Yes, you really can beat the slot machines

On Tuesday the ruination of Susanne Orton's life became complete. Having gambled away £100,000 of her and her solicitor husband's savings, and robbed his practice of a further £79,655 to feed her addiction, she was caught, put on trial, and sent to prison for 10 months. Mesmerised by all those lights, bleeps, nudges and holds, and fuelled by the adrenalin of imminent jackpots, she kept on playing the slot machines until everything she had, and everything she could steal, was gone. Sad proof, you might think, that slots cannot be beaten.

But, according to some, they can. There are tricks to be learnt, devices to be used, and books to be studied, which will liberate some of the £10.3bn pumped into British slots each year. After all, we are assured, there are "professionals" who play fruit machines so successfully that they make a living from it.

Try looking for them, however, and the evidence is transient. It comes, it goes, and, to borrow the language of the slots, you can't get a hold. From time to time, men claiming to be full-time fruit players appear in court, invariably for using counterfeit coins or damaging machines. On the forum at gambling.co.uk, someone called 'Slotterman' claims to have been one: "There have been very good years in the 1990s when I made £4k+ a month but the learning curve was costly ..." On websites, those with allegedly foolproof slot-beating product to shift speak breathlessly of professionals who "plunder hundreds of pounds from fruit machines almost every day they play". But they lack names; the information is useless. And then there is 'Joss', said to live by cleaning out machines in south London, but who declined our invitation, via a mate of a mate of a mate, to talk. We were frustrated, as HM Revenue and Customs is by gambling winnings, said to be around £25,000 a year, that elude its grasp.

Yet, despite campaigners GamCare and industry body Bacta both saying they knew of no "pro" slot players, we persisted, finally turning to Professor Mark Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University, who has studied gamblers for longer, and more thoroughly, than anyone else. "There are," he said, "certainly a small number of people who consistently win more than they lose." A few can make hundreds a week; – and he knows how they do it.

What they don't do is buy a book of "cheats" ("bunkum", says Professor Griffiths). Nor do they disorient a machine by holding a mobile phone up to it, one of many such ruses that are urban myths. Instead, they take advantage of a feature of UK machines unknown to casual players. US slots fulfil their statutory pay-out over three or four weeks, or even longer. British slots are different. Many of our 234,000 machines are in pubs, clubs, shops, and chippies – locations that rely on a weekly income from them to survive. So our machines operate over a shorter term, meeting their 72 per cent payout mark in days. Thus, if a machine has recently accepted a lot of coin and not yet paid out the jackpot, it is due to do so.

What the fruit machine winners do is spend hours watching people play, and then, when they see a machine that's ripe for picking, move in. Others swear by "boxing" (listening to how a coin drops into the slot can tell them when a machine is full). Whatever the technique, it takes a lot of time and patience.

So why don't the Susanne Ortons try the "watch and wait" approach? Because, says Professor Griffiths, for addicts, rewards are psychological, not financial. "They need to be on the machine getting their excitement. If they won, they would just carry on. And a lot of hard-core slot players know that, in the long term, they're going to lose it all."

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