What's the difference between rubber banding and just bad luck in casino games?

“Rubber banding” means that the game starts to fudge its results if you are doing well. Unlucky is part of the game’s random fluctuations.

Honest casinos have random number generators that are proven to be unbiased. They don’t change the payoffs dynamically. There’s variance in all of them – some games are more volatile than others. If you’re having a bad run, most likely it’s just variance.

Rubber banding? Maybe if you think that the match is getting tougher as soon as you get ahead. Can you demonstrate this? Not so easy.

Thus, the next time you lose, don’t worry – it’s probably just variance.

There is no such thing as rubber banding. Casino games don’t have any sort of “memory” or ability to adjust against you. What appears to be a system that is somehow punishing you is simply the natural variance of the game. When you suffer a bad beat, it’s not because the RNG is adjusting against you. It’s just pure randomness and variance. Your brain might want to find a pattern or reason why you’re losing, but there isn’t one. Play responsibly, have fun, and remember that it’s just all luck.

Rubber banding occurs when a player gets the sense that a game is pulling them back after they’re winning – as though they were being “snapped” back to what the game considers to be an acceptable level of achievement. The truth is that games do not alter their probabilities based upon how a person plays; this is an example of the Gambler’s Fallacy, which describes our tendency to perceive patterns in randomness. What players are actually experiencing, when their play fluctuates between hot and cold streaks, is variance. Variance is the inevitable statistical phenomenon whereby random events deviate temporarily from their expected values. If the game’s math is correct, then there is no reason why a player should feel rubber banded when their fortunes reverse; a reversal of fortune is simply a function of variance – end of story.