Beg your pardon, but that is correct. You misunderstood and/or misinterpreted what I said. I'm well aware that the machine has no memory.

First off, I was talking about a "progressive" jackpot machine -- one where the jackpot starts out at a certain amount and grows with each coin played. If it starts out at $1,000, the higher that jackpot grows, the machine is that much closer to paying off. That is no fallacy. If it is 10 days before it pays off, on Day 9 it is closer to hitting than it was on Day 8. What is so hard to understand about that? No gambler's fallacies here.

Certainly a machine that gets up to $1,200 still may not have paid off and one that only got to $1,001 did pay off. That's just the way it goes sometimes.

What I am saying is that that particular machine will hit at some point -- and it is true that the higher it goes, the closer that time gets. That's just intuitive. Sorry you can't see that.

BTW, you state that "that effects the odds, not the chances." Huh? What's the difference between chances and odds? The dictionary defines chances as "the degree of likelihood of an outcome." Sounds like odds to me.

Barbara