Proof casinos games are rigged!

[jasonuk]

Your explanations about randomness carry more weight with regulated brick and mortar casinos and sportsbetting where a lot more money and effort is invested in machines. Not so much with unregulated online casino slots. Much less effort is devoted to their technology, and one has been able to trace the slow development of their intricacies. A lot of the earliest casinos were set up using the same, relatively simple systems and games. Only over time did they start developing complexities and did more game sources enter the online market.

In many jurisdictions, online slots are regulated, and often to the same - or higher - standard than offline slots. If we go back 10-15 years then I would agree with you more, there are some very interesting stories about early online slots being exploitable to the degree people made hundreds of thousands in profits based on flawed assumptions... but now-a-days there is so much monitoring going on that those discrepancies are identified and resolved quickly, and rarely occur in the first place.

Given you're from the US, I assume you're referring to the offshore market (Curacao etc) here, and it'll depend significantly on where else that game provider is regulated:

• If they are a well-known name and active in top-tier jurisdictions then it would be a significant existential risk to offer bent games, and in many cases they'll be offering identical games to those offered in Europe and elsewhere.
• If they are a no-name provider, or of questionable origins (to take my earlier example, the confusingly named IGTech who provide Pragmatic Play games with different names) then you would be right to be concerned - if there is no trust in the chain then all bets are off, and bent providers and operators can and will cheat you out of every penny.

There is a reason why casinos (both on and offline) have, over time, eliminated almost all one-line, one-bet play and not many players have marked this change.

I can think of two reasons - one is the transition from traditional reel based slots to "scratchcard" slots, the other is casinos clamping down on advantage play where people use one line strategies to maximise the chance of winning at all / winning big from bonus funds. Much like casinos now either cap bonus winnings or exclude ultra-high variance slots because they don't want to stand a £100k payout from bonus funds when someone lands the big one on streamer slot of the day (tm).

It is because swinging between extremes after establishing a bet level is the surest way to trigger either a good pay or a slot bonus. And, if you can successfully monkey around to do that during play, that in itself shows that the play is not random.

If that were true, you'd fine-tune your strategy and become a millionaire...

I'm not going to say slots are 100% perfect because errors do occur in hardware, in game design, in network communications... and it's important that games and procedures are designed to defend against those errors to protect players and operators alike. I do concur that the smaller / less regulated providers are more likely to make errors, so a "here be dragons" warning would be apt if neither safety net applies.

This forum has discussions of many such bugs over the years - the old Microgaming pub slots that had alleged compensation behaviour, The Dark Knight Rises which ignored average bet, Frankenstein that left a debug routine in a production game, the Frankie Dettori Blackjack progressive that paid 3 times (and the guy succeeded in court 3 years later), and the Street Fighter II slot that miscalculated average bet.

Most of the stories are quite old at this point - of the five above, only two are after 2015 (FDB was 2018, SF2 was 2020) and we see hundreds and thousands of slots released annually.

 

[dunover]

In many jurisdictions, online slots are regulated, and often to the same - or higher - standard than offline slots. If we go back 10-15 years then I would agree with you more, there are some very interesting stories about early online slots being exploitable to the degree people made hundreds of thousands in profits based on flawed assumptions... but now-a-days there is so much monitoring going on that those discrepancies are identified and resolved quickly, and rarely occur in the first place.

Given you're from the US, I assume you're referring to the offshore market (Curacao etc) here, and it'll depend significantly on where else that game provider is regulated:

• If they are a well-known name and active in top-tier jurisdictions then it would be a significant existential risk to offer bent games, and in many cases they'll be offering identical games to those offered in Europe and elsewhere.
• If they are a no-name provider, or of questionable origins (to take my earlier example, the confusingly named IGTech who provide Pragmatic Play games with different names) then you would be right to be concerned - if there is no trust in the chain then all bets are off, and bent providers and operators can and will cheat you out of every penny.

I can think of two reasons - one is the transition from traditional reel based slots to "scratchcard" slots, the other is casinos clamping down on advantage play where people use one line strategies to maximise the chance of winning at all / winning big from bonus funds. Much like casinos now either cap bonus winnings or exclude ultra-high variance slots because they don't want to stand a £100k payout from bonus funds when someone lands the big one on streamer slot of the day (tm).


If that were true, you'd fine-tune your strategy and become a millionaire...

I'm not going to say slots are 100% perfect because errors do occur in hardware, in game design, in network communications... and it's important that games and procedures are designed to defend against those errors to protect players and operators alike. I do concur that the smaller / less regulated providers are more likely to make errors, so a "here be dragons" warning would be apt if neither safety net applies.

This forum has discussions of many such bugs over the years - the old Microgaming pub slots that had alleged compensation behaviour, The Dark Knight Rises which ignored average bet, Frankenstein that left a debug routine in a production game, the Frankie Dettori Blackjack progressive that paid 3 times (and the guy succeeded in court 3 years later), and the Street Fighter II slot that miscalculated average bet.

Most of the stories are quite old at this point - of the five above, only two are after 2015 (FDB was 2018, SF2 was 2020) and we see hundreds and thousands of slots released annually.

The MG AWP-style slots DID have compensated behaviour, that was the whole point of them! They were not classified IIRC in the same way as the random slots. I used to have great fun in demo deliberately playing them max stake and losing and preventing wins wherever possible, then dropping them to 10p plays and watching them go 'BOOM' lol.

There was an old member here @vinylweatherman who had a few of them out on max-bet streaks for 30-50k balances on the old Vipers. I was theone who spotted Streetfighter II's error and described it on here a few days after I reviewed it, turned out it needed urgent repairs lol. Frankenstein you could trigger the FS on and TDK Rises has pretty much the same issue as SF II.

Novomatics in land-based casinos use a clock for their RNG and E. Europeans worked this out (possibly the same crew behind the fake reverse-engineered Novomatics and other games) and could bring the feature in on land-based cabinets while on live video to their accomplices in the casinos, telling them when to press start. I believe this loophole still exists but premises have been warned about it and look out for it in the same way as card counting on the BJ tables.

 

[jasonuk]

The MG AWP-style slots DID have compensated behaviour, that was the whole point of them! They were not classified IIRC in the same way as the random slots. I used to have great fun in demo deliberately playing them max stake and losing and preventing wins wherever possible, then dropping them to 10p plays and watching them go 'BOOM' lol.

There was an old member here @vinylweatherman who had a few of them out on max-bet streaks for 30-50k balances on the old Vipers.

Thanks for the clarification, I wasn't sure of all the details so didn't want to state opinion as fact - I remember doing the same, watching Dubya Money (with the

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) go mental on minimum stake. Was before I really got into online slots (I played demo but not real money) so didn't fully latch on to the significance of it at the time.

I was theone who spotted Streetfighter II's error and described it on here a few days after I reviewed it, turned out it needed urgent repairs lol. Frankenstein you could trigger the FS on and TDK Rises has pretty much the same issue as SF II.

Almost...

• TDKR used the stake of the triggering spin rather than an average (as described by vinyl here),
• Frankenstein provided a debug keycode that could be used to modify the multiplier in the bonus (allowing the game to enter an illegal state that could significantly alter the RTP, as discussed here)
• SFII actually had two averaging issues - not only could a player ramp up their bets when the battle was clearly in their favour, but the rounding itself was flawed (round half up, rather than stochastic or round down - so a player alternating 40p and 20p spins could generate 40p bonuses for an effective 30p stake). Interesting to note the length of the battles also changed when it returned as per-stake, so you have to wonder what else they discovered...

From what I understand: the first was picked up quickly because enough people realised it was busted and were taking casinos to the cleaners; the second was around for a long time, either undetected or because it seemed ridiculous that a slot would allow client-side debug modifiers (it was back then, it certainly would be now); the third was fixed within a few weeks.

 

[DavidShush]

Of course they are rigged. They tell you that in the RTP %. And they use fancy graphics and near misses to keep you playing as long as possible because they know the longer you play the more likely you are to lose, unless you're a YouTuber who just so happens to get regular big wins.

They specifically show you spins where if it weren't for just 1 symbol or 1 line being out of place you'd hit a big win. Over the years they seem to have this more often as I don't think there is technically any laws saying how often they can do such manipulation.

I do know that there are supposed to be regulations around how many teasers they can give you before you land a feature. It's something like 15 on average, but of course you could go 30-40+ and then get 3 features back to back.

It's all rigged manipulation. That's the industry. From YouTubers to RTP% to algorithms for near misses.

 

[jasonuk]

Of course they are rigged. They tell you that in the RTP %.

For clarity, "rigged" games are those that don't behave according to their game rules or game design - having a house edge doesn't make it rigged, but it does make it unfavourable to play mathematically.

And they use fancy graphics and near misses to keep you playing as long as possible because they know the longer you play the more likely you are to lose, unless you're a YouTuber who just so happens to get regular big wins.

As discussed at length across CM, a significant percentage of streamers and content creators aren't playing with real money anyway... so their "regular big wins" mean jack. When you hear of streamers having wagered hundreds of millions of dollars (or even billions), a quick calculation shows how much money they've "lost" - and when that value is many multiples of their net worth, you know it's bogus.

They specifically show you spins where if it weren't for just 1 symbol or 1 line being out of place you'd hit a big win. Over the years they seem to have this more often as I don't think there is technically any laws saying how often they can do such manipulation.

I do know that there are supposed to be regulations around how many teasers they can give you before you land a feature. It's something like 15 on average, but of course you could go 30-40+ and then get 3 features back to back.

It's all rigged manipulation. That's the industry. From YouTubers to RTP% to algorithms for near misses.

This part is a bit trickier, because it depends on how the game is presented. In the case of the UKGC,

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covers a lot of this - and the behaviour pivots around "simulations of real devices".

In the case of traditional reel-based slots, people have done the number crunching on a variety of slots over the years and confirmed the bonus frequency, tease frequency and other related probabilities and that largely matches up with experience. The regulations here explicitly forbid substitution for near misses - so the average number of teases will be inferred by the reel design.

However, providers realised the regulations were getting in the way, so they started to invent devices that don't map to real scenarios - symbol drops being the most common now-a-days. In that case, most of section 7 protecting against misleading behaviour disappears because there is no real device to compare to. At that point they can do what they want, and some providers have taken that to extremes - the story of Scammin' Jars for example (the provider even lied to players claiming the jar movement was random, and was later confirmed to be scripted - e.g. a single RNG call for the entire game round, rather than one per action - despite what was stated in the game rules which is supposed to be the source of truth)

 

[PMKFRUITPRO]

You’ve got some patience Jason!!

 

[snorky510238]

If games are truly random, explain this or even try it yourself.

The experiment was carried out on 20p Roulette, single zero.

3 numbers covered. One number with £2 straight on it and the adjacent numbers (1 either side), with 20p on each.

If the game was in take mode, the number with £2 on it, would be the last of the 37 numbers to appear, if it appeared at all. In the meantime some of the other (blank) numbers would come in multiple times.

This scenario happened way too often, to even remotely consider the results as random. The game absolutely 100% knows where the money is.