The casinos are not always held to a requirement that each "event" be equally likely.
For example, a Megabucks machine will have 3 reels and on each reel there is a Megabuckssymbol. However, that symbol will not show up with any frequency even close to the inverseof the number of symbols on the reels. Yet it is random.
How can this be?
Its called a virtual stop. Each wheel has a number of stops or positions. For old school slots, I think the number was often 22. Each of these is mapped to 1 or more numbers generated by a RNG. So, for example, there might be numbers 1-300 from the RNG.These are mapped to the wheel positions. Its likely that only one number is mapped to the Megabucks position. Most of the numbers will be mapped to blanks. The RNG generates the number for each wheel quite randomly. But the weighting caused by the mapping creates very non-random looking behavior.
Note that casinos wanted to have "7 7 blank" type results be mapped to the game result. This would allow them to have a great number of near miss results to milead the gambler into thinking they were close. That behavior was not allowed by Nevada gaming. With the current rules, the player at least gets to see that the Megabucks symbol comes up VERY rarely.
This is all quite legal. Personally, I think its awful. A fairly simple redesign of the games would makeit possible to have every symbol be truly equally likely while making it possible to have very high jackpots. One simple idea is to simply add 3 more reels. For any game, the odds of every outcome should be intuitively obvious as they are for a fair set of dice or cards. And that also means that the number of possible results for each game element should be provided. The current rules allow casinos to offer games where the player cannot know what his odds are. This is gross and totally biassed towards the casino. All games should be an "open book" when it comes to the frequencies of the various game states.
Promotions have even fewer rules. Kiosk games simply don't have to be random. It is probably a very bad idea for casinos to pretend otherwise. Had Nudge been presented with 50 choices and only a few were high multipliers, he might be annoyed, but he would not feel deceived. Casinos who give customers any reason whatsoever to feel cheated are being operated by morons. So while Nudge probably has zero legal recourse, the casinos should be very aware of his anger. He may be more vocal than most, but he is far from alone. Even ploppies will get annoyed when the game shows 6 multipliers and they always get the crappy ones. Why do this to customers? Sadism? It must be, since it is not a way to make them happy they came to your casino.
QZ
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
