It frightens me that in a community populated by those professionally involved in the gambling world, there are so many people who still believe the old wives’ tales of ‘non-randomness’, ‘it’s all rigged’ and ‘win/lose switches’.
I thought these were the preserve of the general gambling public, but I guess in an unregulated and still fairly underground industry, there is not enough opportunity for people to learn what they’re selling. Still, I think it’s worrying and rather disappointing.
For example, it appears that some still think that payout percentages are somehow controlled mechanically – as if the casino software will say “The last 100 hands won, so we need some losses to make up the percentages.” This is absolute nonsense and shows a complete lack of understanding on the fundamentals of probability and the principles of casino gambling.
The payout percentages achieved by an online casino game will, in the long run, match those achieved in an equivalent B+M game for one simple reason: the rules of the game combined by the probabilities of the outcomes decide the payout percentage.
Let’s take European Roulette as an example, and look just at the number bets. There are 37 numbers on the wheel – 0-36. If you bet on any of these numbers, you get back 36 times your stake. However your number will only come up one in 37 times on average. This calculates to a house advantage of 2.7% – which is 1/37. I.e., you expect to have to bet 37 times before your number comes up, but when it does you get paid only 36 times back.
That’s it. The software doesn’t have to manipulate or guarantee the payout percentage, it’s inherant in the mathematics of the game. On a real roulette wheel, any given number will come up 1/37 times and pay 36x, therefore the player loses 2.7% on average. In an internet casino, the RNG simply generates a random number between 0 and 36, of which any given one will come up 1/37 times.
So it’s the rules of the game and the probabilities that control the set payout percentage, not any ‘non-randomness’ or ‘manipulation’ on the part of the casino software. All their RNG needs to do, in this example, is generate a number between 0-36 and be random enough such that each of those numbers will come up, on average, in the long run, 1/37 times. I can assure you that every reputable software provider today is capable of doing that with no problem at all. In fact their RNGs are likely much more random and unpredictable than a real roulette wheel, which can occasionally suffer from bias as a result of wear and tear, or because of the technique of the croupier.
Every gambler has stories about the time he lost 70 out of 100 hands, or won 70 out of 100. Yeah it’s really frustrating (or really amazing, depending on which yet get), but it means nothing. This table shows some probabilities:
http://wizardofodds.com/blackjack/appendix4.html
So for example, after 100 bets the probability of being down 43 bets is 0.01%. It happens one in 10,000 times. So when it happens to you, you’ll feel pretty pissed off. But if there’s 10,000 people playing Blackjack right now online, it’s almost certainly going to happen to one of them. And if that guy keeps playing for a long time, there will likely be another session where he wins 43 bets out of 100 hands. You can extrapolate this further of course – the example Stupid gave sounded incredibly unlucky, perhaps 1 in a million. Sucks if it happens to you, but you’re not the first and you certainly won’t be the last, and it indicates nothing other than the laws of probability.
I’m really surprised at the affiliates here who believed all the nonsense about it being non-random or rigged, and yet continue to promote casinos. That just seems dishonest – you think the product is flawed but you sell it anyway.
The simple fact tho is that no casino needs to cheat. Their profitability is built into every game they offer, it’s mathematically guaranteed that they will profit over the long term and usually the short term too. Casinos worldwide made millions before RNGs even existed, and they will continue to do so as long as people want to gamble at games with a house advantage.