Can You Trick A Slot Machine?

It’s one of the most controversial issues for any slot machine player – can you trick a slot machine? The gambling world is full of myths and anecdotes as to how certain outcomes can be achieved, but for the average player, a lot of this can seem out of reach.

Technically speaking, yes, players can trick a slot machine – but it’s not as simple as a ritual of taking a break every five spins or anything equally as bizarre. Rather, it takes a keen interest in technology or a daring venture into law-breaking.

Of course, it’s never advisable to pursue anything illegal, but here’s a little anecdotal evidence of what some players claim to have done previously.

The coin that kept on paying

In days of yore, some slot machines were susceptible to the ‘manipulated coin’ trick. With advancements in security and technology, it’s unlikely that this trick would work now, but legend has it that some crooks got away with them in the past.

The trick involved attaching a coin to a nylon wire. The slot machine could not detect the wire because of its material, and so players would feed the coin into the machine, retrieve it, and do it again.

As long as the slot machine registered that a coin was being entered, then gameplay would continue! Of course, this is outdated, and more importantly, illegal, so here are a few other tips and tricks that might potentially increase your chances of winning.

Influencing the outcomes

We’ve all read stories of experienced card players becoming card counters, but what about slot machine players? This happened in the 1980s when Diethard Wendtland took advantage of the manual ‘stop’ function on the slot machines.

This function isn’t available on all slots, but he developed a knack for stopping the slots at just the right time. With his lightning speed reactions, he could see when symbols were going to light up and stop the reels.

Sadly for us, casinos soon became wise to this, and later on, they changed the stop all reels function to enable us only to stop one reel at a time. We can still influence our winnings to some degree, but nothing like Diethard!

Software hacks and bugs

This last one is for the computer geeks: over the years, technology has become considerably more secure, but some decades ago, hackers noticed that slot machine software could be influenced due to weaknesses such as hackable processing chips.

You might struggle to hack into the programming of a slot machine now, but there is always the bugs route instead.

This happens on online games, for example, players have reported being returned their original stake after an online roulette freeze – if you can spot a bug that rewards you, then it makes sense to try and repeat it!

More often than not, tricking takes more time than it’s worth or is illegal, so we’d suggest sticking with the odds and enjoying the risk.