How pokies work

They use psychological theories to reinforce behaviour and train your brain to expect rewards.

Pokies work on the principles of operant conditioning. The original studies on conditioning often involved animals (you know, lab rats and Pavlov’s dogs).

In these experiments, an action was performed by the animal (like hearing a sound or hitting a lever), which resulted in them getting a reward such as a small pellet of food. The animal learnt that by pressing the lever, it was rewarded with a treat every time (Positive reinforcement).

Operant conditioning works in a different way using the idea of intermittent reinforcement. In this example, the pellets or rewards are dispensed randomly. When the animal pushes a lever, it can get a few pellets, a lot of pellets, or none at all.

Without knowing what to expect at any time, we keep pushing the lever over and over again.

Sound familiar? This is the psychological principle that pokie machines operate on and how they can work on you.

Dopamine is a chemical in your brain that increases when you know there is a reward coming.

Dopamine neurons in your brain light up when they spot a pattern that could lead to pleasure. This is useful for signalling things that may be good for us.

When the brain of someone who plays pokies at harmful levels is scanned while playing a pokie machine, we see dopamine neurons light up in the same way as someone using cocaine. When dopamine is overstimulated, we start to crave activities that aren’t always in our best interests.

Pokie machines create a false sense of expectations. This is one of the ways they keep you playing for longer periods. The impression that you are always on the verge of winning keeps your dopamine neurons in a false state of stimulation. This makes it hard to walk away or take a break from the machine.

Ever felt like you’re in the zone, where nothing else matters except for what you’re doing at that very moment?

The sights, sounds and motion of a pokie machine can produce a similar effect to what sportspeople and musicians refer to as getting in the zone, a “perfect flow”. It can feel like time, money, and responsibilities are suspended and can be forgotten about. Many pokie players talk about getting in the zone.

The zone can be very powerful. Las Vegas casinos have footage of pokie players who continue to play while failing to notice a man lying on the floor next to them with a heart attack. Their eyes remained glued to the machines even as the man received first aid and defibrillator shocks.

Pokie machines are designed to be very absorbing. While this can be entertaining, it pays to be careful - take regular breaks and don’t lose sight of your surroundings. Make a plan for how much time and money you want to spend, and stick to it.

Your brain is wired to spot patterns, even when they’re not really there.

Finding patterns normally works in our favour because it helps us make everyday decisions. We can often spot the best waves at the beach before they break, and choose the best time to drive to work based on past experience.

When playing pokies, this strength becomes our weakness. The outcome of each spin is random, meaning past spins don’t have anything to do with the result of future spins. Your brain is trying to spot patterns that in reality do not exist.

Pokies are known to be one of the most addictive forms of gambling.

You can play pokies much faster than other types of gambling. As players grow in experience, there’s a tendency to increase the speed of play. However, unlike other skill based games, this is not a sign of mastery, it just means you’re likely to lose faster.

Faster games can be more addictive because they deliver the result quickly, providing even stronger reinforcement that leads to repeating the behaviour.

It doesn’t matter how experienced a player thinks they are, you can’t have a strategy when the result is completely random.

Many gamblers wrongly think that they’re due for a win if they sit at a machine for long enough.

Jackpot rates are based on thousands or even millions of spins, so they don’t reflect what will happen on a particular day in a particular venue. Every spin is random. The machine doesn’t take into account how long you’ve been sitting there or how much money you’ve put in.

Machines are programmed to give you a feeling that there’s some kind of skill involved.

The truth is, there’s nothing you can do that will increase your odds of winning on any spin. There are no techniques to trick or cheat it.

• Here’s how pokies trick you into feeling you have control:
• You get to decide how many credits to wager.
• You get to decide how many lines to play.
• You choose exactly when to press the spin button.

You may even start to feel a sense of mastering the whole process if you’ve spent a lot of time at the machine.

The truth is, none of these actions give you a greater or lesser chance of winning. Every spin is random, there is no skill involved.

Pokie machines are designed to keep more money than they pay out.

Each machine is programmed with a return-to-player rate. The return-to-player is the percentage of your bet that you’d expect to get back for each spin. The New Zealand Gaming Machine National Standard requires the return-to-player rate in pokies to be between 78% and 92%.

For example, if the return was 92%, then on average you’d expect to lose around 8% on each spin. The outcome of each spin is random. So in the short term, you could take a bigger win or experience a bigger loss. But on average, if you inserted $1, you could expect to have 66 cents left after 5 spins.

The more time you spend playing, the more likely it is that your money will gradually reduce to almost zero.

The longer you play, the more you lose.

Each machine is programmed to take in more than it pays out. So the longer you play, the higher the chances are that you’ll lose. In other words, you’re likely to be better off playing pokies for 10 minutes than playing for an hour. Though for many people, even 10 minutes of play can cause harm.