Do you ever play a slot machine and it seems to stop paying right before you get a reasonable payout win? If you were playing $1 a spin, the machine would need to pay out several times that amount to make it seem like a substantial payout – so it stops paying. It feels more like a ‘cheat’ than anything else. It almost seems the machine needs to’recover’ from that big win before it will pay again, which is odd since they are supposed to be completely random.
In the past, slot manufacturers were limited in the number of combinations of symbols they could produce because a single symbol occupied only one physical space on the reels. Manufacturers solved this problem by weighting particular symbols more or less heavily. This made the odds of losing symbols appearing on a payline disproportionate to their frequency on the physical reels. The result was that the player’s money disappeared faster.
With the advent of electronic slot machines, the weightings were replaced by computer programs. This meant that winning symbols could occupy more than just one spot on the screen, but many of them simultaneously. This resulted in higher probabilities of losing, but it also created a greater variation in the size of wins and losses.
Some machines, especially those connected to a progressive jackpot, are programmed to streak intentionally. This is because the jackpot must be won before a certain amount of money is reached, so they cheat in order to reach that threshold as soon as possible.
Japanese slot machines do not have this problem because they use a different system. They have skill-stop buttons and must stop within 190 milliseconds of the button being pressed. This is a much shorter time than a human can react, and it is possible to beat the machine by “catching” the spins at the exact moment that they are about to turn up a high percentage of symbols.