Sounds like you are experiencing Apophenia (the tendency to perceive meaningful connections in random or unrelated results)…
You're right that humans don't do random, that's why certified hardware devices for RNG are usually physical hardware utilising natural phenomena. The integrity of these aren't just important for gambling, but for any security-based implementation... if you can break it, things get very bad very quickly (as happened with the
many years ago).
Casino games largely break down into four categories:
- True random - the game behaves according to true odds - e.g. most table games, and older slot games, where each reel stop has an equal chance of landing and each reel is an independent RNG call. While people think of a spin as "one" RNG call, it's possible that triggers multiple or dozens of separate RNG requests.
- Weighted random - the game behaves according to a documented or undocumented weighting, so while the RNG is real, the result presented is skewed by the weighting.
- Scratchcard slots - particularly common now-a-days with streamer slots, the entire game round is one or few RNG calls, akin to picking a ball from a bag. Depending on the scripted implementation, the game can infer chances that have zero probability of occurring.
- Compensated - this is restricted to certain markets (for example, AWPs in the UK) where the machine is not random and some decisions will not use an RNG at all (e.g. you gamble and you will lose regardless of your choice).
You are confusing strike rate with randomness... for a
single line the odds of winning may well be 1 in 50, but when you are playing 10, 20, 25 lines those odds are combined and generate a curve of probabilities. Much like a single line will never pay a micro-win, but playing 25 lines often will.
In a regulated market, that would require operators, providers and regulators to all be in cahoots rigging the casino games... while technically possible, their collective incompetence suggests they would be unable to keep it secret if such an event was going on.
Meanwhile, in an unregulated or rogue market, it's much more likely to find a rogue operator working in cahoots with a rogue provider (or they are one and the same) and at that point all bets are off. We've heard plenty of horror stories of fake/pirated slots pretending to be NetEnt that are designed to pay almost nothing, fake/pirated blackjack providers that think Blackjack ties with Dealer 20, or progressive jackpots that are literally unwinnable (and the rogue provider then runs off with the proceeds, see TopGame and its successors Octopus Gaming, Pragmatic Play and IGTech).