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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Interesting, what era was the whole... "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." tagline? Wikipedia says 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Happens_Here,_Stays_Here
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Aug 30, 2023 10:39
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ThomasPaine posted:I'm not a card counter but instinctively I feel like single deck would actually make it harder to count because the whole premise is keeping a running total of how the deck is weighted wrt high and low cards. A single deck game (which I can't imagine existing today without a pile of additional weird rules) is almost certainly going to be shuffled every hand, so the best you'll get is being last to act with the max number of players. Whereas a 4 deck shoe might be in play for a good few hands meaning you have the time to establish a decent count. The sweet spot is getting the longest time playing with the smallest shoe. There were plenty of very smart people around in the old days of casinos and there were more ways to exploit vulnerabilities, but there's a reason every mathematician didn't go make millions in Vegas - it was still very difficult to do. Single deck isn't (or at least, wasn't) always re-shuffled after every hand. If you take a 4-player game of blackjack, you're starting with 10 cards. Give everyone 2 extras and you're at 20, not even half the deck. Less players and higher card values mean you'll often see less. Multiple deck blackjack has n-more of every card, and at the same time also puts a burn card in to trigger a re-shuffle a good ways before the end of the shoe. So the potential pool of remaining cards can vary a lot more, with a large buffer of cards that will never come into play. Continuous shufflers do kind of render it moot, though. Magnetic North posted:Wikipedia says 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Happens_Here,_Stays_Here The year after Wet'n'Wild closed down 
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Aug 30, 2023 11:13
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oh poo poo... lol funny i memory holed that era even though that's probably when i spent the most time in vegas.. like 2004-2011 (with a two year gap where i wasn't in the country so only visited for like 1.5 weeks). that also was when they opened up a bunch of night clubs. i think TAO at venetian and Pure at Caesars were the "hot" ones to go to. then towards the end of my time in that era they found out people wanted to party during the day time so they created the beach dayclubs
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Aug 30, 2023 11:13
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Are there any old timers that are able to share what Vegas was like before the corporate-resort or Steve Wynn era?
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Aug 30, 2023 12:42
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:There has to be... a point though where the win rate even for terrible droolers stop playing? Society is going to learn at some point, right? It's not about money. It's about winning on a random schedule. Gambling is a dopamine factory. It's drugs. Just because your body produces the drug doesn't mean it's not a drug addiction.
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Aug 30, 2023 13:17
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"inside the edge" is a good documentary btw, you all should check it out. Its legit, i recognize some of the people they interview. ThomasPaine posted:A single deck game (which I can't imagine existing today without a pile of additional weird rules) is almost certainly going to be shuffled every hand, so the best you'll get is being last to act with the max number of players. Whereas a 4 deck shoe might be in play for a good few hands meaning you have the time to establish a decent count. The sweet spot is getting the longest time playing with the smallest shoe. Hardly ever a full table taking lots of cards, so you will get a few hands out of single deck. But they won't deal anywhere near the whole deck out, and that's one of the big factors in game selection when you are counting. "penetration", the % of cards dealt before they are shuffled. Once you get the hang of counting, it doesn't really matter how many decks there are. But if they cut off half the cards, that's going to be terrible because the (true) count is less likely to ever get very high for very long. The game survey here shows how many decks are cut off at each game in each casino in Vegas: https://wizardofvegas.com/guides/blackjack-survey/ Those .19 edge games at MGM casinos used to be 100 minimum (or even 25), and spread on the main floor. Now it's 300-500, christ. If you go at off hours it'll probably still be less. But then you are guaranteed to be the only player in there, and all eyes on you is stressful.
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Aug 30, 2023 13:41
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CapnAndy posted:Smart, IMO. Legalized gambling is only gonna keep spreading, and every state that legalizes it takes away some of Vegas' attraction as The Place You Can Go To Gamble. Leaning into their strength -- that they're already a massive tourist attraction with a ton of hotels and flashy buildings -- is a good move. Who says the tourists have to show up to gamble? They just have to show up. This is true. I used to try to plan Vegas trips because I wanted to play poker and screw around with other games on the side. Now that there's an MGM ~25 minutes away and like 3 other casinos within about an hour, why bother with airfare and whatnot? But then again, I was just thinking "you know, I could go watch the Penguins play the Knights in January" or "I guess I could go see the Nats or Pirates play a series if there was a baseball stadium out there". Or "lol, what if I had like 10k to spend on F1 tickets?" (I'm actually just going to go to Montreal next year for F1.)
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Aug 30, 2023 15:15
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It's weird to think of gambling being in only one location in the country. Here in the UK is absolutely everywhere. Every high street has a bookmakers on it where you very an the dogs, houses or any other event you want. Slot machines are in every Bar and Pub (though disappearing because they are poo poo). Casinos exist in every major city. Nothing on the scale of the big casino's in the US, but you cannot go anywhere without being able to gamble in some form.
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Aug 30, 2023 15:20
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Tsietisin posted:It's weird to think of gambling being in only one location in the country. Here in the UK is absolutely everywhere. Every high street has a bookmakers on it where you very an the dogs, houses or any other event you want. In the US, we sort of skipped the "you can bet everywhere" phase of things (although when a state does legalize casino gambling, they pop up everywhere right away) and went straight to "why even go to a casino/sportsbook when you can bet on sports and play slot machines right on your phone! Download FanDuel/DraftKings/BetMGM/ActionBet/whatever today and use promo code GETFUCKED for $1000 in free bets!" Like, I even like to gamble, but the advertising for it is loving obnoxious and the way that fantasy sports and sports betting have completely pervaded every facet of sports broadcasting is garbage.
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Aug 30, 2023 15:56
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Tsietisin posted:Slot machines are in every Bar and Pub (though disappearing because they are poo poo) Otoh I have been genuinely sad to see the demise of the pub quiz machine, which has kinda vanished without much notice. I guess smartphones with 4G make them a bit unviable today. Used to love wasting a few quid on them after a pint or two back in the day. I once got absurdly lucky with the questions on 1vs100 and turned my pound into twenty on the first try 
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Aug 30, 2023 20:29
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CellBlock posted:But then again, I was just thinking "you know, I could go watch the Penguins play the Knights in January" or "I guess I could go see the Nats or Pirates play a series if there was a baseball stadium out there". Speaking of, Vegas just bought the Oakland Athletics baseball team recently. The timetable is still in the works, but they bought the land the old Tropicana used to be on and will build the new stadium right there on the strip. They likely will stay in Oakland for a few more years while it's being built, or maybe spend a year or two playing in Vegas at a minor league park, they are figuring it out last I heard. Unfortunately current ownership basically gave up on the team once this happened and they currently have the worst record in MLB, so, there's that. However, even if the A's suck, more people will be regularly in from out of town compared to most cities and would be dropping in to see their home team play anyhow like you said. It's smart and definitely leaning into the "Vegas as a vacation destination, why don't you throw a few bucks at the tables while you are here".
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Aug 30, 2023 23:42
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That's why they bought the oakland raiders a few years ago - but the raiders are a much smarter buy, because they've always been a "travels well" team with fans in attendance at every away game. The A's are... not.
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Aug 31, 2023 00:25
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leper khan posted:It's not about money. It's about winning on a random schedule. Gambling is a dopamine factory. It's drugs. Just because your body produces the drug doesn't mean it's not a drug addiction. I totally get that but the way things are going to lower win rates on slots, additional rules on blackjack or other games to increase the house edge... at some point you'll hit a threshold where that rush isn't enough for them to keep playing.
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Aug 31, 2023 10:33
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Magnetic North posted:Wikipedia says 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Happens_Here,_Stays_Here Yeah I think this was more a pivot away from their "family resort destination" 90s marketing exemplified by the Mirage, and more them going after a younger, wealthier audience. A lot of those "resort" hotels are going away too. The Mirage is going, and that's amazing given how important that hotel was to Las Vegas, but they have zero sentimentality when it comes to getting rid of old hotels.
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Aug 31, 2023 14:59
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Back in the 00s in Canada there was a pretty solid segment of 18-40 year olds, mostly men but also couples, who basically would've even consider any vacation other than Vegas. The language was "when we do Vegas this year" not "if."
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Aug 31, 2023 15:33
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:I totally get that but the way things are going to lower win rates on slots, additional rules on blackjack or other games to increase the house edge... at some point you'll hit a threshold where that rush isn't enough for them to keep playing. I disagree. Look at the house edge on e.g. lotto tickets, sports betting (especially draft kings etc.), carnival fair games, straight up street hustlers with the ol' three cups game. There is no limit to how bad of a deal people will happily take. Famously: there's a sucker born every minute.
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Aug 31, 2023 19:25
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CapnAndy posted:They can definitely be fun, especially the more video'd up, gimmicky ones. Find a youtube stream of somebody playing one (yes, they exist) -- it's genuinely entertaining to just watch the reels spin and have a bunch of flashy nonsense go off. Double points if said flashy nonsense is an IP you like. Relevant comic strip. I was looking for something else, came across that strip, and remembered the thread. The closest I've come is being at the airport in Reno, thinking "oh hey, I'm in Nevada, I could ... gamble?", and being very disappointed when I realized the slot machines were all digital. I was picturing physical wheels.
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Aug 31, 2023 21:53
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Vavrek posted:The closest I've come is being at the airport in Reno, thinking "oh hey, I'm in Nevada, I could ... gamble?", and being very disappointed when I realized the slot machines were all digital. I was picturing physical wheels. Those do usually exist in the casinos, unless they've thrown them all out in the last year or two... you just have to wander around to find the dank corner they've been shoved in. The airport probably ditched them years ago, though.
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Aug 31, 2023 22:38
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Vavrek posted:Relevant comic strip. I was looking for something else, came across that strip, and remembered the thread. The ones with physical wheels are computer controlled too, they just spin plastic instead of shining LEDs.
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Aug 31, 2023 23:05
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Vavrek posted:Relevant comic strip. I was looking for something else, came across that strip, and remembered the thread. I enjoy videos of people playing them because it allows me to experience some highs and lows without actually having to wager any money. You can play a lot of casino table games for free in various ways, but slot machines tend to be a little harder to enjoy for free. That said, I always wanted to own a slot machine.
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Aug 31, 2023 23:51
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Leperflesh posted:I disagree. Look at the house edge on e.g. lotto tickets, sports betting (especially draft kings etc.), carnival fair games, straight up street hustlers with the ol' three cups game. There is no limit to how bad of a deal people will happily take. Famously: there's a sucker born every minute. True but it's definitely interesting to me how Blackjack used to be more popular back in the day but this chart is amazing to me how it's changed over time. https://twitter.com/JacobsVegasLife/status/1690053160709271552?s=20
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Sep 1, 2023 04:57
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Vavrek posted:The closest I've come is being at the airport in Reno, thinking "oh hey, I'm in Nevada, I could ... gamble?", and being very disappointed when I realized the slot machines were all digital. I was picturing physical wheels. Some of the older downtown and smaller Casino still have older slot machines that seem to manually spin. For what it's worth, I ended up in Pure Platinum  once and I swear the video poker machines have to be running Windows 3.1. 
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Sep 1, 2023 05:01
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Some of the older downtown and smaller Casino still have older slot machines that seem to manually spin. For what it's worth, I ended up in Pure Platinum There are a lot of slot machines that have physical reels as a display, but most states have required pure digital logic for a very long time. Checking Nevada's regs, they don't appear to explicitly outlaw pure-mechanical slots but it would be nearly impossible to meet the various other regs with one. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RAI70O6FU3E This is a pretty good example - this machine has physical reels, and many examples have a big chunky lever you can pull. It is entirely computer-controlled.
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Sep 1, 2023 05:11
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Gnoman posted:There are a lot of slot machines that have physical reels as a display, but most states have required pure digital logic for a very long time. Checking Nevada's regs, they don't appear to explicitly outlaw pure-mechanical slots but it would be nearly impossible to meet the various other regs with one. Lame. Does anyone know if the ones in 4 Queens or Binion's are still authentic?
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Sep 1, 2023 05:26
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Lame. Does anyone know if the ones in 4 Queens or Binion's are still authentic? Unless you’re in your 60s, physical reels and big chunky lever have been vestigial since before you were born.
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Sep 1, 2023 06:06
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Almost all of the mechanical/analog slot machines have been ‘hacked.’ Dudes would sell little pieces of metal to folks so they could jimmy the machines and new techniques were discovered all the time until the casinos switched entirely to digital.
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Sep 1, 2023 15:33
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They're also extremely easy for the casinos to rig undetectably, which can bring the keep percentage out of what the relevant regulations allow.
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Sep 1, 2023 15:58
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Yeah like the nevada gaming commission needs to be able to pop open any random slot machine, plug in, and do an audit that shows it is being run fairly and not cheating. You can't really do that with a box full of a hundred little brass gears and springs and such. An old-timey slot machine may be interesting and cool and neat, but it's not what you want to play if you actually want to receive the odds claimed by the operator.
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Sep 1, 2023 17:16
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Leperflesh posted:Yeah like the nevada gaming commission needs to be able to pop open any random slot machine, plug in, and do an audit that shows it is being run fairly and not cheating. You can't really do that with a box full of a hundred little brass gears and springs and such. An old-timey slot machine may be interesting and cool and neat, but it's not what you want to play if you actually want to receive the odds claimed by the operator.
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Sep 1, 2023 17:32
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Slot machines are extremely expensive. If it doesn't get a few thousand pulls within a couple of weeks, it gets sold back to the distributor (or, more often, sent back to the owner that leased it to you) and replaced with something that will.
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Sep 1, 2023 17:48
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I chatted with a guy who wrote software for gambling machines - mostly video poker type things but some other stuff too - quite a few years ago. So this info is a bit out of date. But what he told me at the time was that none of those machines have a true random number generator; instead, some vendor generates a table of random numbers, which is securely stored within the machine, and those are then used in sequence for each pull or roll or go. An auditor can plug in and validate that the table of numbers exists, is truly random, and hasn't been tampered with: and of course, is not accessible or readable by anyone, including the casino. An old-timey pull machine isn't truly random either, but the only way to know is to have a very long record of results and check them, and you don't get that record from some clockwork thingy. So it's got to write a record to a log, that log has to be long enough, and it's probably a lot easier to tamper with. now I have no idea about the sort of middle ground, like machines made in the 1980s or 90s or something that could easily have an embedded chip and some kind of electronic/computerized storage. Might be talking out of my rear end a bit. But the gist of it is, the auditor is provided with tools that lets them be reasonably certain a modern gaming machine (anything made in this century) is fair from the factory, day 1, regardless of how much or little it's used.
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Sep 1, 2023 22:03
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I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. If you could read the table of numbers, even as an auditor, you now know the entire future of that game. You would have to also generate a new batch of these random number tables for every individual machine, because otherwise you could pick up where in the sequence the machine was and adjust accordingly. That said, something like this did happen a few years ago. Some Russian dudes ended up reverse engineering how a particular brand of slot machine's random number generator worked, using videos of results, and then predicted when to push the button to get good spins. The machines don't have a long list of numbers they cycle through, they generate new ones on demand using various methods. The problem is when they make a random number algorithm that's just "pull_random_number(CURRENT_TIME)" because then you can predict it.
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Sep 1, 2023 22:23
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Yeah modern ones just have a microchip to generate a random number I'm sure, but I'm talking about somewhat older machines. My understanding was that the table was billions of numbers long, so it wouldn't cycle through multiple times but rather it'd never get through the whole thing even once? But this is a half-remembered detail, the important part is the auditability can't rely on the thing having been used a bunch first, they're auditable from day zero.
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Sep 1, 2023 23:26
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for pseudorandomness like that they could cross-index the seed number from the table against any other fluctuating variable (say the last digit in the time in MS between the two most recent button presses) and have an unpredictable outcome.
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Sep 2, 2023 02:21
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Zamujasa posted:I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. If you could read the table of numbers, even as an auditor, you now know the entire future of that game. You would have to also generate a new batch of these random number tables for every individual machine, because otherwise you could pick up where in the sequence the machine was and adjust accordingly. That was my thought as well, years ago Dota and HoN had to be specifically updated because the "rainbow tables" or RNG Tables weren't random enough and some players figured out how to slightly game certain abilities that had a chance to do bonus damage.
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Sep 2, 2023 09:17
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:That was my thought as well, years ago Dota and HoN had to be specifically updated because the "rainbow tables" or RNG Tables weren't random enough and some players figured out how to slightly game certain abilities that had a chance to do bonus damage. could you link something about this? quick google wasn't helpful and i love that stuff
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Sep 3, 2023 00:39
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uniball posted:could you link something about this? quick google wasn't helpful and i love that stuff Hah never would have thought you’d ask a question about dota, or I’d answer one, long time bud! Psuedo RNG https://dota2.fandom.com/wiki/Random_Distribution
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Sep 8, 2023 07:13
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Psuedo RNG in layman's terms: true randomness is very, very hard, but 99% of the time, all you need is to be random enough. Psuedo RNG is a die that comes with a board game. Rounded edges, soft plastic. It might have a slight bias, or develop one over time through wear, but who cares? So long as nobody knows what their next roll will be, it's doing its job. True RNG is a casino die. Sharp edges, hard plastic, precision cut, carefully weighed to ensure perfect balance so each roll is truly unpredictable. It's a better die, strictly speaking. It's also a lot more expensive, and it'd be a tremendous waste of money to insist on using one for family game night. Using true RNG on anything where nothing important is at stake (big enough sums of money, secrets, potentially people's lives) would be just as wasteful. Also, video games are a special case where they'll sometimes intentionally introduce bias, when leaving it up to even psuedo randomness would be less fun -- missing an 80% chance to hit five times in a row is a completely valid result, but it is also bullshit and it'll make your players mad, so a lot of games have a little data gremlin watching the results to go "well, that's enough of that" and override the results if it sees a streak go on too long.
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Sep 8, 2023 07:54
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CapnAndy posted:Also, video games are a special case where they'll sometimes intentionally introduce bias, when leaving it up to even psuedo randomness would be less fun -- missing an 80% chance to hit five times in a row is a completely valid result, but it is also bullshit and it'll make your players mad, so a lot of games have a little data gremlin watching the results to go "well, that's enough of that" and override the results if it sees a streak go on too long. Regarding this: Collateral Damage posted:
If an attack says Hit Chance: X%, the reasonable assumption is that in the background, a (pseudo)random number from 0 to 99 is generated, and if it's less than X, the attack hits. That way, a 100% chance hits all the time, a 0% chance hits never, a 50% chance hits half the time, and a 90% chance hits nine times out of ten. This is not what Fire Emblem does. Fire Emblem says Hit Chance: X. Not percent. Then it rolls two dice, generates two numbers on the interval [0, 99], and takes their average. It that is less than X, the attack hits. A 100 always hits, a 0 always misses, and a 50 hits half the time, but a 90 hits 98.1% of the time. Likewise, Hit Chances under 50 hit less often than they would with a single generated number. A Hit Chance of 10 hits 2.1% of the time, because, c'mon, how often are you actually going to hit on a 10? What do you mean, one in ten? It's a clever and fairly simple-to-implement system (it's, what, a couple extra lines of code?) that produces results which match people's (faulty) intuitions about probability very well.
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Sep 8, 2023 08:44
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Another game that deliberately uses poor RNG generation is Doom. There is a preset list of scrambled numbers from 0-255 and each call for random values just takes the next value off the list. This has been abused by TAS players. As many developers and any casino will tell you, humans are terrible at assessing randomness. Humans think randomness means roughly equality. When that idiot bets black because the last 5 numbers were red, an xcom dev wakes up screaming. The above example is a way of softening true RNG for our silly meat brains, and Magic the Gatherings most recent digital offering also uses something similar to provide starting hands that seem fair.
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Sep 8, 2023 12:11
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