When we talk about online casinos or online gambling, we take it for granted that whoever plays loses money, since after all, online casinos are made for the companies that manage them to earn money.
In any case, what interests us today is how casino games work behind the scenes and especially online slots and slots.
Have you ever heard that an online slot machine is hot? Well, as you will see below, this is something that does not make any sense or any mathematical basis.
RNG: Random Number Generator
As well pointed out by some specialized industry pagesonline slots have as a method for the delivery or not of the prize in the play a random number generation. What does this mean? Basically, each play is independent and that is why we can have a large number of consecutive plays without a prize or with small prizes, just as we could obtain two high prizes relatively consecutively. In any case, what is certain is that the probability of each of these events occurring is different.
For simplicity, let’s imagine that each roll in a slot rolls one die. Numbers 1, 2 and 3 do not award any type of prize. The 4 awards a small prize, the 5 awards a higher prize, and the 6 would give the player a big prize. This means that we would have a 50% chance of not getting a prize, while we have a 16.6% chance of getting each of the three types of prizes.
Obviously this is a huge simplification, but this is how an RNG would basically work: each play brings out a random number among a huge amount of them that can win or not.
Is the RNG manipulable?
Well really, in theory we should say yes. After all, it is an algorithm, so it could be manipulated. Although in practice this is exceedingly difficult as casino software providers take care that it is practically impossible to achieve.
So, although in theory it could be manipulated, in practice we must say that it is practically impossible to achieve it and that it would be necessary to have access to the original algorithm to be able to carry out reverse engineering and be able to exploit it.
Algorithm Scams
Of this, which is totally real, in recent years some scammers have been taking advantage of it on social networks.
The modus operandi is to show on social networks, such as Instagram, manipulated videos where they supposedly earn money by making a specific betting combination in an online slot machine. However, these videos are not real and they have not won any prize for using a specific betting sequence in the machine at all, but they use them as a hook to take users to other social networks or messaging platforms such as Telegram.
After that, they will ask for a price for sharing the algorithm with users, which of course will not work. In this way, the user is left without the money they pay for access to the supposed algorithm and the money that, almost certainly, they will lose in the casino games trying to replicate the bets indicated by the scammer.
RTP on slots
The RTP (Return To Player) we could say that it is the profit margin that the slot machine has for the casino, since it represents the percentage of money that returns to the players in the form of prizes.
For example, in a machine with a 97% RTP, it means that 97% of the money that players bet on the slot returns to the player’s pocket in the form of prizes. Of course, these numbers hold true over a very long term, over a very large number of spins, so they have no major implication in an individual user’s slots session, but only have real application in case we have into account hundreds of thousands of spins from many players combined.
Probability in other games
Outside of slots, which are powered by this RNG system, other casino games are based on probability which gives the casino an advantage.
For example, in games like roulette, a full bet pays 35 to 1, while roulette has 37 numbers. Precisely that extra number, the green zero, is what gives the casino the advantage and makes it always win in the long term.
In blackjack, on the other hand, the house advantage lies mainly in the fact that the user can always bust before the banker does, losing their bet regardless of whether the house subsequently goes over 21 as well.
As a summary, in the casino you can only win with a good dose of luck that does not usually happen, since we have the mathematics against us in any game.