Slot payouts
Slot games still choose which symbols to land on randomly, they just do so within the scope of the game's parameters, to yield a specific payback percentage.
See here (PDF) for a sample video slot design/analysis, and here to play it.
silly
Quote: JBA slot game's configuration (rules, symbol quantities/weights, paytable, bonus round parameters, etc.) determine the game's return. The return is theoretical in the following sense: if you have a slot game that returns 95% (the other 5% is the house's advantage), it is unlikely that the house will win exactly 5% of every bet. But the more play the game gets, the more the house's win will approach 5% of the money wagered on the game since it was installed.
Slot games still choose which symbols to land on randomly, they just do so within the scope of the game's parameters, to yield a specific payback percentage.
See here (PDF) for a sample video slot design/analysis, and here to play it.
My question is about the Wizard's method of having someone film 30 or so minutes of play on a slot, and then using the film to construct the reel stripping, and from that determine the payback. How can you do this when you have virtual stops on the reels? You get at this with the notion of "symbol weights" above. How is it possible to, in 30 minutes of play, see enough instances of a symbol to reliably give it a weight?
Background, for those interested in more: The Wizard's method seems like the same method old-school progressive slot players used. I think I first heard about this from one of David Sklansky's books.
In the old school method, one could assume that each symbol was equally likely to occur. This was a limitation (as I understand it) of mechanical slots. When slots became digital (even if they still had physical reels), that limitation was lifted, and a single symbol or blank could be much more, or less likely than others. This facilitated extremely high top award jackpots, which would need to be very unlikely in order for the machine payback to be within normal limits. Before virtual stops were introduced, when the most unlikely event, as on a mechanical slot, might be (1/32) cubed, there was no way a million coin jackpot could be offered. Virtual stops also facilitated three red sevens (say) frequently appearing one position off the payline, achieved by making the adjacent blanks more likely to appear on the payline.
If you CAN "clock" a video reel slot with a modest range of payouts in its paytable, at what point does this method break down because some symbols are just too infrequent? I can imagine you could not clock Megabucks, say, in this way.
Quote: Wheelman1175My question is about the Wizard's method of having someone film 30 or so minutes of play on a slot, and then using the film to construct the reel stripping, and from that determine the payback. How can you do this when you have virtual stops on the reels? You get at this with the notion of "symbol weights" above. How is it possible to, in 30 minutes of play, see enough instances of a symbol to reliably give it a weight?
It's the equivalent of running a simulation to determine a game's house edge instead of determining the exact house edge. It may not be precise to 15 decimal places, but close enough.
Using the empirical data technique to analyze slots works well for games where there are no hidden variables other than the symbol weights. For example, a bonus round where you pick objects has several hidden variables -- what the possible prizes are, and how they are weighted. Or a game that uses different reel strips during free spins than the ones that are used for paid spins (although that too could be estimated, it would just take longer to do).
Each spin on a standard 5x3 video slot gives you a stop for each of the 5 reels. If you gather the data for enough spins, you can get a pretty good idea of how many times each symbol occurs on each reel strip. While there might be 1,073,741,824 possible combinations, you may have enough information to accurately estimate the game's return in a surprisingly small number of spins. The reason why is because each reel is independent of the others. If each reel has 64 stops, yielding 1,073,741,824 possible combinations, then in 128 spins you can expect to have observed each reel's 64 unique stops twice.
The fun comes in trying to assemble the 3-symbol chunks together to form a 64-symbol sequence; it's like fitting together a jigsaw puzzle when you can't see what the final picture is supposed to look like. This is what makes it somewhat imperfect, but fairly close nevertheless. However, it's not really necessary to come up with reel strips. Unless the game has some special mechanics, all you need are the weights of how often each symbol appears on each reel, and from that (in conjunction with the paytable), you can estimate the game's overall return.
Quote: Wheelman1175My question is about the Wizard's method of having someone film 30 or so minutes of play on a slot, and then using the film to construct the reel stripping, and from that determine the payback. How can you do this when you have virtual stops on the reels? You get at this with the notion of "symbol weights" above. How is it possible to, in 30 minutes of play, see enough instances of a symbol to reliably give it a weight?
Video slots do not use virtual stops, with few exceptions. To alter the weight of each symbol, the designer will add or remove a symbol from the reel strip rather than changing the virtual weight of the symbol.
The exceptions that I know of are video games that were made to mimick existing physical reel games. In the physical reel games, it is necessary to use virtual stops because the number of physical stops is fixed.
