Probability Of Slot Machine Formula

Posted : admin On 3/26/2022

This depressing, yet pragmatic lesson explains how life seems to deliver results and how countless people die while chasing a non-existent mirage. How doing everything right, might still not give the results we long.

Simply put, the more money you pump in over-time the less you are actually getting in return. This of course is more of a rule of thumb than a certainty, slot machine probability is no mystery and over the long term slot machine odds for winning aren’t great because the advantage always goes to the house. The probability of winning on a slot machine is 5%. If a person plays the machine 500 times, find the probability of winning 30 times. Use the normal approximation to the binomial distribution. Find the area under the normal curve over the interval (29.5,30.5) when the mean =np=500.0.05 and the standard deviation = sqrt(500.0.05.0.95).

Keywords: problem gambling, slot machines, video slots, PAR Sheets, structural characteristics, reinforcement schedules Introduction Slot machines are a very popular form of gambling in North America. For example, Ontario, Canada, has approximately 23,000 slot machines, which in the fiscal year 2002. Prior to Telnaes’ invention, slot machines were essentially mechanical devices. Besides being difficult to tune and maintain, mechanical slot machines suffered from an essential problem: Let’s look at a machine with three reels, each with 12 symbols, with one of those 12 symbols a cherry. But still there is a chance, and we get the best chance through moving towards the slot-machine probability. Imagine two slot-machines. Machine A gives you a 1/10 chance of winning, while Machine B gives you a 1/20 chance of winning. Sometimes Machine A is not going to give any results even though the chance is 1/10, and successively players.

We grew up in an environment, where when we did something good, mommy would come and reward us. But life is not that way.

Even if we do everything right. When we work hard and put in the hours. Even if we are smart and are reading a lot of books. Even if we are humble and adaptive. Yet, life still doesn't give us the outcome we want. But why?

Because we live in a world of uncertainty.

There is no black or white. Convictions that were believed to be true 100 hundred years ago, are ridiculed today. And in the same way our convictions today might proof wrong in the future. It seems like we will never know for sure, how life truly works. What does it have to do with the reason we don't get the good life?

Having strong convictions about which business partner to choose, which product to launch, which partner to marry, to stay at the job or to built a business is like chasing a mirage.

A mirage is an imaginary place which we will never find. And the desert is full with the bones of people who have chased the mirage.

And in a similar way our convictions of what is right and wrong might lead us to get lost in time, miss the good life and die miserably.

Thus dropping those convictions, we are left with uncertainty and we got to be willing to accept uncertainty, because the only way to know for sure, which choices are the correct ones, is to built an alternate universe and to observe the outcomes of our decisions, which apparently can't be done by you an me.

Is there a certain way to get the good life? Unfortunately not.

Probability

But still there is a chance, and we get the best chance through moving towards the slot-machine probability.

Imagine two slot-machines. Machine A gives you a 1/10 chance of winning, while Machine B gives you a 1/20 chance of winning.

Sometimes Machine A is not going to give any results even though the chance is 1/10, and successively players will lose at Machine A. While sometimes when we use Machine B we win, even though the chance is 1/20. And that is how life seems to work.

Sometimes we can do all the right things and it still won't work out. And sometimes we get a little bit lucky, we did the wrong thing and we won. And then we get confused, because people are pointing at Machine B and sooner or later we are sitting at the 1/20 Machine. But this mentality is incorrect, because it is still better, even when we are losing, to sit at the 1/10 strategy.

In life we also got to choose. In health, wealth, love and happiness. We have to choose between business partners, between products to launch, between women. And we feel paralyzed, because we are looking at the needle in the height stack, to understand which is right and which is wrong. And we will never find it, because we live in a world of uncertainty and we can't bring certainty to all the things we wish we could.

But one choice is going to be Probability A and one is going to be Probability B. Therefore we should go down the path that wins 1/10 and not the path that wins 1/20, even though the 1/20 wins some of the time.

With which woman should we continue a relationship? Sometimes we just choose one and wish that things will work out, but we have to go with the numbers, if we don't want to chase a mirage.

Because a mirage is a dangerous game. People are chasing the mirage and think, that maybe there is a sea of water, if I follow what I see. But quite contrary this train of thought has low odds. The better odds are staked to the people who use a plastic stredge to collect the morning dew until they are rescued. The better odds might be not as cool, but it is slow and steady to get enough water to survive.

This way of thinking is harder.

And further accepting uncertainty and probability presupposes a scary conclusion. That we can do the right thing all our life and still not get what we want. And this is hard to cope with, because we are wired to think in anthropomorphic understandings of cause and effect, of black and white. That our mommy will reward us, if we do our best.

But even though we do our best, the world might still not acknowledge our efforts.

The way life seems to work, is that we need to know stuff. Therefore a good strategy to increase our probability of success is increasing our skills.

Increasing skills is a good slot-machine. Doing that long enough and eventually somebody is probably find out what we did. But it won't happen over night and it might not happen ever.

That's why we love get-rich-quick-schemes, because here we have cause and effect. We put a quarter in the slot-machine, we pull it, every time we win. But in reality we won't. We have to give the world time to catch up with our accomplishments.

There is a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling called “If.”

If we can stick with the plan. If we can stay at the table, even though we know we are doing the most likely path, the most probable, even though it is not giving results. If we can stick with it and do that, ours is the earth.

When we reach this plateau, where we don't see results. The steady continuation is what separates the children of the adults.

Failure is logarithmic, success is exponential.

At slot-machines we lose money, that can be regained. But in the slot-machine of life we loose time. Marrying the wrong person, taking the wrong diet, partnering up with the wrong partner. We are going to waste years of our life, and not all the money in the world can bring time back.

Side notes

The reason there are 67 steps, is because it takes precision to go where we want to go. Even a small misstep in direction, one omitted lesson, can make us miss the good life. Comparing it to a space rocket even the most marginal misdirection, will cause the rocket to miss the target by hundreds of miles. Don't miss the good life.

Questions

  1. What is your thing that you have been able to stay with past the 18 month plateau?

    Continuing Web Application Development, Growth Hacking and Digital Marketing.

  2. What's an example of something you gave up to quickly on?

    Definitely college. I got hot on business and hadn't the patience to stick with the odds of getting my Diploma therefore I dropped out. I am still going to finish it, by enrolling again. I live in Germany, so why not, free education is good.

  3. What is the clear path that you know you should take but have not taken and what is your resolution to get there?

Back to college. Stick with it. Do business on the side. Or fifty-fifty. Hopefully business doesn't go to well, because I am going to stick with college.

  1. What is an improbable 'horse' that you have been betting on?

Get-rich-quick start up idea. The idea is not bad, not at all. But it is naive to think that I can be a millionaire, when the foundation is unstable. Slow steady foundation and everything else might come.

If you’re the type of person who isn’t that great at Blackjack or Poker and feel left out when you go with your friends to a casino, you can always spend your time on the slot machines. Slot Machines are those big boxes shaped like vending machines that have bright, flashy lights and play wonky circus music. In a big casino like the ones in Macau or Las Vegas, you will have rooms with rows of slot machines and slot machines in random corners of the casino. They are the perfect gambling entertainment for the rookie gambler and the newbie casino goer. It’s a simple game and I will try to explain how it works and your chances of winning a jackpot.

All slot machines will have the same type of features. They will have:

  • A Lever: It’s the big handle that sticks out from the side of the machine. If you pull it, you start the game.
  • Reels: The spinning wheels inside the machine that have different types of symbols and pictures on them. They start turning once you pull the lever. Then all the reels start turning and stop one-by-one from left to right. You win the game based on the arrangement of the types of symbols that appear on the reels. There are generally in most slot machines three spinning reels.

There are two types of slot machines that are based on how they are made. There is the classic, mechanical slot machine that turns with the reels with gears and pulleys, and the modern, computerized slot machine that uses a computer program to turn the reels. The computerized slot machines can allow casinos to be really creative, and sneaky, with how they set them up.

Let’s set up a make-believe mechanical slot machine that has three reels with 64 symbols on each. To make things simple, to get a jackpot, you need to have a ‘7’ symbol on each reel, other combinations are losers. The first reel has no effect on where the second reel stops, and the second reel has no effect on where the third reel stops, making each reel independent of the other reels.

  • If each reel has 64 symbols, of which only the ‘7’ symbol can let us win, therefore the probability of getting a ‘7’ on the first reel is 1 out of 64.
  • Since all the reels are identical, that means the probability of getting a ‘7’ on the second reel is also 1 out of 64.
  • Same like before, the probability of getting a ‘7’ on the third reel is also 1 out of 64.
  • Since each reel is an independent event, the formula to calculate the probability of getting a ‘7’ on each reel is P(Three ‘7’s) = P(‘7’ on first reel)*P(‘7’ on second reel)*P(‘7’ on third reel)
  • Therefore: P(Three ‘7’s or Jackpot) = (1/64)(1/64)(1/64) = 1/262144 or 1/(2^18)
  • The odds of getting a jackpot or three ‘7’s in a row are: P(Jackpot)/P(Losing) = P(Jackpot)=P'(Jackpot) = P(Jackpot)=(1-P(Jackpot)) = (1/262144)/(262143/262144) = 1:262143. If you really think about it, it seems almost impossible to win.

Probability Of Slot Machine Formula Cheat

People sometimes think that some machines are hotter than others in the way that they are more likely to give a jackpot because more people have played them before, when in fact it is not true at all! Because the reels are independent events and each lever pull is a new event every time, your odds of winning a jackpot will remain 1:262143, even if you play for 12 hours straight non-stop.

The Computerized Slot Machines are harder to calculate because they use complex computer programs to generate the random numbers for which symbol appears on the machine. I won’t be able to give you a calculation, but I will try to explain how casinos use probability to ruin our chances of winning:

  • Let’s say we use a 3-reeled machine that has 21 symbols this time on each one.
  • First the lever is pulled
  • The computer generates three random numbers. For example: 12,34,56. The first number tells which symbol will appear on the first reel and so on.
  • If you noticed, we have 21 symbols, so why are there numbers like 34 or 56? This is because there actually 4 reels, 3 mechanical and 1 virtual, in the matrix…
  • The virtual reel has 64 numbers from 1 to 64 (could also be 32 or 128 and so on). Each of these 64 numbers match to one of the 21 symbols in each reel.
  • But that would mean some of the 21 symbols will have more numbers from the virtual reel than others. Exactly, that means so symbols are more likely to appear than others. So your chance of getting a jackpot number in one reel is not 1 out of 21, but even less.
  • What casinos will do is have the symbols that appear before and after the jackpot symbol on each reel to be those symbols with more numbers on the virtual reel. It gives the false idea to players like us that we are so close to winning, and so we need to play more until we get a Jackpot, but in reality you’re being a tricked and are losing a lot of money.

Probability Of Slot Machine Formulas

So next time your friends abandon you at the bar while they make millions, or lose them, at the Blackjack or Poker table, you can entertain yourself with a slot machine, but will be more prepared to stop if you think you’re close to winning after 20 pulls.

Probability Of Slot Machine Formula Calculator

(some random dude on Google :P)