None of what follows is stupid. Every item on this list is a reasonable guess by somebody working from what they can see inside a room, and most of them would be true of a machine built the way people imagine machines are built. They fail for one shared reason, and it is mechanical rather than moral: approved gaming machines decide each result from a fresh number and keep no account of what has happened before. Hold that one fact and six of the seven collapse on their own.
"It hasn't paid all night, so it's due"
Stated fairly: the game is designed to give back a certain proportion over time, this one has taken money for two hours, so the balance has to come back at some point and the odds now favour whoever is sitting there.
The answer is that the proportion is a property of odds repeated, not a balance the machine tracks. No counter records a shortfall and no instruction could act on one if it did. A machine behaving as the belief requires would have to make outcomes depend on its recent history, which is exactly what it is tested not to do before it may be installed — the arithmetic is on the return figure page.
"That one's hot, it's been paying all evening"
Stated fairly: results plainly arrive in clumps, anybody who has spent an evening in a gaming room has watched it happen, and a machine in the middle of a good run is a better bet than one that is not.
The clumping is real; the inference is not. Independent events produce streaks as a matter of course — the eye reads a cluster as a cause, and a run of results that looks designed is an ordinary product of randomness rather than evidence against it. The machine is in precisely the same state after a good half-hour as before it. What a streak does genuinely tell you is something about the game's spread, which is worth knowing for its own sake and covered on volatility.
"They tighten it after somebody wins"
Stated fairly: a venue has an obvious commercial motive, the machines are its equipment, and somebody must be able to reach the settings, so why would they not be adjusted after a bad week?
Because the settings are not the venue's to reach. A game's mathematics is part of an approved configuration, and changing it is a regulated process involving the gaming supplier and the regulator rather than a manager with a key and a bad mood. Consumer and Business Services SA holds the licensing and approval side of this in South Australia. There is also a simpler objection: no venue would need to, since the design already works in the house's favour on every spin without anybody touching it.
"Always play maximum lines, that's the strategy"
Stated fairly: more lines means more paths covered, more paths means more wins, and the regulars all do it.
More lines does mean more wins, and it also means a proportionally larger stake on every spin, and those two cancel. The proportion the game returns in the long run does not shift with the number of lines selected, so full coverage is a bigger transaction rather than a better one; it mostly makes the credit meter move faster in both directions. The one real qualification is that some games tie feature or jackpot eligibility to how you are betting, and that condition is printed on the machine. The multiplication involved is worked through on paylines and ways.
"Putting the card in makes it pay less"
Stated fairly: the venue can see who you are and how much you play, so of course the machine treats a tracked customer differently — and anyway it stopped paying the day you joined the scheme.
A loyalty system records play for the venue's own scheme. It is attached to the accounting, not to the mechanism that generates results, and a spin resolves the same way whether anything is inserted or not. The timing people notice is a run of poor luck coinciding with a memorable date, which is how nearly all personal gambling data gets collected. If the scheme's terms are the real question, they come from the venue; both Angaston hotels publish nothing about such arrangements.
"Go on a Friday night" or "go first thing on a Tuesday"
Stated fairly: there must be a best time — either when the machines are full of other people's money, or when they are fresh and nobody has had anything out of them yet.
Both versions assume the machine knows what time it is and cares, and neither survives the fact that each spin is computed from a fresh number. A busy room and an empty room present identical odds to the person sitting down. What genuinely varies by day and hour is everything else: whether the room is staffed, whether the kitchen is serving, how long a hand pay takes, and whether the gaming area is open at all, since its hours are its own and neither Angaston venue publishes them. Those are the reasons to ring ahead, and they are on our gaming-room checklist.
"The staff know which machine is about to go"
Stated fairly: they work there, they see everything, and they will tell a regular if you are on good terms.
Staff know a great deal worth asking about — which games are installed, which cabinet has a temperamental note acceptor, when the room closes, how a hand pay works. What nobody in the building knows is which machine will pay next, because there is nothing to know: the result does not exist until a stake is placed and a number taken. A tip of that kind is a sincere person passing on the same pattern-reading everybody else in the room is doing. The mechanism is on how the random number generator works.
The things that are actually true
| The claim | Why it holds up |
|---|---|
| The house has an edge on every spin | It is built into the prize schedule and does not need any intervention. |
| Some games swing far harder than others | Spread varies hugely between designs, independently of the long-run return. |
| Playing faster costs more per hour | Nothing to do with odds; purely how many stakes you place. |
| The state caps the stake and prize per spin | Both ceilings are in the Gaming Machines Act 1992, identical statewide. |
| Leaving credits on a machine loses money | Mundane and the commonest avoidable loss in any room. |
On the fourth of those: the Act fixes both the maximum stake for one spin and the maximum prize one machine may pay for one spin, and no pub or club in South Australia differs from any other on either. We print neither amount, because the figures have been amended before and Consumer and Business Services SA is where to confirm the current ones. On the fifth, which is the item on this page most likely to save somebody money tonight, see how a machine actually pays you.
A gaming area anywhere in South Australia is for adults only. Correcting a myth does not improve anybody's position at a machine — the honest conclusion of this page is that there is no system, and that money staked can be lost. If gambling is hurting you or somebody around you, Gambling Help Online is free and open at any hour on 1800 858 858.
How these answers were arrived at
The replies above rest on how approved gaming machines are built and tested — general to the technology, which is why they can be given without reference to a particular room. The statutory per-spin ceilings are in the Gaming Machines Act 1992, administered by Consumer and Business Services SA, which also holds venue licensing and approval records. Two things we could not source and therefore have not asserted: the detail of the approval and testing standards applied to individual games, and the terms of any loyalty scheme at either Angaston hotel, since neither publishes one. What the two Murray Street venues do publish is set out on our Angaston page. Reviewed 10 October 2026.