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In This Chapter
Slot Machine’s conditions
General definition of a streak
Cold and hot streaks
General definition of a splash
Streak versus Splash
6 empirical observations 

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If you played slots for an extended period of time you, undoubtedly, came to the same conclusions about slot machines’ behavior as other players. Let’s enumerate them one by one.

1)      When the players play any slots, they find themselves only in two opposite situations. Either they lose money consistently, or machine gives back more than it takes with some regularity. Players call a machine that takes a “cold” one. Machine that gives is a “hot” one.

2)      The situation is possible when a machine is “choppy”. It takes and gives in a sequence keeping a player’s bankroll afloat without a progress in any direction – positive or negative. However, that condition is usually a short lived one and is an aberration from a normal machine’s tendency to run in streaks.

3)      When a machine is “cold”, it usually stays cold for an extended period of time. The same applies to a “hot” machine but to a lot smaller degree. We can express these facts saying that machines have “inertia” or tendency to stay in the same mode. Duration of that period is unpredictable. There is no way of knowing when that period will end. Theoretically and in practice, it can end in the next moment of your play. Most of the time, when you sit down at a cold slot machine, it keeps you down for quite a while taking money from you pull by pull. Players call these extended periods of cold or hot behavior “streaks”. Some call them “trends”, “cycles”, “waves”, “periods” etc. – meaning is the same.

4)      Another fact observed by slots playing public is that cold streaks are usually long and uneventful ones and hot streaks are short and violent. Once, I was taking a statistical data off Double Double Diamond 4-time pay 3-reel dollar machine. I saw in a minute that a machine was running cold. Unsuspecting player played it for a half an hour losing about $200. Another player “without a clue” took his place. That machine stayed in an ice age for 4 hours inflicting unpleasant losses to seven players. Finally, I got tired and left the machine still being cold, when an eighth victim was inserting his cash ready to get the same treatment. Later on, I played that particular machine many times in the last few years and observed it to be on few occasions “as hot as a pistol” rewarding players with extremely long (half an hour) hot streaks. That example leads us to the next observation.

5)      Same machines behave differently from day to day. There are no machines that always hot and always cold. Machines don’t give all the time or take all the time. Their performance differs from hour to hour, from day to day and their temperature constantly shifts from Northern Atlantic to Equatorial. That’s why the only important information for a player is what temperature a specific machine has at the specific moment when a player approaches to play it. All “observations” made in the past about the performance of that specific machine and about comparative performances of different machines are simply irrelevant.

6)      When you play a machine, it does not act uniformly. You won’t find a cold machine that pays absolutely nothing back or, all the time, takes more than it pays back. Hot machine going through a hot streak does not always produces a profit during its time span. Streak is often interrupted by short-term, in comparison with a streak’s duration, sequences of RNG decisions of the opposite to a current streak’s nature (temperature). That leads us to an important general definition of a “splash”. Splash is a short sequence of RNG decisions that has an opposite to a streak “temperature”. Thus, cold streaks are often interrupted by hot splashes. Hot streaks can have negative splashes to show their ugly face momentarily and then disappear to let the streaks to continue their run.  

6 observations above reflect a collective experience of a slots playing public. It’s good to know them, but it’s a lot better to know and understand them – in other words, to know why those facts are constantly present in modern computerized machines.