Frank wrote:
> After about our 50,000,000 hand as a team, we became convinced VP
> machines were honest and random.
nightoftheiguana2000 wrote:
It's always useful to pencil out some numbers. I can only guess at
what you were doing, so feel free to correct if you'd like. Let's
say your team was mostly playing 8/5 jacks quarter progressives
with a start level of $2500 on the royal. Since you had a team and
played till it hit, the meter movement was like cash back to you
and didn't add to your variance. But the variance of the game
itself is about 130. After 50 million hands, the 2SD range would be
plus or minus about $200,000. You would expect to be somewhere in
that range some 95% of the time, but it would be unusual (and
suspect) to hit the average exactly.
NOTI, I'm surprised you feel a need to dissect Frank's assertion ... I would expect you'd have no problem with it on face value.
I hardly think that you perceive that Frank is suggesting he truly hit expectation on the nose. What I get is that over long play, Frank saw results that closely matched expectation %'s.
That, of course, is what's key to Frank having comfort with machine "fairness". Even acknowledging that variance from absolute $ result expectation only grows with additional play, so long as the % deviation is small, one has strong confidence of expected profit from a solid play over time. (I'm not suggesting anything new to you ... this is the very implication of the "N0" concept you originally introduced here.)
In the scenario you suggest by example, the 2SD range comes to about +/- 0.3% of coin-in. Under the plays that Frank, et al, likely engaged in, I imagine that translates into a near-lock on a handsome profit. (I don't need actual numbers to envision Frank's specifics spell out a similarly strong situation.)
- H.
Speaking for myself, reviewing my play history, a mere 200,000 hands of play of a low variance game such as JB is sufficient for me to gain very strong confidence in general machine fairness.
Over such a relative short span, obviously aggregate results are subject to some wide dispersion. However, back out the RF contribution and what I see in my records is that results adhere very close to expectation on a percentage basis.
I don't sweat the "fairness" of RF hits (so long as I witness a reasonably frequency of hits around me), since only a dolt of a casino manager would short RF frequency. It's far too evident. (Were I looking to short a machine, and had the capability, I'd put a very small dent in S/F/FH frequency that would be far more imperceptible yet yield as much as any RF gaffe.)