Also, Frank, hitting a royal flush does not make
a machine any more or less likely to hit another,
although your question does prompt me to recall
a gentleman named Stevey Tyler, who hit three-$4000
royal flushes in a row at a Reno, NV supermarket.
The bagger asked "Paper or plastic?"
for hauling out the loot.
Many
players like you erroneously believe that if they
had stayed put and inserted just five more coins,
or had pressed the play button on a coinless machine
one more time, that royal -- that someone else
fortuitously hit -- would have been theirs.
In
reality, when a machine is sitting in idle mode,
even for a split second, it will be constantly
crunching numbers waiting for the next sucker
-- Oops! sportsman, I meant -- to come along.
When the next participant walks over and inserts
a coin, the machine is triggered into knowing
it has a live gambler on the hook.
When
you feed a coin into the machine, the random number
generator (RGN) instantaneously stops crunching
numbers and picks the combination of cards you
will see on the screen. From your moving to another
machine, until the next player inserts their coins,
the combination of hand possibilities played through
is incalculable. Yet the chances of anybody hitting
that royal remain forever the same, about one
in 40,000, no matter what the machine had been
doing moments ago.
I
would recommend that you do move from one machine
to another if the buttons are sticky, or if the
lights are blinking, or you particularly don't
enjoy cigarette smoke, or to hide from your tapped
out brother-in-law, or for anything else that
annoys you.
Oh, by the way, the odds of Mr. Tyler hitting
those three royals in a row were 32.8 trillion
to one. He took paper.
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Columns By Mark Pilarski
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