In the new film, “What Happens In Vegas”, one of the major premises of the film is that one of the characters wins $3 million by dropping a single quarter in a slot machine.
Trust me when I say that anybody who lives in Las Vegas, or has been here often, knows that ain’t gonna happen. There are no slot machines that have that huge of a payout for a quarter. Granted, this is a nitpick and if they had at least dropped 3 quarters into the machine, it would have been at least realistic…
This got me to wonder - are there other films that have a basic premise that is supposed to be “real” but is totally bogus?
Of course, not that many people play penny slots. Quarter slots are the most popular but machines exist that take nickels, half-dollars, and larger denominations. The record for a nickel slot as of the middle of 2005 was nearly $3.2 million hit by an off-duty cab driver in Las Vegas. (It looks as if asking the cabby where to go gambling is a ‘good bet’ after all).
The record for a quarter slot stands at more than $13.7 million hit at a casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1993, also on a progressive slot. The biggest win on a 50-cent slot was a paltry $6.1 million in Atlantic City, which, coincidentally, has a high percentage of half-dollar slots. The really big win was on the dollar slot, when in 2003 a 25-year-old software engineer, on a weekend trip to Las Vegas to watch the NCAA basketball tournament, landed a jackpot of $39.7 million.
That is what I am talking about, don’t ask - but if you read the fine print, you will see you have to play the maximum bet in those machines to win the progressive amounts!
Yes, you can play a single penny in a penny slot just to play the game, but to win the progressive jackpot (many millions of dollars as a matter of fact) you have to play the maximum - which on most penny slots the maximum bet is 250 pennies, also known as $2.50 per play!
For example, Wheel Of Fortune is a popular slot game here…and the quarter machine often has a progressive jackpot of over a million dollars (I have seen it up to $4 million and more)…but ONLY if you play the 3 coin maximum. Locals laugh when it gets over a million dollars as the only way it got that high is some clueless tourist won the jackpot, but they only had one coin in…so instead of winning the millions of dollars, they win $1000. Thus the progressive jackpot goes up and if another person wins with just a quarter, it goes up again. Only when someone plays the maximum do they get that huge jackpot.
Trust me - if there were any machines that paid millions of dollars for a single quarter bet, you would find every local in town standing in line to play it.