Loose Slot Machines for Dummy Casino-goers

slot machine

Staffers here at the Antisocial Network aren't particularly big on casino gambling, mostly because with all these geeky types in the place, we're pretty well aware of the probabilities involved. Sure, there's card counting in blackjack and the difference between skill and luck in poker, but when it comes to slot machines? They're not even pure chance: those one-armed bandits are programmable, and you can be pretty certain that they're programmed in the house's favor. Except maybe "loose" slots... but when it comes to "How to Calculate a Loose Slot Machine,"¹ we don't think eHow.com's Melissa King (Melissa Howbert) is much help (now located at OurPastimes.com).

King, drawing on that AA in communications of hers, decided that "calculate" must mean "locate"; but we differ with her decision. Even if someone did want to know where the good ones are, what are the odds [chuckle] that they'd ask how to "calculate" the locations? There are, of course, lots of online sources giving that information, which mostly consists of "They're in the most visible locations." Even King gets this:

"Many casinos place loose slot machines by the casino's change booths. This is because these are high-traffic areas, and placing loose slots there entices more people to play. " Let's assume, for the moment, that the OQ actually wanted to know how to calculate whether a machine is "loose" or not -- that's a question that Melissa studiously avoided, only chatting briefly about "payback rates." That's most likely because doing so would take math (icky!) to determine whether a slot machine is "loose" – in specific, statistics and probability. In a world in which a casino could not program its slot machines, calculating the odds of a payout is fairly simple: The probability of any one outcome is the number of faces on the reels raised to the power of the number of reels. For example, if there are three reels and ten unique faces on each reel including one lemon on each, the probability of turning up three lemons is 1 chance in 10³, or 1 in a thousand. You could make a case that if your slot machine regularly turns up three lemons more than once time in every thousand, it's "loose." Naturally, if the faces aren't unique, the probabilities change...

So calculating whether a slot machine is loose or not depends on a lot of variables, including its configuration and your definition of loose. Lots of people who have difficulty counting higher than ten claim they can tell you how to locate loose machines, but only someone who understands math can tell you how to calculate a machine's relative looseness. King didn't, but pretended she did; the reason she's our Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ourpastimes.com/calculate-loose-slot-machine-7764664.html

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