Are there any "Pro" slot players? And if so how do they believe they can get an edge?
Cheers
Reachy
I know it's a little scary, but there used to be a lot of them, and there still are some at times.
How? Well, from around the late 90's to 2002 or so, one of the common themes in slot machines was a concept called "Bankable" slots. The first big example of this was a slot machine called "Piggy Bankin".
The machine had a symbol on it's third wheel, labeled "Break the Bank". The bank began at 10 coins, and everytime the player spun 3 blanks, the bank increased by the number of coins. When a player spun "Break the Bank", they won the number of coins in the bank, and the bank reset at 10 coins.
The way to have an advantage at the game was to watch other people play until the "bank" got above about 20-25 coins. Then, when the player left, take a seat at the machine and play 1 coin at a time until you break the bank. Then cash out and let someone else come along and play.
While this seems silly, it was profitable, especially when few people knew about this. For example, spotting an empty $1 Piggy Bankin machine at 35 coins had an EV of about $15 for about 5 minutes of slot play. The problem was that eventually, the secret got out and each casino with these type of machines had a handful of drifters who walked from machine to machine looking for players who had built up a jackpot and stalked them, waiting for them to go broke. Often, multiple people would stalk the same machine, which would either cause a race to fill the eventual empty seat, or the first stalker would stare down the second stalker to mark his territory until they other guy left.
Since these slot stalkers were undesirable, eventually slot managers stopped ordering these types of games, and they are mostly rare to find in casinos (and also more difficult to beat). The new multi-level linked progressive jackpots are more difficult to beat than the old bankable slots because they don't allow for the single-coin play that many of the bankable strategies counted on.