Researchers Confirm ‘Almost Winning’ Pays The Same As Losing
A three-year study of near misses, close calls and late equalisers finds the payout for every one of them was zero, give or take nothing.
Coming close to a win is, financially, indistinguishable from not coming close to one, according to a study of 41,000 near misses published on Wednesday by the Centre for Applied Hindsight.
Researchers spent three years collecting cases from slot floors, sportsbooks and scratchcard counters: two cherries and a lemon, an accumulator undone by an equaliser in stoppage time, a ticket one number off. In each case they recorded what the gambler said had happened and what the gambler was paid.
The chart
The Centre’s headline chart has six bars, one for each category of near miss, sorted from “so close” to “literally one away”. All six sit at zero. The authors drew each bar one pixel high so that readers would know it was there.
We expected some variation between categories. There was none. We checked whether the scale was broken. The scale was fine.
What gamblers said had happened
- “I nearly had it” (44 percent)
- “It was basically a win” (31 percent)
- “That’s a sign” (19 percent)
- “That’s it, I’m done” (6 percent, most of whom were back the following week)
The paper also notes that some slot machines are built to show near misses more often than chance alone would, a finding the authors called “the only result in here anybody will find surprising.” The Centre’s next study asks whether a horse that would have won if the race had been longer has, in any sense, won.
