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Do All Slots Have RNGs?

Repeat Bet button on WMS machine
Written by Joshua

Now that I’ve talked about the various gambling machines, a simple question arises: Do all slot machines have Random Number Generators (RNGs)?

STATUS: Only Vegas-style machines are truly slot machines. And all Vegas-style machines are governed by an RNG. So yes, all slot machines have RNGs.

RNG-driven slots mean the timing of the spin determines the timing of the outcome. The outcome doesn’t come from an external source, like Bingo, Historic Horse Racing, the lottery, and so forth.

And although all those games may have the same themes as slots, or look and behave like slots, they don’t operate similarly so they’re technically not slot machines at all.

If you play a free spin bonus on an RNG-driven game, it’s most likely also driven by an RNG. Bonuses on non-slot machines are predetermined. Some bonuses, such as progressive picks, on Vegas-style slots can be predetermined too. But there are definitely some that are driven by the RNG.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, where players get confused or superstitious is whether an RNG-driven game pays better than a predetermined one, or whether you can have true control over your destiny to win more or lose less and that answer’s quite simple: No.

Regardless of an RNG approach or an external outcome, games have a payback target based on how they’re programmed, so you presuming two casinos, one with Vegas-style slots and one with Bingo or some other external outcome, but with the same payout setup in the long term, you’ll not do any better or worse, on average anyway, in casino over another.

About the author

Joshua

My name is Joshua, and I’m a slot enthusiast who works in tech as a marketer by day, and dabbles in casinos periodically during off-times. Know Your Slots will reflect my interests in understanding the various ways you can play slots, travel, casino promotions and how you can get the most out of your casino visits.

2 Comments

  • Joshua a long time back there was a person who fixed a slot machine when he was working on it at the factory. It was a keno machine and he had a certain code put in the slot machine so all he had to do was punch the code in and the numbers would come up. He was caught and I believe he was sent to jail. But he made a statement that there is no such thing as a Random Number Generator! That someone somewhere had to put those numbers in the RGN the first time. Random is not Random that the numbers just did not come out of thin air! Can you explain your feeling about the RGN?

    • Sorry for the delayed response! I was traveling last week.

      This is a big enough question to make its own post (look for that soon), but the short answer is that RNGs are really “RNGs” because at the end of the day someone programmed it and developed a sort of logic to govern it, so in that essence it’s really a pseudo-random number generator. And of course each game combination is programmed and assigned a number, so it would make sense the person had some sort of inside knowledge and/or manipulated the machine.

      There was the story of the Aristocrat machines and someone who allegedly devised a way to know when a player should hit the stop button. So there’s a lot to it but it’s technically not truly random because of the human factor. But it’s random enough for the purposes of developing a game that can over millions of spins deliver an expected payback percentage and so forth.

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