Wednesday, June 4, 2008

The randomness of slot machine jackpots

By Steve Briggs

Jackpots happen all the time and in no rhyme or reason. As proof of this I offer the recent exciting news to come out of BlackjackBallroom.com, which just paid out a whopping five and a half million dollars to some lucky online player located in Finland. What's amazing about this besides the incredible size of the jackpot is that just a couple months back the same casino paid out over three hundred thousand to another player located in Finland. If you take all the countries in the world and put their names in a hat, each country's name allowed one time for each percentage of the world's online gamblers that country represented ... for Finland to have come up twice would have been nearly like finding a needle in a haystack.

As strange as it might sound, and however seemingly unlikely, odds are odds and if they say there is a chance it could happen ... then that is exactly the matter. For instance you could hit the biggest jackpot on a slot machine game and turn around and hit the same thing again the very next spin of the reels because the odds say there is a chance that could happen.

Sadly it works both ways however and just as it is true that you could conceivably hit two top jackpots in a row on the same machine, so it is also true that you could conceivably sail right past the "due" point, not once, not twice, but on and on until you beat the odds, which will be the same every time regardless of how much money you have put into the slot machine. You will never get closer to winning at any time, no matter how much money you have lost or time you have spent towards that result other than you will have bought another chance at the same odds by spinning those imaginary reels one more time.

It was once perhaps a true statement to say a slot machine game is "due", but any chance of there being merit to that statement withered on the vine and died the day slot machine games stopped using real "reels" and started using computer chips with screens that portrayed spinning reels.

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