Can You Predict Slot Machines

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Can You Predict Slot Machines Without

“Time on Device” (TOD) is the #1 metric that casinos and slot machine manufacturers are.

Predicting a Slot Machine's PRNG

Can You Predict Slot Machines Jackpots

Wired is reporting on a new slot machine hack. A Russian group has reverse-engineered a particular brand of slot machine — from Austrian company Novomatic — and can simulate and predict the pseudo-random number generator.

The cell phones from Pechanga, combined with intelligence from investigations in Missouri and Europe, revealed key details. According to Willy Allison, a Las Vegas­-based casino security consultant who has been tracking the Russian scam for years, the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.

Can You Predict Slot Machines Jackpot

“The normal reaction time for a human is about a quarter of a second, which is why they do that,” says Allison, who is also the founder of the annual World Game Protection Conference. The timed spins are not always successful, but they result in far more payouts than a machine normally awards: Individual scammers typically win more than $10,000 per day. (Allison notes that those operatives try to keep their winnings on each machine to less than $1,000, to avoid arousing suspicion.) A four-person team working multiple casinos can earn upwards of $250,000 in a single week.

The easy solution is to use a random-number generator that accepts local entropy, like Fortuna. But there’s probably no way to easily reprogram those old machines.

Can You Predict Slot Machines Machine

Posted on February 8, 2017 at 6:48 AM • 31 Comments