It seems they are far from "truly random" if the postings here and elsewhere on the Internet are correct. I myself have had some truly weird results out of them - even considering the statistical odds... when I say weird, I'm also thinking "possibly bent" - but maybe I'd just had a worse than normal run on these machines?
Seems strange to me that I can win online, I can win in casinos, but that winning on the FOBT machines seems much more difficult.... sure, I've had some ok sessions on them, but I've had far more "strange results" (i.e. 14 reds in a row, twice within an hour) than I've typically experienced on a casino roulette wheel... of course these things can happen, but the odds against are BILLIONS to one.
Here's my few thoughts about the FOBT machines and how to beat them etc: http://beatthecasinos.blogspot.com/2007 ... -fobt.html , http://beatthecasinos.blogspot.com/2007 ... rvice.html
I recommend avoiding these machines, and playing much superior and friendly roulette games online, where you actually have a chance: http://beatthecasinos.blogspot.com/2007 ... -edge.htmland http://beatthecasinos.blogspot.com/2008 ... lette.html
What do other players in this forum think about the FOBT machines?
Why does anyone play those bookie FOBT machines?
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jeffvickers
- Senior Member
- Posts: 2069
- Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 12:05 pm
- Location: North of England
Wow, you're quite the mathematician!ma71lda wrote:Why has every topic got a post from you to a link? 27 and counting in one day.
Apologies, the links were there to provide useful (I think) reading about the topics at hand - and to save me repeating those same thoughts in the forum post itself.
If if makes you (and others) happier though, I'll reduce my link to post ratio - look, this post has NO links! :-)
This article is now five years old.
In any list of bullet points likely to flow today from the phrase "the trouble with this government is... ", this one is unlikely to make anyone's top 20. But I offer it anyway, in the confident expectation that before long this will have become a medium-ranking cause célèbre of governmental idiocy.
The trouble with this government today is... it knows nothing about gambling. By this, I don't mean gambling with the lives of British troops, the fragile construct we wryly know as "parliamentary democracy", or with their own reputations and careers. At these disciplines, Mr Tony Blair and the gang are inveterate and often wild gamblers.
What I mean is that they know nothing about the deliciously seedy world of the betting shop and the casino. As one who spends much of his life and income in such places, I can report that never in the last six-and-a-bit years, in any number of establishments within a two-mile radius of Westminster, have I spotted so much as a PPS studying the form for the 2.37 dog race from Monmore Green, or twisting on 15 against a dealer's ace. Of all Her Majesty's ministers, however, none seems less well qualified to oversee this ill-lit area of national life than the one charged with overseeing it. The secretary of state for culture, media and sport appears, from brief acquaintance, to be a friendly and charming person, but Tessa Jowell also strikes me as a peculiarly unlikely patroness of William Hill and Ladbrokes.
Tessa is known to some of us as Nanny Jowell, a nickname born of her penchant for trying to mould our behaviour, albeit more with a spoonful of sugar than with the firm hand so mythically popular with members on the Tory benches opposite. When it comes to the telly, to take one area of her remit, she condemned Chris Morris's magnificent Brass Eye on paedophilia, and she has urged us to stop watching those silly reality TV shows in favour of something more high-minded.
So it's a perplexing paradox that, when it comes to gambling, this ministerial Mary Poppins has been so astoundingly laissez-faire. She took her eye off the ball - the roulette ball - for a moment, and the results could well be catastrophic.
As a small and ill-considered part of the general trend towards liberalising gaming in Britain, Ms Jowell's department recently permitted high street betting shops to instal touch-screen roulette machines. You stick your coins - or more likely your £10 and £20 notes - into a device that sucks them in, you tap the screen to place your chips, you press a button, and a computerised simulation of a tiny ivory ball spins around the wheel until it plops into one of the 37 numbers.
Those of you who haven't spent the last 20 years trying to bankrupt yourselves playing roulette may view this as a harmless amusement. But my bank manager and I can assure you that it is gaming's very own crack cocaine.
Roulette is one of the most instantly and potently addictive things known to mankind. An explosive game in which huge multiples of the stake can be quickly won, its special wickedness is subliminally to persuade players - conditioned as we are to seek out patterns in numerical sequences - that if 17 hasn't come up for an hour, and if red hasn't appeared for 10 spins, they are more likely to come up next time. Which, of course, they most certainly are not. Every spin provokes an adrenalin surge and doubtless other psycho-chemical reactions that may make the game physically, as well as psychologically, addictive.
For centuries addicts have driven themselves to insanity and beyond trying to work out winning systems - a preternaturally futile pastime, since however you bet the odds must always favour the house to the identical degree. My first exposure came as a small boy on a trip to my father's Aunt Lily in Blackpool, where I was kept awake most of the night by the sound of the ivory ball clicking away in her sitting room as she sought a way to beat the immutable laws of probability. To this day, the casinos of Europe feature ancient contessas, graffens and grand duchesses wearing wedding rings of zircon, the diamonds pawned long ago to feed the craving.
But at least with a casino, you must make the effort to get there in the first place. All over continental Europe, you have to show a passport or ID card, while in Britain (for the moment, at least, until the law is changed) it's necessary to become a member 24 hours before entering. Which explains my cunning and hugely effective self-help plan of never joining one in London.
Thanks to Ms Jowell's carelessness, that one vital barrier between the addict and the addiction has already gone. Every 100 yards on every high street, two, three or four of these machines are in constant use by the young, middle aged and elderly, by the well-off and the potless. Last week, in a William Hill in Bayswater, I watched a shrunken old girl feed what looked like her entire weekly pension into one in 10 minutes, while a friend was telling me about an Albanian who stuffed every penny of the £1,000 painfully saved for a trip home to Tirana into another.
According to one district manager, William Hill now takes more money from these machines than from dogs, horses and all other sports betting combined. And no wonder, because once you start it is exceedingly difficult to stop. Hit a winning streak and (demented as this sounds) you persuade yourself that it will never end. A losing run, conversely, entices you to keep going on the wildly mistaken premise that your numbers will come up to get you out of jail. On an intellectual level, of course we are well aware that the odds can only be beaten in a virtual world of unlimited stakes, unlimited funds and unlimited time. But in the real world, what kind of rival is the intellect to an addiction? Ms Jowell has lately been fretting about how to revive the comatose national lottery. One obvious step in that direction would be to get these machines out of the betting shops, and leave roulette to casinos - rightly furious, as the lottery should be, about this unfair diversion of their revenues.
I will be back in William Hill today, chain-smoking and doing crazy jigs to encourage my numbers to come up. Whether they will depends on an online, random number selection system somewhere in Scotland. But what I will bet on is this. The numbers will soon be up, and melodramatically so, in Gamblers Anonymous meetings across Britain - and they and the human misery they represent will keep rising until Nanny takes drastic action to put temptation beyond her weak-willed charges
In any list of bullet points likely to flow today from the phrase "the trouble with this government is... ", this one is unlikely to make anyone's top 20. But I offer it anyway, in the confident expectation that before long this will have become a medium-ranking cause célèbre of governmental idiocy.
The trouble with this government today is... it knows nothing about gambling. By this, I don't mean gambling with the lives of British troops, the fragile construct we wryly know as "parliamentary democracy", or with their own reputations and careers. At these disciplines, Mr Tony Blair and the gang are inveterate and often wild gamblers.
What I mean is that they know nothing about the deliciously seedy world of the betting shop and the casino. As one who spends much of his life and income in such places, I can report that never in the last six-and-a-bit years, in any number of establishments within a two-mile radius of Westminster, have I spotted so much as a PPS studying the form for the 2.37 dog race from Monmore Green, or twisting on 15 against a dealer's ace. Of all Her Majesty's ministers, however, none seems less well qualified to oversee this ill-lit area of national life than the one charged with overseeing it. The secretary of state for culture, media and sport appears, from brief acquaintance, to be a friendly and charming person, but Tessa Jowell also strikes me as a peculiarly unlikely patroness of William Hill and Ladbrokes.
Tessa is known to some of us as Nanny Jowell, a nickname born of her penchant for trying to mould our behaviour, albeit more with a spoonful of sugar than with the firm hand so mythically popular with members on the Tory benches opposite. When it comes to the telly, to take one area of her remit, she condemned Chris Morris's magnificent Brass Eye on paedophilia, and she has urged us to stop watching those silly reality TV shows in favour of something more high-minded.
So it's a perplexing paradox that, when it comes to gambling, this ministerial Mary Poppins has been so astoundingly laissez-faire. She took her eye off the ball - the roulette ball - for a moment, and the results could well be catastrophic.
As a small and ill-considered part of the general trend towards liberalising gaming in Britain, Ms Jowell's department recently permitted high street betting shops to instal touch-screen roulette machines. You stick your coins - or more likely your £10 and £20 notes - into a device that sucks them in, you tap the screen to place your chips, you press a button, and a computerised simulation of a tiny ivory ball spins around the wheel until it plops into one of the 37 numbers.
Those of you who haven't spent the last 20 years trying to bankrupt yourselves playing roulette may view this as a harmless amusement. But my bank manager and I can assure you that it is gaming's very own crack cocaine.
Roulette is one of the most instantly and potently addictive things known to mankind. An explosive game in which huge multiples of the stake can be quickly won, its special wickedness is subliminally to persuade players - conditioned as we are to seek out patterns in numerical sequences - that if 17 hasn't come up for an hour, and if red hasn't appeared for 10 spins, they are more likely to come up next time. Which, of course, they most certainly are not. Every spin provokes an adrenalin surge and doubtless other psycho-chemical reactions that may make the game physically, as well as psychologically, addictive.
For centuries addicts have driven themselves to insanity and beyond trying to work out winning systems - a preternaturally futile pastime, since however you bet the odds must always favour the house to the identical degree. My first exposure came as a small boy on a trip to my father's Aunt Lily in Blackpool, where I was kept awake most of the night by the sound of the ivory ball clicking away in her sitting room as she sought a way to beat the immutable laws of probability. To this day, the casinos of Europe feature ancient contessas, graffens and grand duchesses wearing wedding rings of zircon, the diamonds pawned long ago to feed the craving.
But at least with a casino, you must make the effort to get there in the first place. All over continental Europe, you have to show a passport or ID card, while in Britain (for the moment, at least, until the law is changed) it's necessary to become a member 24 hours before entering. Which explains my cunning and hugely effective self-help plan of never joining one in London.
Thanks to Ms Jowell's carelessness, that one vital barrier between the addict and the addiction has already gone. Every 100 yards on every high street, two, three or four of these machines are in constant use by the young, middle aged and elderly, by the well-off and the potless. Last week, in a William Hill in Bayswater, I watched a shrunken old girl feed what looked like her entire weekly pension into one in 10 minutes, while a friend was telling me about an Albanian who stuffed every penny of the £1,000 painfully saved for a trip home to Tirana into another.
According to one district manager, William Hill now takes more money from these machines than from dogs, horses and all other sports betting combined. And no wonder, because once you start it is exceedingly difficult to stop. Hit a winning streak and (demented as this sounds) you persuade yourself that it will never end. A losing run, conversely, entices you to keep going on the wildly mistaken premise that your numbers will come up to get you out of jail. On an intellectual level, of course we are well aware that the odds can only be beaten in a virtual world of unlimited stakes, unlimited funds and unlimited time. But in the real world, what kind of rival is the intellect to an addiction? Ms Jowell has lately been fretting about how to revive the comatose national lottery. One obvious step in that direction would be to get these machines out of the betting shops, and leave roulette to casinos - rightly furious, as the lottery should be, about this unfair diversion of their revenues.
I will be back in William Hill today, chain-smoking and doing crazy jigs to encourage my numbers to come up. Whether they will depends on an online, random number selection system somewhere in Scotland. But what I will bet on is this. The numbers will soon be up, and melodramatically so, in Gamblers Anonymous meetings across Britain - and they and the human misery they represent will keep rising until Nanny takes drastic action to put temptation beyond her weak-willed charges
A good essay. The human condition is a curious one. An ancient maths text book from my past, detailed the parable of the 'oily stranger'. One of the ways the oily stranger extracts money from the escapists, is by the spinning of the ball on a roulette wheel. The book did have a point.
It did plant a seed of doubt in my mind, but it didn't stop me playing MPU3 classics in seaside arcades in my youth.
The language of roulette is worldwide. Take these Polish 'invaders' you love to mention now and again. Stick a roulette wheel, be it virtual or real, and a Pie Factory in front of them. It's roulette every time.
It did plant a seed of doubt in my mind, but it didn't stop me playing MPU3 classics in seaside arcades in my youth.
The language of roulette is worldwide. Take these Polish 'invaders' you love to mention now and again. Stick a roulette wheel, be it virtual or real, and a Pie Factory in front of them. It's roulette every time.
why? I can only assume that because of they way they play to a %age, and appear to suck/streak - some people play them in the hope of catching a big streak, as opposed to playing a truly random wheel at a casino.
Other people might prefer them as it's much easier and quicker to pop round to the bookies and see how you can do out a £20, than going to a casino.
Other people might prefer them as it's much easier and quicker to pop round to the bookies and see how you can do out a £20, than going to a casino.
Convenience is a huge factor. Plus being able to get away with behaviour that pit bosses in a casino would NOT tolerate must surely be another huge plus for some miscreants.
DildoDez.....ahem.......giggle....cough......are you......(chuckle)........suggesting that these games are not......hiccup.......entirely fair? Are you insinuating that they pay to % in a compensated manner, by way of streaking?
DildoDez.....ahem.......giggle....cough......are you......(chuckle)........suggesting that these games are not......hiccup.......entirely fair? Are you insinuating that they pay to % in a compensated manner, by way of streaking?
lol for a fairly intelligent guy like I have assumed you are jg (perhaps eroneously going by this) you seem to give the impression you think these fobt roulettes are rigged...
a game casinos have historically made billions on when its not rigged - what is the point of rigging it!!! Do you not realise they will make so much money when its fair, that there would be 0 point in rigging the game - I often wonder why alot of people do not realise this simple fact - THE GAME OF ROULETTE IS DESIGNED TO MAKE THE HOUSE MONEY!!!
a game casinos have historically made billions on when its not rigged - what is the point of rigging it!!! Do you not realise they will make so much money when its fair, that there would be 0 point in rigging the game - I often wonder why alot of people do not realise this simple fact - THE GAME OF ROULETTE IS DESIGNED TO MAKE THE HOUSE MONEY!!!
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trayhop123
- Senior Member
- Posts: 4901
- Joined: Tue Jan 22, 2008 9:21 pm
- Location: leicester
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jeffvickers
- Senior Member
- Posts: 2069
- Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 12:05 pm
- Location: North of England
Question to JG, Why the constant software updates for the Roulette?ob wrote:lol for a fairly intelligent guy like I have assumed you are jg (perhaps eroneously going by this) you seem to give the impression you think these fobt roulettes are rigged...
a game casinos have historically made billions on when its not rigged - what is the point of rigging it!!! Do you not realise they will make so much money when its fair, that there would be 0 point in rigging the game - I often wonder why alot of people do not realise this simple fact - THE GAME OF ROULETTE IS DESIGNED TO MAKE THE HOUSE MONEY!!!
ie. Version 11.3.1
I believe the Random Number Generator is based on the S16 random generator. The more losing games, the liklihood the Winning games are due, this will give addicts a "Winning Streak", which makes them more addicted. This is the reason the Number found is always the 1 that happens not to be covered, far too often. They just don't play truly random. You can see that with your own eyes.
Catching a Streak right can keep you hooked.
A huge losing streak means you are more likely to chase losses.
The big Bookmakers know this.
Play a game of Roulette at a casino sensibily, you don't lose too much over the evening.
Play sensibily in a Bookies, you are in trouble, as the machine will play in a manner to either fuck you big time or win big time (rare)