Instinctive paranoia
But, after the third screwdriver, he did get me to thinking. When I lost the third pot in a row to river cards against the odds, I confess to thinking I was caught in a skin game. Just a moment of anger. Ain’t no-one with the cojones to try anything against me for real - not with my connections. But there’s lots of folk get it into their heads that online video poker sites are cheating them. So I s’pose I’d better say a few words of reassurance - not that it’ll actually boost your confidence. The truth ain’t designed to do that.
So, let me sit you down in front of a video poker machine playing Jacks or Better on a pay table that’s offering 9-6-250 like online at goldencasino.com. For those who’ve not boned up on the jargon, that’s a machine paying 250 per coin on a Royal Flush, 9 on a Full House and 6 on a Flush. That machine’s set up to pay back only a fraction over 98% of what it takes. Even if you play a perfect strategy on this machine, the theoretical return never gets above 100%. It bears saying again. No matter which lucky rabbit’s foot you got in your pants, the very best you can hope to do is to almost break even.
‘Cause most folk can’t play the perfect strategy, the House edge on every video poker machine keeps the funds rolling in. That’s why you gotta pass the carousels of slot machines before you get to the tables. They’re the bread-an-butter earners for every casino.
If I stopped there, there’s no sense in any casino cheating on the slot machines. But don’t even try to think that you can succes in this. Greed’s the worm in the gambling apple. Don’t matter which side of the fence you’re on, there’s always some as thinks they’re gonna hit it big. So I’ve seen pit bosses and managers decide the Vig’s not enough and rig the games. I’ve seen a few do it to put the money in their own pockets - most of them got decent burials, too. Yeh, there’s some cheating going on, but most of it’s on your side and it’s not very subtle.
People are often very hot and passionate, that always makes the loss harder to bear - when your emotion gets in the way of your judgement. Gambling’s got streaks of luck both ways. On one hot August night in 1913, the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo came up black a record-breaking twenty-six times in a row. The House took millions of extra profit. Half the room got to playing the Martingdale System. They were doubling their bets after every loss. But they tapped out of money before the streak ended. Was there anything wrong with the wheel? Nope! The math god smiled and it was true.
If you think that you’re true lucky person, the only way to prove this to other people is to play online slots. Well, you gotta test their slot machines. Pick one of their video poker games. Say before you start how many times you’re gonna play and what you hafta see to prove the machine’s rigged. S’pose you think a video poker game don’t have all the faces in the deck - you’ve to track the frequency of the faces as they show in the count of all non-face cards. So how many thousand hands of data you gonna pay to collect to test your hypothesis? It’s put up or shut up. No-one likes a sore loser unless they got the evidence to prove otherwise.