The shiny lights and intriguing buzzers of casino slot machines draw novice and experienced gamblers alike. While games like poker, blackjack, and craps have die-hard fans of their own, few casino games attract as much attention as the slots. However, a winning slot machine isn’t just about luck; it’s also about knowing how to play. Here’s a guide to help you maximize your time at the slot machines.

Slot (noun): a narrow notch, groove, or opening, as a keyway in machinery, slit for coins in a vending machine, etc.

Despite the fact that near-miss research has gained considerable attention in recent years, no experimental paradigm seems capable of consistently demonstrating that these stimuli produce a conditionally reinforcing effect on gambling persistence. This may be because the stimuli used in the current experiments are relatively simple—a deliberate move to limit pre-existing biases and make learning of the contingencies more straightforward. Also, the experiment design only produced a net gain, which is uncharacteristic of slot machines in general and is unlikely to produce the putative conditional reinforcement that would explain why near misses are effective at prolonging gambling behavior. Moreover, the extinction procedure in the present experiments was remarkably rapid, suggesting that the effect of near-miss stimuli on gambling persistence is not very strong. Even so, the results of this study are intriguing and deserve further investigation.