Is it Worth Moving from Your Current Slot Machine to a “Winning” Machine?

By John Grochowski on Wednesday January 18, 2017

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One of the big changes I’ve seen in more than 30 years of playing in casinos and more than 20 years of writing about gaming is an increase of couples playing together.

When I started playing, the large majority of casinogoers were men, and even couples at the casino together often split up into him at the tables and her at the slots.

Today, nearly half of casino players are women, and it’s not unusual to see couples side by side on penny slots.

That’s one of the things I thought about when this email arrived from a reader named Barry.

“My wife and I were playing penny slots together, and she was playing Goldfish,” Barry wrote. “It’s a games she’s liked for a long time, and she usually gets a bonus really often.

“This day, not so much. She was going dozens of spins at a time with no bonus, and that game is no fun without bonuses. The lady next to her was getting bonuses all the time.

“After a while the other lady left, and my wife moved onto the machine that was getting all the bonuses. Naturally, they mostly stopped. She got a few, and that was more than she was getting on her other machine, but not as many as the other lady.

“My question is, did the other lady use up all the bonuses for a while? Did the machine have to recharge? “

Players should understand that there is no recharge time or built-in makeup time on slot machines. Results are random and the odds are the same on every spin.

It’s only natural Barry’s wife wanted to move to machine that had been hot, but both the cold streak your wife experienced and the hot streak the other player had are part of normal probability. Whether you’ve gone 100 spins in a row without a bonus event or just had one on the last spin or had five bonuses in the last 10 plays, the odds are the same on the next spin.