>>>I figure my time is best spent in Vegas if I walk up to the nearest table, empty my wallet, and walk away. ;-)
>>>
>>>Actually, I usually just play video poker and ALWAYS make money.
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>Video Poker has one of the highest payouts of any game.
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>>You just can't play like a poker player. You have to play like you're debugging the software. I've spent 20 years diagnosing software and it's software that runs those machines.
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>>>Dan
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>>Yes, but aren't the cards still random? Is there really a way to outsmart the game?
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>>Mike
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>Good question. Probably random within the payout parameters it is programmed for (different payouts for different locales....). They key is, you can play skillfully against it, and if you are good, you can win. This was discussed this week on the Travel channel (Winning in Vegas).

Actually the code behind it has a really good random number generator, but it's just that ... 'random'. Generally speaking these machines have about a 91.2% payout... in other words for every 1 dollar stuffed into the machine, over time it should average out to spitting out about 91 cents, but again.. "random".
Another interesting tid-bit that I ran across about 2 years ago... there was a guy working for one of these companies that develops the software for some of these video poker machines and he actually put his own little 'easter-egg' in the software ... a certain set of actions would cause it to payout...hahaha
There was also someone who had done somthing similar to a video slot machine program - but the oppoiste was true, the thing was designed NOT to ever land on the 'big payoffs'. Finally someone who ran a bar figured out there was something wrong because the machine would normally hit a big one every week or so, then suddenly 3 months go by & no one won...haha