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Poker Machines

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Sean K

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I went and played the pokies at 'the club' last night with my old cheese, followed by a bar meal. A regular Sunday night event for them.

The place was filled with older aged people staring at their machines pushing buttons and getting excited with free spins. I was certainly excited with my free spins!

I had a machine next to my mum and we chatted as we watched the reals turn and waited in anticipation for three or more free spin thingies. Three beers disappeared along the way.

After 40 minutes of pushing buttons I cashed in when it was time for dinner, $2.32 up! Whoohoo!

Time well spent?

 


Beats paying for your time there .

Personally think that the pokies are a scourge in Tasmania............... School funds and nanna,s boob job savings given away on a daily basis.

Glad that WA only has them in the casino at present.
 
kennas said:
Time well spent?
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Depends. If you enjoyed it and had fun talking to your mum, then sure it was time well spent.

If we outlawed everything that someone can have an addiction too, then we'd have to shut this sight down and also prevent people from investing in shares.
 
Some of those old people you saw happily playing away, will blow all their pension on these things, and then ask a community agency to pay their power bill or rent.
 
kennas said:
I had a machine next to my mum and we chatted as we watched the reals turn and waited in anticipation for three or more free spin thingies. Three beers disappeared along the way.
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I assume anything not tied down is fair game in these venues.
 
Julia said:
Some of those old people you saw happily playing away, will blow all their pension on these things, and then ask a community agency to pay their power bill or rent.
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Yes! They should all be banned as they are the unacceptable face of capitalism.
 
Julia said:
Some of those old people you saw happily playing away, will blow all their pension on these things, and then ask a community agency to pay their power bill or rent.
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Yes, for many people they just flush what limited cash they have down the tube. I generally believe in the Whitlam's 'Blow up the Pokies' song.

On the other side, there was one lady there who commented that it was an excuse for her to get out of the house. She took $20, played the 1c machine and was very entertained for a couple of hours. And there were a few regulars she bumped into each night who she caught up with. If she didn't do that, she'd be at home watching Big Brother with a box of wine, or something...

As a generalisation, I can think of better ways of spending my time.

Loved those free spins though!
 
Legalized drug dealing at best. Get them hooked, take all their money with the pretense of false highs until they are just broken soles.

The implementation in Vic by consecutive govnuts amounts to treason of the people.

They should only be found in non profit organizations like sporting clubs and associations.

Politicians made a pack with the devil because of their own inabilities to manage an economy.

Cheers

Satan
 
Glad you enjoyed yourself Kennas and if your experience reflected what was typical in the poker machine industry, I would say fine. But if you scratch below the surface of the statistics no doubt you will know that stories abound of people who have destroyed their own and their families lives. The price is too high I believe.

By the way, anyone heard how the the independent Senator who was elected on the single issue "no pokies" platform is going with his cause? Maybe he has been too busy with other issues!
 
although i dont support them either (tho a big fan of the punt) i will provide the way to win at the pokies lol.


the machines, and the system behind them, is controlled to payout at a certain threshold (or thresholds). legally the providers (eg TAH,TTS) cannot hold (as revenues) more than , say 12%, of the money being poured in. as a result, every time that threshold is reached, the system HAS to pay out, and with the aim to entice everyone with big wins, it will payout larger amounts to minimal players.

so now i encourage those that have no reason for living, or not wanting to eat properly, to NOT play for example 80 lines at 1c each line every spin. but instead to maximise your potential gains by playing ONE LINE ONLY. in this way the bet you place is then a potential higher payout (80c X 500/1) rather than 80 chances at 1c X 500/1. this theory (using the legislation to your advantage) will obviously work better at the peak times (fri/sat night) rather than tuesday lunchtime.

again i dont support using these machines as a form of entertainment, but if you are, at least try to make it profitable.
 

Hmm..I'm quite tempted to go and give this a punt just to test the theory. I once did something like that playing roullette. Basically there it was something like just keep playing the same colour and then every time you lose double your bet. Took me like 3 hours but i did made aroun d$150.
 

You used the Martingale strategy on roulette - it's a loser. I'm skeptical of the pokies strategy - Son of baglimit, how do you know this?
 

martingale strats will eventually burn out though so take care.
 
skyQuake said:
martingale strats will eventually burn out though so take care.
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LOL...I did say once. There is the problem of having a max bet limit and also landing on green or whatever colour that was. But just to do it once for a test was something to do for entertainment.

I not aware of martingale strats though. It was all just things I've heard when trying it out.
 
gordon2007 said:
There is the problem of having a max bet limit and also landing on green or whatever colour that was.
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It would still be a losing stategy. To be profitable, the odds of the payout or probabilities have to be altered, and a betting strategy does not do this. Without a betting limit, you'd need an infinite amount of money, but you would still run the risk of losing for infinity.
 
Mr J said:
You used the Martingale strategy on roulette - it's a loser. I'm skeptical of the pokies strategy - Son of baglimit, how do you know this?
Click to expand...

i worked for TAH in pokies devel in the early 90's, and read the gaming legislation.
 
nunthewiser said:
Personally think that the pokies are a scourge in Tasmania............... School funds and nanna,s boob job savings given away on a daily basis.

Glad that WA only has them in the casino at present.
Click to expand...
I'm sure we'd have a lot more people employed in small business etc via increased consumer spending if not for these monsters. They rip a fortune out of the community and send it partly to government and largely to a few already very wealthy individuals.

I'm not against them totally, but the blatant concentration of machines and marketing in lower socio-economic suburbs is a disgrace.

As a general rule, I'm somewhat against meddling in the affairs of individuals "for their own good". But these poker machines do a LOT of damage to many and there's no reason, other than greed, why we need de facto casinos in every poorer suburb. They could always drive or catch a bus to the casino, but the reality is these machines aren't really that great, people won't go out of their way to use them. Hence they're put right under peoples' noses combined with a marketing blitz to convince the masses that throwing away money is "fun".

Put them in legitimate casinos that's fine. Likewise in non-profit clubs etc. But I'd very gladly see the end of round the clock gaming in working class suburbs. Judgemental may be, but these machines do bring a lot of misery to many.

Just think how much better off we'd all be if the $ millions poured into these machines went instead into local small business, charity or anything of lasting value. So sad to see all those old clunkers in the car park while their owners hand a fortune to someone who could already afford any means of transport they choose.

I refuse to play these machines on principle. Never have and never will unless they're put back where they belong - and that's not under the noses of everyone.
 

Sorry to burst your bubble, but they don't work that way.

Simple game of chance, you have (say) 22 positions on 5 reels, so that's 22^5 giving 5,153,632 possible combinations;
exactly 1 of those will be the top pay/jackpot (eg 5 x dragon symbols)
if it pays left to right only there are 21 possible outcomes of 4 dragon symbols, these will be at a fixed win, maybe 1000 credits;
then there's the 3 dragons and so on with all the other 'winning' combinations for all the other symbols.

If you sat and played the machine 5,153,632 times statistically you'd get one of every combination.

If the machine is rated to return 90% to the player (87% is the minimum, they can and do go up to 98% or more) then the sum of credits paid for all the winning combinations needs to be 5,153,632 * 0.9 = 4,638,269.

How the 4,638,269 credits is distributed is up to the game designer, it could be the 5 dragons pays it and there are no other winning combinations (boring game but fantastic for the person that hits it), it could be there are 1,000,000 combinations but the top pay is only a hundred credits (bit of a time waster). In reality there will be games that are very volatile (fewer big pays) or conservative (lots of small pays) so sit and watch someone play for a while to see if you can figure out which it is.

Obviously things like right to left pays, scatters, substitutes make calculating the number of winning combinations a little more time consuming. Straight out 5 lines is just 5 games of 1 line played concurrently, the games with different rules on multi-line play are a little more complex to work out, but will be broken down into multiple concurrent 1 line games for this statistical analysis.

There is no "it has to pay out" threshold, it's just simple statistics. A single machine may never hit the top pay in its' lifetime, similarly it may hit it twice in a week (I've seen both scenarios).

m.
 
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