Due, hot, cold and the stop button

A machine has taken your money for forty minutes and given you next to nothing back. Is it closer to paying now than it was when you sat down?

• Spins you made in forty minutes400at 600 spins an hour
• Your money through the machine$400on a $1 spin
• The chance on your next spinunchangedthe same chance the machine gave your first spin

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

“It’s due.” “It’s hot.” “It’s cold.” “You have to press it at the right moment.” I have heard all four of those sayings out loud on the floor, and almost never from somebody being silly. You sit in one place for an hour watching the same thing happen, and your head starts hunting for the pattern. That is what heads are for. A slot machine simply is not the kind of object that has a pattern in it.

So this is not about being wrong, and I am not going to tell you the thought is foolish. What I can tell you is what the thought costs, and the cost is not luck and not a jinx. The cost is the extra spins you make while you wait for the machine to do what you have decided it owes you, and the money those extra spins send through the machine.

Four things people say, and the one belief under all four

“It’s due”, “it’s hot”, “it’s cold” and “you have to press it at the right moment” sound like four different claims about four different situations. All four sayings say one and the same thing: that the machine is in some state right now, that the state is either good for you or bad for you, and that you can read which state it is in from what the machine has just been doing.

A machine on this floor is not allowed to put the words Due, Overdue, Ready or Ready to Hit on its screen, in those exact words. The ban is not a verdict on the people who say “it’s due” out loud at a machine. The ban is there because the thought behind the word is so reliable that a machine could be built to feed it, and a machine that printed Due on its screen would be selling you a state the machine does not have.

• Duenever on the screen
• Overduenever on the screen
• Readynever on the screen
• Ready to Hitnever on the screen

There are no hot machines and no cold ones, and sitting at one machine longer does not improve the odds on any spin of that machine. The machine takes the same amount on the spin you make in the fortieth minute as it took on the spin you made in the first minute, and what it is taking is your credits (what a machine counts your money in on screen, which is not the same as dollars until you cash out).

The climbing line is what people picture when they say a machine is due; the flat line is what a machine actually draws.

Leoformer dealer · rules and maths

I dealt cards rather than fixing machines, but I walked past the same rows every shift. What you notice from the aisle is that the quiet machines and the loud ones swap places all evening long, and nobody walking that aisle can tell you which machine will be the loud one a minute from now. Neither can the person already sitting at that machine, and that person is closer to it than anybody else in the building.

What an hour with nothing back actually looks like

Take two machines that give back the same share of everything staked over their lifetimes, and let them do it at two different rhythms. The machine that pays often gives back small amounts many times an hour; the machine that holds its money back gives nothing at all for long stretches and then one large payout. Neither machine is real: both are written out one possible result at a time, which is what makes every figure about the two machines something to be worked out rather than guessed at.

How often a spin pays and the chance after a hundred spins with nothing back come out the same: those hundred spins leave the machine exactly where it started.

On the machine that holds its money back, a stretch of 72 spins with nothing back is the middle of an hour rather than the bad end of it: half of all hours on that machine contain a dead stretch at least that long.

1. 50 spins in a row with nothing back93.0%of hours on that machine hold a stretch at least that long
2. 72 spins in a row with nothing back50.5%of hours on that machine hold a stretch at least that long
3. 100 spins in a row with nothing back13.5%of hours on that machine hold a stretch at least that long
4. 150 spins in a row with nothing back0.9%of hours on that machine hold a stretch at least that long

The machine you walked away from, and the award somebody else took

The version of the belief that hurts most — the belief that a machine carries something forward from one spin to the next — is not something people say while they are still playing. It is what they say afterwards. You stand up after two hours at a machine, somebody else sits down in the seat you have just left, and three spins later that person takes the largest award the machine has.

One machine, and two presses made at two different instants. What changes from picture to picture is the instant the button went down and the symbols that instant brought up on the payline. What does not change is the machine — three reels of 64 symbols, with the symbol that matters appearing once on each reel — and the chance of the largest award, which stands at the same figure under both pictures. Standing up did not hand the next player an award that had been waiting for you: standing up changed which instants got pressed, and a press a thousandth of a second apart is a different spin, not the same spin caught better or caught worse.

The belief that a machine carries something forward runs just as often in reverse: the machine has paid heavily, so it must be empty now. A machine that has just paid out a large jackpot can pay another large jackpot on the very next spin. Nothing was taken out of a store when the machine paid, because there is no store inside a machine to take anything out of.

And the explanation people reach for when a good stretch ends is that somebody in a back office turned the machine down. A machine’s payout cannot be changed while somebody is playing on it, and every result the machine is able to produce already sits in a program that an independent laboratory certified before the machine was ever switched on.

1. Before the machine reaches the floorEvery result the machine can ever produce is written into a program, and an independent laboratory certifies that program before the machine is switched on.
2. While the machine stands on the floorThe machine plays from that certified program, and the number generator inside the program keeps running day and night, whether anybody is sitting at the machine or not.
3. While you are playingNothing is set and nothing is changed. A machine’s payout cannot be altered while somebody is playing on it, and that is the rule the story about a back office runs into.

The number generator inside the machine ran through the whole of your two hours, and through every idle minute before you arrived, and it kept no score of any of it.

The stop button, and the one thing it moves: how many spins fit in your hour

Press Spin and the machine chooses the result there and then; the symbols that roll past afterwards are the entertainment. Your bet has to be committed before that choice is made, and a bet that arrives after the choice is voided and handed back to you.

So the stop button is real, and it does one real thing: it cuts the spinning animation short. A shorter spin means more spins fit into the hour you are sitting there.

Pressing Stop on every spin makes 300 extra spins in the same hour, and each one of those extra spins carries the same chance as every spin you would have made without touching the button. Nothing about the hour got better, and a machine is not permitted to indicate or imply that anything did — not in words, not in sound, not in animation.

Nor does the manner of the press matter. Hit the button hard, bump it, tap the glass first, hold it down until the reels stop: the machine reads one thing out of all of that, and the one thing it reads is the instant at which the press arrived.

When the machine is a website

Put the same game on a licensed website, and the machine behind it behaves in almost exactly the same way. A machine on a floor and a game on a screen are forbidden the same four words, in the same order — Due, Overdue, Ready, Ready to Hit — and on a machine and on a screen alike the result is picked before the picture.

On the licensed gambling sites of Ontario, turbo, quick spin and slam stop are simply not permitted, and a game there may not let you shorten the wait for a result in any way. On a casino floor the stop button is perfectly legal, and the only thing forbidden there is the claim that pressing it helps you.

Neither a casino floor nor a licensed site is the safer of the two places to be. The ban on the button covers the licensed sites of one province and not screens in general, and a ban on shortening the wait says nothing whatever about which of the two places is safer for the person playing. Nor does a game on a screen run more slowly than a machine in a room because of that ban. What the ban takes away is the shortcut through the animation, and not the speed at which one spin follows another.

Practice: read the machine

A machine has no decision left in it once the button is down, so not one of these moments asks you to spin a machine. Each moment asks about the three things you really do decide — which machine you sit at, what you stake, when you get up — and then it checks the reason you gave for deciding, because at a machine the reason is the only part of a decision that anybody can check.

The lesson is one run: every square on the strip below is one moment of it, and they are all there from the start. Level 1 is the button alone. Level 2 puts a machine’s own record of its last ten games in front of you. Level 3 is what you do after a machine pays somebody else. Only your first answer on each moment counts, and when a level’s squares are full the next one begins by itself, with no button in between.

Nothing here keeps a balance, pays credits or makes a sound. There is no money in it at all.

Check yourself

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

Five quick ones. Pick an answer, then check it. No timer, no points: just whether it stuck.

The question we opened with. The machine is not closer to paying than it was forty minutes ago. Forty minutes that leave you with next to nothing to show for them is one of the ordinary shapes forty minutes at a machine takes, and the machine has no way of knowing those forty minutes happened at all. What those forty minutes did settle is how much of your money went through the machine, and that figure is the one that keeps climbing for as long as you sit there.

Where to check this

19+ (18+ in AB, MB, QC) · Play responsibly · the helplines for every province are at the end of this page

Further reading

• Minimum Technical Standards for Gaming, 11: Game Behaviour · Alcohol and Gaming Commission of OntarioWhat a slot machine in a room is allowed to do, clause by clause: the payout floor, the reel strip, the odds on the largest prize and the ten games of history every machine can show you.
• How to play slots · Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (PlaySmart)An operator walking through the arithmetic of one spin, with its own worked example: nine lines on a nickel machine, and what one press of it takes.
• How to play slots · British Columbia Lottery Corporation (Casinos BC)Reels, lines and the province’s average return, in the words of the corporation that runs the rooms.
• Understanding chance: slot machines · Loto-Québec (Wise Play)The near miss, volatility and the illusion of control, named and explained by a provincial operator rather than by us.
• Informed Gambling: slots and VLTs · Manitoba Liquor & LotteriesA short brochure on what a payout percentage is and is not, and why two machines with the same one can empty a wallet at different speeds.
• Registrar's Standards for Internet Gaming: game design and features · Alcohol and Gaming Commission of OntarioThe same machine on a screen: what a regulated site in Ontario may not do with the picture after the outcome has been drawn.

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

If you take one thing away, take this: believing a machine is due never changes the odds on a single spin, so the only way the belief can reach your evening is through the clock and through the money going into the machine while you wait. That is what makes it easy to handle. Decide the hour while you are still at home, and “it has to be close by now” stops being an argument you are obliged to answer at two in the morning.

And if the pull to stay is the loud part of your evening rather than a passing thought, that is worth talking to somebody about. The lines below are for exactly that, and Game plan helps you set the hour before you go.

How it’s worked out