Michael says: "Most game companies (the good manufacturers, anyway) will put the manuals for their games online freely, for anyone to download. You can tell the inner-workings of many games this way, including whether or not a game can be set to be unwinnable for a certain number of plays, or if the game adheres to a set percentage. ... Anytime I'm suspicious of a game having an unwinnable mode [where you'll always lose for a number of plays, no matter what you do], I'll immediately look up the manual."

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And yes, they answer to the question you've been asking since childhood:

The claw really is rigged.

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For most people, those manuals wouldn't really mean anything, but for advantage players, they are basically the machine's private diaries detailing all of its turn-ons and turn-offs (literally). For example, check out the online manual for Spin-N-Win, a pretty straightforward game where you hit a button to stop an electronic wheel in the hopes of landing on the Jackpot.

"I got the manual for Spin-N-Win. ... It showed that the timeframe the jackpot window can be set to is between 2 and 20 milliseconds, with a factory default of 5, but more importantly, it DID NOT have a setting for 'games until next win.' This had me playing the game consistently because it would never be 'due' for a jackpot, unlike Stacker or Tippin' Bloks, where the difficulty drops significantly every few hundred games or so, making it much easier to win."