Near misses and why almost winning hooks you

7. Then another 7. And the third 7 stops just above the line.

So close! Your heart jumps. Surely the next spin is the one.

It isn't. That feeling is called a near miss, and it's one of the big things that keeps people playing. You'll find it away from the pokies too. A lotto ticket with five numbers when you needed six. A multi that wins every leg but one.

A near miss is just a loss

On a poker machine, a near miss pays nothing, same as any other losing spin. It doesn't mean the machine is warming up, and it tells you nothing about the next spin.

Lotto works the same way. Matching five numbers this week doesn't make you any more likely to match six next week. Every spin and every draw starts fresh.

Why it feels so different from losing

Research using brain scans has found that near misses light up some of the same reward areas as wins, even though no money comes out. People say near misses feel bad. Yet they make people want to keep playing more than a clear loss does.

Your brain treats "almost" as a sign you're getting better. That makes sense when you're learning to throw a ball. On a machine that picks results at random, it makes no sense at all.

How machines make near misses common

A poker machine's reels are strips of symbols, and each strip can carry a different number of each symbol. Put several jackpot symbols on the first two reels and only one on the third. Now two jackpot symbols line up all the time, and the third hardly ever follows. The near miss becomes normal. The win stays rare.

Our see-through pokie does exactly this. Reels 1 and 2 each carry three 7s, and reel 3 carries one. Two 7s on a line come up about 1 in 283. Three come up about 1 in 14,416. Switch on its X-ray and you can see the reels for yourself.

Near misses outside the pokies

With lotto, matching four or five numbers feels close to the jackpot. It was never close. Each extra number you need makes the jackpot many times less likely. See the real odds of every division.

On scratchies, a losing card can show two of the three matching symbols you needed. Researchers have found that makes people want to buy another one.

And with a multi, losing a five-leg bet on the last leg feels like rotten luck. But the more legs you add, the more often it happens. See how the margin grows on multis.

What to do when you feel it

Notice it. Then say it to yourself: "That was a near miss. That's a loss."

The urge to go again straight after a near miss is the machine doing exactly what it was built to do. Which makes it a really good moment to stop.