THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE How To Feel Them Out and Win Big

I hit the spin button. Bubkis. No winner, not even a chance of winning. I went to hit it again – my balance is too low. I’m about to hit the Cash Out button and take the odd five cents but instead, I reach into my pocket and reload the machine. Next spin – BOOM, jackpot! The lady next to me cheers and says, “Good job!” I wonder, was it a good job? Did I just break the RNG code? Can speak to the ghost in the machine? I’ll give you my secret by the end of the article 😉

Slot terminals across the US have long since gotten savvy, preventing users from any kind of predictive behavior analytics. There will be no “card counting” at these machines. There are; however, some tactics I watch for, and I’ll try to step you through my madness, which has a 34% success rate, in this article.

Slot terminals, can be configured in a number of ways to influence payout. A US casino is likely regulated and mandated to have a payout rate of, at a minimum, 80%ish. In a perfect world, that would mean if you put up $100 the worst it could get for you would be walking out with $80. WE ALL KNOW THAT IS NOT THE CASE.

While the overall casino payout rate must be 80%ish, they can allocate those payouts as they wish. Your hot 88 Fortunes machine isn’t paying you 100X your bet from your money, but more likely 110% payout rate across the casino, and to compensate, my Video Poker machine at the same time might be paying me a 40% payout rate. In the old days, the casinos would set the Return Rate, Acceleration and other factors for each machine, then as the machines would payout, the casinos would add up the payouts and tweek as needed.

My old tactic was simple – find a hot machine, and play it even when it is cold. Machines DO NOT HAVE A MEMORY. I have hit four of a kinds back to back, many times. At the end of the Taj Mahal in AC, there was a Super Times Pay machine I knew that if I put $600 into I would get a good repay somewhere. I rocked that machine right until the end, and cried when they made me leave it.

In this day and age; however, machine play settings have changed. They can be set by machine, but are typically configured as groups, and can be modified in real time (although I believe the practice is still a late night configuration adjustment). It’s possible that you can be at a hot machine and at 4 AM the machine is reconfigured to be a piece of shit and beat the crap out of you.

So do your best to watch your machine’s behavior throughout the course of your visit. If you see it constantly hitting, it or the bank of machines may be set to pay out like crazy. Plop your ass down. Set your budget and don’t go over it because life sucks when you are over-drafting your checking account.

Oh, and the machine I hit at the beginning of the article? My feet were still hurting from walking the entire boardwalk and I decided I’d rather lose another hundred bucks as opposed to standing up. I guess there really is no such thing as ghosts.