Can You Beat the Random Number Generator?

Slot players have been trying to time their biggest bets ever since games started accepting wagers of more than one credit at a time.

But making your biggest bets first, then dropping down to smaller wagers? That’s a revolutionary thought.

Is it a system that helps? No, but let’s look at the reasoning behind it, as explained by a player who called the system, “Fool the Random Number Generator.”Here are the points made to support the system:

** Online Slots and Offline casinos alike give their biggest rewards to their best customers.

** Rewards are based on total wagers, but there are incentives that mean the rewards aren’t entirely proportional to bets. You can see that in tiered reward systems where players at higher tiers get more rewards for the same amount of play.

** Therefore, wouldn’t it make sense for casinos also to give higher payback percentages at the games to their most valuable players?

** Given the above, it’s in your interest to make the casino think you’re a bigger player than you really are.

** The way for a slot player to accomplish that is to start out with bigger bets. Then it will register with the random number generator that determines your result that you are a big player worthy of bigger paybacks.

** After you’ve established yourself as a big player, you can drop down to a more comfortable bet level and reap the rewards.

The resulting system is very similar to a method table games players who chase comps have long used in offline casinos.

Offline casinos rely on pit supervisors to accurately record a player’s average wager when rating the player for comps. Supervisors often watch the player’s first few bets, then have their attention diverted to other chores. So a player who makes his biggest bets first sometimes, but not always, will have their average bets rated higher than the really are.

But the same table games players don’t use that system online, where wagers are accurately tracked. And even in offline casinos, inaccurate bet tracking doesn’t change the payback on the game itself, it just alters the rate at which comps are given.

Does the system really fool the random number generator at slot machines?No. Let’s look at a few facts about how slot machines and random number generators work.

** In jurisdictions with legal, regulated slot machines, giving higher-status players a bigger payback percentage is illegal.Regardless of whether you have top tier status, bottom tier status or anything in between, you’ll get the same payback percentage on slot machines as any other player.

** Casinos can give bigger comps such as free play, rooms and meals to higher-status players, but that status won’t be changed by a few big bets. Slot machines, online and offline, accurately track your betting total including all bets big and small. That betting total serves as the basis for your player rewards status.**The random number generator doesn’t know your rewards status. That information is not relayed to the RNG when you insert your rewards card offline or log in online.

** The RNG doesn’t even know how much you’ve wagered. It is not in its programming to consider how much you’ve bet.

** All the RNG does is generate random numbers. It generates the same numbers regardless of whether you’ve wagered one coin or 400.

** Different programs then take those numbers and map them onto reels or reel images to show you the outcome. Other programming then takes the result, compares it to your bet size and pays you the appropriate amount.

** Any outcome can come at any time, regardless of your bet size or player rewards status.

Other slot wagering systems have tried to anticipate what the random number generator will do and tried to time the biggest bets for when the slot games are more likely to pay off.

One of the most common slot is called “Prime the Pump,” in which they start with minimum wagers before increasing their bets when they think the game is ready to pay off.

A variation is the “step” system in which wagers are set for a specific number of spins. For example, a step player might bet one coin per payline for five spins, then two per line for the next five, three per line for five after that and so on. After a full cycle, the system player starts again with minimum bets.

As long as you don’t bet more than can afford, these systems are harmless, but they don’t really help you win, either. Slot results, regardless of whether in an online or offline casino, are as random as humans can program a computer to be. You’re as likely to win on the minimum wagers as on the big bets.

So it goes with the “fool the random number generator.’ You can’t really fool the RNG. It just keeps generating numbers and neither knows nor cares whether you make big bets early. Your outcomes will be random and not affected by any attempts to make the machine think you’re a bigger player than you really are.