How to win at Pokies!

Australians are big players of pokies but according to data the Aussies don’t have much success and every year they lose approximately $10 billion! This isn’t necessarily down to bad luck, all pokie machines are designed to just pay out a certain amount of the money put in. Down under the payout for pokies is usually set at 87% which means that on average, the pokies will pay out 87% of the money put in. It also means what while you may have a win every so often, the longer you play, the more likely you are to lose.

Looking for the weak spot

Usually, when you hit play on a pokies machine the symbols will begin to spin and depending on the different pattern that forms when they stop, you might get a payout. It’s important for the “house” that the gambler can’t predict when a winning sequence will appear. In general, pokies machines rely on random number generators which typically use complex mathematical formulae based on a single number referred to as the “seed”. If the seed is a number with 20 digits, you could square that number to get a 40 digit number. Then you might take the first 20 digits and multiply them by the last 20 digits to give you another 40 digit number! You might repeat this 100 times and only then, pick the middle five digits. These five numbers can determine the display on the screen that the pokies player sees and if they are a continuous bunch of sevens, the player will win.

How to beat the pokies house

In 2009, practically all gambling in Russia was banned and all casinos sold their pokies machines cheaply to whoever would take them. Some people in St Petersburg bought some of them and tried to reverse engineer them to see if they could work the machines out. The Russians only tested out the Aristocrat Mark VI, which is an old pokies machine manufactured in Australia. After each one cent play, the gamblers would enter the pokies screen display into an app on an iPhone hidden in their pocket. The mathematicians were able to work out where exactly in its pseudo-random number sequence the pokie machine was.

A team of four Russian gamblers would end up winning a quarter of a million dollars in a single week. They were careful to avoid the really large payouts so they wouldn’t attract too much attention to themselves. However, American casinos don’t like losing money and when they worked out that the Russians had used mathematics to win at the pokies, they started jailing them, so don’t follow the Russians by trying to cheat!

There are approximately 100,000 Aristocrat Mark VI pokies still in operation around the globe, so see if you can win big!

Check out our information piece about Pokies now!