for instance. So, how can it be that numbers are being randomly selected, as Michael says, AND there is a controlled payback %? Funny, this seems to touch on how I've always said the vp machines operate, only the "experts" like Michael swear everything is random there too--exactly in the same way he states that slot machine operation is random.
Did he stub his famous, math wizard toe here? Please comment.