Are Online Pokies Rigged?

It isn’t common to read about cheating on the part of online casinos or software developers. Discussions of illicit behaviour in casinos are far more likely to focus on gamblers. For example, a team of blackjack card-counters or coin shavers ripping off the house in the old days of mechanical poker machines.

The rigging of pokies has been an issue since the first machines appeared in the USA in the late 19th century. Likely, many machines in the mechanical and electro-mechanical days of design (before the 1970s) were rigged to favour the house.

Without laws regulating the production of these games. It would have been easy for crooked operators to take advantage of punters. At least as much as some gamblers took advantage of the operators.

But to answer the question posed in the title of this article. We should first pick the question apart to make sure the answer we’re giving fits the real question.

A payback percentage is similar to the house edge in reverse. Casinos, land-based and Web-based, sometimes use payback percentages to advertise their machine games. The gaudy sign hanging above a machine on the casino floor that reads “99%!!!!” or something like that is an example of a payback percentage.

Governments who regulate games of chance and skill usually regulate the legal range of poker machine payback percentages on games within their borders. Payback percentage is a theoretical percentage of cash wagered on a specific machine that it will pay back to gamblers over the entire life of the machine. Right there in the definition is one way to answer our question. Yes, pokies are rigged, but the rigging is part of the design and all games in the casino are set up similarly.

But this isn’t the kind of manipulation people are talking about when they wonder if casino game operators are fixing their games. Any game with a built-in advantage represents a guaranteed profit for the house.

The variation in these different advantages is what makes some casino bets “smarter” than others. Blackjack played according to basic strategy rules gives the casino a tiny edge, around 0.5%. While a lottery-like game such as keno includes some wagers that grant the house an edge of around 30%. The two games are set up with two very different advantages, but they both favour the casino in the long run.

Think back to our example above – the one per cent difference between the number on the sign hanging over the game (“99%!!!!”) and 100% is the edge the casino holds. All it means is the machine gives the house a profit equal to 1% of its take over its entire life. So is the 99% pokie in this example “rigged?” By the most basic definition of the word, yes it is. But this form of manipulation is legal; it’s a part of the game.

When people ask the question that forms the title of this article, they’re not talking about legal manipulation of statistics to turn a profit.