Originally Posted by
Enscheff
Games are designed to pay out 90%-95% of the money players put into them. Over time, you will lose. If someone tells you they are ahead over a long period of time, they are lying.
The gaming control board goes to great lengths to ensure there is nothing shady going on. For example, contrary to what some folks insist, there's no mechanism that forces someone to win or lose because a machine is paying out too little or too much. The machine simply pays out 90% of what you put in, and since the casino has essentially unlimited money compared to players, they can afford to wait out the streakiness until you inevitably run out of money.
One of the biggest projects I worked on was to take these games and simulate their entire reel cycle. This meant calculating every single possible result (tens of billions, maybe even trillions of total outcomes), and counting it all up to make sure the game paid exactly the percentage it was supposed to pay. Make sure the game had the intended volatility, win frequency, bonus frequency, average win amount, etc.