Because slot machines are designed to hook you in, you’re going to get some return on investment from them if you hold yourself to a specific amount. At the Casino de Lac Leamy, up in Canada (run, I would add, by the Quebec provincial government. Now that’s a lottery system), the slots are ‘loose.’ They pay out relatively often. In fact, when Weds and I have played twenty dollars worth of slots together, we’ve never failed to leave the casino floor with more money than we had entering the floor. That twenty dollars has been anything from thirty to sixty-five dollars, the three or four times we’ve done this.
I’ll give you that “many” is almost certainly flat wrong, on reflection, but such machines are (were?) probably out there.
That move was full of falsehoods. For example, people named Silas are actually no more or less likely than the general population to be tall homicidal albino monks—but you wouldn’t guess that from seeing the movie, now, would you?
That twenty dollars has been anything from thirty to sixty-five dollars, the three or four times we’ve done this.
I’m pretty sure it’s not that unlikely to come up ahead ‘three or four’ times when playing slot machines (if it weren’t so late I’d actually do the sums). It seems much more plausible that the blog author was just lucky than that the machines were actually set to regularly pay out positive amounts.
On the scale from “saw it in The Da Vinci Code” to “saw it in Nature”, I’d have to say all I have is an anecdote from a respectable blogger:
I’ll give you that “many” is almost certainly flat wrong, on reflection, but such machines are (were?) probably out there.
That move was full of falsehoods. For example, people named Silas are actually no more or less likely than the general population to be tall homicidal albino monks—but you wouldn’t guess that from seeing the movie, now, would you?
That’s why it represents the bottom end of my “source-reliability” scale.
The only relevant part of the quote seems to be:
I’m pretty sure it’s not that unlikely to come up ahead ‘three or four’ times when playing slot machines (if it weren’t so late I’d actually do the sums). It seems much more plausible that the blog author was just lucky than that the machines were actually set to regularly pay out positive amounts.