Never mind the urban myths, what about the slot machine myths?

Here we take the four most common myths about online slot machines and give you ‘truth’. No, honestly. Here, we tell it like it is!

The main problem is that most people don’t know enough math to understand how the software algorithms work inside the online slot machines. This gap leaves most people guessing and they guess wrong. The core of a virtual machine is the Random Number Generator (RNG). If you had to start shouting out numbers at random, how random would you be? Do you have favorite numbers? Or would you forget after the first ten or twenty and start repeating yourself. It would be so easy to fall into a pattern, wouldn’t it? So, how does a machine do it and how does that affect what you see in a real-world casino or online?
Let’s take four situations and talk you through them:

1. Well, here goes with the first of our four myths about slots. Now, ask yourself, “How many times have you been in this situation:
You walk away from a machine and the next player hits a jackpot.”

How many times have you thought, “If only I’d played one more time!”

When we asked you to shout out those random numbers, you stopped when you got bored, didn’t you? Well, machines don’t get bored. They just keep on doing what they’ve been programmed to do so long as the electricity keeps coming. Ah ha! So, when someone plugs in and switches on the machine, the RNG starts to generate random numbers and it doesn’t stop until someone switches it off again. It doesn’t stop generating numbers.

When you press play, you get the latest numbers generated. If you’d pressed play five seconds later, you’d have gotten a different set of numbers. So, when you were playing your sequence, you paused between each play, didn’t you? Sometimes, the pause might have been only a second or two. Other times, you sipped a drink or said, “Hi” to a passer-by. Either way, the RNG would have been generating new numbers non-stop.

“How quickly?” you ask.

Well, that’s the thing. The RNG produces hundreds of numbers every minute. So the chances of you hitting the same set of numbers as the person who followed you were effectively zero. When you stood up and walked away, the RNG kept right on generating numbers. There was a gap before the new player hit play again. That time might have been more or less the same as you would have waited between your plays. We’ll never know. To be a winner, you had to hit play at precisely the same fraction of a second as that next player. If you were out a fraction of a second either way, you missed the jackpot combination. It’s that sensitive, down to a fraction of a second.

You always kick yourself but there’s no need. A online slots are always random every time. Whether you win is purely a matter of luck at the fraction of a second you press play. Every player gets the same chance of winning whenever they play. It’s that simple.

In the next exciting instalment, we’ll we looking at whether you can count the symbols on the reels in the same way as you can count cards.

By Elizabeth Tudor
Find Elizabeth Tudor’s other contributions at http://www.slotsya.com/articles/the-slot-machine-myths-1-8.html where he gladly shares his opinion on many different subjects and helps people around the globe find a better understanding of the things they’re interested in.