[riceart]

> If it were truly random not pseudo random there would be no way to control what was won or maybe nobody would win at all.

This doesn’t make much sense. You don’t need to manipulate an RNG to ensure the house has an edge - and to my understanding this is generally not done in the big casino venues because it’s not even necessary. Because what you’re essentially suggesting is that machines purposely use poor quality PRNGs - which is absolutely not true. They have in the past unintentionally and have only been burned by it. Utilizing a PRNG does make auditing easier though. And it’s much easier to produce a reliable PRNG than find a reliable source of randomness that is not vulnerable to manipulation. (Having said that, mechanical real machines got by for years without any algorithmic RNG)

Games of chance that utilize effectively true randomness (since the behavior is unpredictable even to the house) have been around for millennia.

[andy800]

Roulette is perhaps an easier example. A typical American wheel has 38 positions: 1-36, 0 and 00. If you bet on a single number and hit, a 1/38 chance, you don't win 37x your bet, you only win 35x. If you bet on Red, or Odd, those pay 1-1 but the odds of winning are less than 50%, there are 18 winning results and 20 losing results. The payouts are always lower than the true probability of that specific outcome. If two people play opposite colors, one Red and one Black, the casino will break even on numbers but collect both wagers when 0 or 00 wins.

Another example is sports betting with a point spread. You bet $11 to win $10, on supposedly an 50-50 wager (the purpose of the point spread).

Slot machines work off the same principles. It's ok for the outcomes to be random, because the payouts are always less than the true probabilities.