An Especially Tricky Lot

Back during our days writing Slate's "Explainer" column, we were once asked to tackle a statistically tricky question: Could self-styled moral watchdog William Bennett really have, as he claimed, broken even playing high-stakes slot machines for over a decade? (Quickie answer: Almost certainly not, unless the man is blessed with Ashley Albright levels of luck.) Doing the research on that piece led to an ongoing fascination with the psychology of slot machine players, a topic of much...