Some time ago, while hanging out with old friends, I had an interesting moment. One of my friends is the type of person who plays slot machines by observing certain patterns while playing, and think he feels that it influences the outcome. At that time, he was playing Gates of Olympus, and before purchasing a feature, he manually spun the reels until he found an interesting pattern. I really didn't understand what he was seeing or doing. I just watched him for a moment, and he even seemed to be able to predict when lightning would strike, and he seemed to truly understand what he was doing, some times I did see it make a profit, and some times it didn't.
However, I wasn't focused on what he was doing; I felt it was all about luck, so personally, I just played slots without paying attention to any particular patterns. So, what about you? Are you one of those people? or are you just a casual player like me? If so, please give your reasons.
Each one of us have our own beliefs in gambling, some of us (like your friend) believes in patterns and as you've said sometimes it's a win and sometimes it's a lose, it just confirms that patterns or beliefs don't do existing in gambling especially in slots or game of chance since all of the results are random and there's no outside factors that may affect it.
It's the same thing as playing baccarat. There, you can see that they have history of the winnings and you can see the patterns though sometimes the pattern is right and sometimes it's wrong but in reality it doesn't matter.