“A prodigious amount of thought goes into the design and layout of a casino’s gambling floor. The layout of slot machines and card tables is carefully designed in order to maximize the casino’s profits and lure customers into the games.”

Once a casino patron has been roped into initiating play at a slot machine, operant conditioning is perhaps the most powerful force that keeps him or her absorbed in the game. What psychologists call the “primary conditioning mechanism” is the inclusion of relatively small payouts in slot machine gameplay. These small payouts provide positive reinforcement to the player, a phenomenon that has been studied extensively by psychologist BF Skinner in experiments with rats …. The frequency of payouts is precisely fine-tuned and optimized—a payout rate that is any higher than absolutely necessary cuts down on the casino’s profits.

… Secondary mechanisms augment the excitement and incentive to continue playing. The most important of these is the inclusion of a system in the machine that yields a high frequency of “near misses,” or situations in which the player believes they have almost won.

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Via Boing Boing.

Comments @ SlashDot

I’ve spent some time with slot machine code … and I’ve done some minor consulting with casinos in Las Vegas. The near misses are not encoded into the machine.

It is easy to believe the machines are built to take your money, but it has nothing to do with preset expectations. They truly are random, but each wheel has a specific number of possible results. Each wheel is independently picked from a random number generator with numbers picked at the instant you hit the spin button or pull the lever.

All 3 or 4 wheels might have a number of possible positions, numbering as high as 1024 per wheel. The first half of those numbers (say, 0-511) will be “blank” hits, so the wheel will stop on a blank. Then another 256 or so might be a symbol with a low payout, and then you get progressively less hits on the higher paying symbols. As you move further down the wheel, you get even fewer high paying “hit” numbers. The big payout only occurs on one or two numbers per wheel.

When the right combination of random numbers occurs, you win a payout. The chance is slim, with most machines paying out a percentage avering 85-92% over infinite spins, based purely on the mathematical chance of hitting a specific combination of random numbers in a spin.

Seeing those “near hits” is only because white “loser” spots on the wheel are always surrounded by symbols. Those near misses are almost always symbols that would pay SOMETHING, but rarely do you get 3 symbols that are near misses of the jackpot.

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I’m in the Province of British Columbia, Canada. Some of the slots here don’t play fair. They randomly and briefly (to quick to see, really, but caught on camera) flash a picture of the grand-prize winning symbols all lined up for the big payout. They do this randomly while you are playing them.

These slots were pulled out of the casinos in the Province of Ontario. I think *somebody* is paying $$$ to *somebody* because the slot machines are still in the casinos here.

Oh ya, the manufacturer of the slot machines said it was a “programming error”!

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I have actually built an online casino for a third party in Monaco and they aked us to rig the slotmachines so they would pay out more than their natural randomness would do, because they want their clients/addicts to have as much fun as possible for as long as possible before they run out of money. We even had a button that they could press in the management pages that would trigger a Jackpot within 50 games or so to keep the customer happy. When someone was gambling they would monitor how much money he had lost and if it became too much, they would grant him the jackpot so he could play a few more hours before that money was gone too. Of course the software was coded never to pay out more than a fixed percentage but the percentages were all in the 95-98% range.

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Having actually worked at a casino on the slots, I find the article lacking and in one area outright false. They say nothing about how the individual slot machines and their network actually works. Further, they are wrong in that casinos do not operate under a “laissez-faire” or unregulated free-market economy. The idea that casinos operate under “minimal government regulation” is so ridiculous as to be completely laughable.

Casino gambling is one of the most highly regulated industries in our nation.

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