Poignantly, one of Schüll’s gambler informants says, “You get to learn the pattern and just need to get it right.” Always on the verge of winning, he is led to believe that he is developing an arcane skill, an intuitive connection to the machine’s obscure workings. He is not. The frequency with which he almost wins can be made to increase over the course of his play in a single session, and because players are tracked, it can be made to increase from one session to the next as well, leading to a feeling of growing mastery.
