In a related vein, I was once told by the check-in clerk at the Luxor casino in Las Vegas that the nickel slots alone make enough money in one year to cover the salaries for all of their employees.
Does the Mafia know about this? 
Like Monty Burns said:
Yuppers. About fifteen years ago there was a story circulating around the industry in Nevada that Universal’s Magnificent Sevens game teased. They were two coin machines, but if only one coin was played, only the (small) bar pays counted. The big payouts were when you lined up three sevens, but to get those you had to play two coins. If a player put in only one coin, and a non-paying combination came up (say two bars and a blank) the program would shift to “loser mode.” Four times out of five, nothing would change, the reels would stop on two bars and a blank. One time in five, though, they would stop on three sevens instead. A player playing only one coin would definitely get the impressions that an awful lot of seven combinations would have paid, if only he had dropped that second coin in.
The story varies, either that Universal had to change out that program on machines already installed, or that they asked permission and were denied. Either way, Gaming disallowed the teasing.
DD
Any truth to the stories my Comp. Sci. prof used to tell?
That the very earliest computer slots ran on a very basic RN-generator algorithm, basically creating an array based on a long decimal or some other not-really-random stream, and the casino owners, unaware of the algorithm, turned off the machines during slow times, and upon power-up would go through the same set of random numbers, allowing big payouts for customers who noticed? (Now that I actually see it in print, it sounds highly dubious.)
BTW, these quotes from law and policy makes me think that the Nevada government must be the most technologically astute set of elected officials in the country. We need these people in Washington!
Oh, yeah. Up until about 1978 casinos in Nevada were either small operations run by individuals or a partnership, or with a couple exceptions, (Bill Harrah and Howard Hughes to be precise) big operations run by the mob. All casino owners have to be licensed by Gaming, and part of that process involves a background check. (The front man for a mafia-run casino would be clean, obviously). Up until 1978, Gaming said that all of the stockholders in a corporation would have to be licensed, a daunting prospect. At that time, Gaming decided that publicly traded corporations underwent sufficient scrutiny by federal agencies and only stockholders of 5% or more would need to be licensed. This plus a lot of pressure from Gaming and the feds caused a big shift in the industry. The small casinos are still as they were, individuals or partnerships, but all of the big glitzy palaces in Las Vegas, Reno, and Lake Tahoe are now run by coprorations.
DD
I don’t know for sure, but it sounds plausible.
For example, the year is 1984. Consider a random number generator which is 24-bit, having a period of 2^24 (16,777,216) whereupon it would start to repeat. It’s in an early video keno game, which picks 20 numbers in a row from a field of 1-80, discarding repeats.
If a slot cheat knew this, and knew how this particular RNG worked, he could play one game on a keno machine in a deserted corner of the casino, write down the last 10 of the 20 picked numbers in order, and take his notes up to his hotel room where his Apple ][ is set up. Puts in the numbers, and 15 minutes later he’s got a probable on the next 20 numbers the RNG will draw.
There are multiple safeguards agains this kind of thing in all modern machines., for example there are multiple combined generators, which constantly pull numbers in the background at a high rate of speed, and has a very, very large period scope.
I don’t believe the Nevada Gaming Control Board is elected. They’re crowned royalty
[sub]…and they occasionally have been known to exercise droit du seigneur, too[/sub]
Oh and on the subject of the Mafia, see the movie Casino. An excellent documentary, though they did get a few things wrong (Cafe Society-style hijack, not a plot element):
The plane with the FBI surveillance team which ran out of gas and landed on a fairway of the golf course? In real life, that didn’t happen. It went into a lake on the course (Las Vegas Country Club).
Since this thread is about slot-machines, I have two questions.
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Do the coins that you put in get used for the payouts, or are there two buckets of money in each machine, an incoming and an outgoing?
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In Atlantic City, at several of the casinos I visited, the machines used a bar-coded ticket for a payout. The ticket could be taken to another machine and fed into the bill-acceptor, or could be redeemed for cash. Once in a while though, I would hit the cash-out button and get a bucket full of quarters or nickels. Why? Do some machines only pay out coins, or is it a random thing? As far as I can remember the machines that did this had ticket readers and printers.
Sorry about the hijack.
No idea on (1).
On (2), you – with all due respect – probably lost track of which kind of machine you were playing. I’ve never seen a machine that printed tickets that also produced coins. It may be possible that a machine could accept tickets and pay in coins, though…I wouldn’t swear I’ve never seen one like that.
In the early ´50´s I flew as a crew member for VR-1 at the Naval Air Station in Patuxent River Maryland.
When we flew to or from Naples or French Morrocco, we would often lay over at the AFB in The Azores. At this Air Force Base, it was just like a hotel. You´d go to the front desk where the guy on duty would assign you a room, give you a key, maybe a set of towels, whatever. In this lobby there was a 25-cent One Armed Bandit.
Well, it was fairly well known among us that the slot machine would also take a practically worthless Italian coin - say a 5 Lire piece. They were the very same diameter as a quarter, but maybe a skosh thinner. (The exchange rate was 620 lire for a buck, so you can see that 5 lire wasn´t worth very much.)
Anyway, one night we came in on a flight from Naples and I had a bunch of these Lire pieces in my pockets and figured, “WTF, I might as well get rid of these things,” and started pumping them in. Well there´s a glass panel in the machine that shows the most recently fed coins, and by now it´s showing a full line of the 5 Lire “slugs” I´ve been throwing in.
What comes up on the machine? 3 bars. Jackpot!
MY fellow crewman are watching and they burst out laughing and cheering, and I start worrying that the duty guy will come over, see the slugs and I´m nailed for fraud or whatever the military can dream up. So without missing a beat I started pumping in real quarters from the payout to get rid of the slug line and I got three cherries for a 18 more quarters!!
Oh. There were some 5-lire pieces in that jackpot which someone else before me had put in. Which, of course, I put back in the machine after everything settled down.
The size of the jackpot, by the way, was on the meagre side. Around $26 I think. (It was a long long time ago.) But it was still a kick to hit it, nevertheless.
The last time this happened to me was last night, at Ceasers in AC. I got 675 nickels that I had to put in buckets. While it was spitting them out, I made sure the ticket printer was there. I also checked before I started because I had a ticket with over $25.00 on it and I had been given hundreds of nickels two other times that day.
:smack:
Not complaining about winning, I just really like the ticket system and was puzzled why I was getting coins sometimes.