I haven’t been in a casino or played a slot machine in at least 25 years. IIRC isn’t the maximum payout very clearly labeled on the machine or there’s large wall signage indicating a row of machine’s maximum pay out? $1 slots pay less than $5 slots. Risk more money and naturally the potential payout is larger. While the casino gets richer and richer.
I don’t quite understand why this lady remotely thinks she should get $8 million. The casino admits the maximum that machine pays is $20,000 and thats only if she bets on all the lines and credits. :rolleyes: whatever the heck they are. I fed quarters into a few slots and lost during a Vegas trip after college. Thats the extant of my experience. Gambling bores me. Reading that press release confirms its not for me. Too complicated and I’m smart enough to know the house always win in the end. Payouts are just the cost of doing business.
At most isn’t the casino only on the hook for $6,000? Assuming the casino rep is correct in manually calculating her maximum possible payout?
I’d suggest paying the maximum and settling. either the 20k or 6k. 8 million? Nah. dream on lady.
On the one hand, yeah, if a machine with a maximum pay-out of $20,000 suddenly comes up with $8million, then that’s pretty clearly a malfunction rather than a regular jackpot.
On the other hand, this is the nastiest aspect of an already nasty business: the odds are already stacked against you, you’re given a magic box with some buttons on it but you don’t know the exact rules by which the magic box will determine if it will let you win this time – and then when, against the odds, it actually does let you win, the casino can still decide that it was a malfunction and you won’t actually get the money which their magic box says you won!
And of course all the malfunctions are in the casino’s favour: if you win, they can claim there was a malfunction and refuse to pay out; if there’s a malfunction which causes you to lose when you should have won, it’s extra profit for the casino and you’ll never even know about it.
I would be in favour of a rule saying that all decisions made by the slot machine on the casino’s behalf, as displayed on the machine’s screen, are binding. If the machine says that you’ve won eight million, then you have won eight million, and if the casino doesn’t like it then they should have hired better programmers. They already control the whole environment in which you’re gambling, they hold all the cards literally and figuratively; to allow them to weasel out of paying up when their own machine says they have to, shifts the balance of power even more ridiculously in their favour.
There’s no such thing as a perfect program, and you’ve essentially granted an automated system infinite liability. What if part of the display breaks and it says billion instead of million? Is an error in a single character actually worth a 1000-times increase? Of course not.
Some reasonably high minimum (say, a malfunction earns the user $10,000) would be plenty to give casinos and programmers incentive to make good systems, and would remove their ability to say “oh, it was an error, here’s $100”.
I presume that they have more than one of that machine in the casino. If they don’t know what the problem is, the prudent thing would be to take that all of the similar machines out until the issue is resolved.
Can we compromise on the OP’s suggestion, whereby the casino has to pay out the maximum which the player theoretically could have won given the amount of their bet? And that maximum has to be clearly printed on the front of the machine. So if, due to a malfunction, the machine says that you win $X while the largest possible jackpot you could have won is $Y, you get the smaller of those two amounts. (Except in the rare case where the customer can prove that they actually did win the full jackpot, and that it is the displayed smaller amount which is incorrect.)
Otherwise, when someone legitimately wins the jackpot, the casino could still arbitrarily decide to say “sorry, malfunction” and pay them only $10,000 which in many cases will be much less than the jackpot amount. (Yeah, I’m sure that in such a case the technical problem is supposed to be investigated by a third party. Somehow I distrust the neutrality of those third parties, never mind the guarantees which the customer has that the machine will not be tampered with by casino personnel after it has been “taken out of service for investigation”.)
I agree that in case of an actual display error – let’s say the amount shown on the screen is $80000.00 but there’s a bunch of dead pixels in the place of the decimal point, so it shows up as $8000000 – this rule shouldn’t apply, as long as the casino can be shown to make reasonable efforts to prevent such problems by using high-quality hardware etc. (I also wouldn’t put it past a lot of habitual gamblers to get very creative in deliberately causing such errors, by rubbing on the screen or whatever.)
Yeah, she’s been doing the sad-faced victim thing on the local news, and making noises about her lawyer. I don’t think she stands a chance in hell of winning a lawsuit.
As soon as a casino makes a policy like this, they will have an army of people the next day breaking all their slot machines demanding $20k because it “malfunctioned”.
They only casinos I am familiar with are in Vegas and there when a jackpot is disputed, it is the Nevada Gaming Commission not the casino that decides if it is a malfunction or not.
Sure. Ultimately, I’m not sure it matters that much, since if you don’t trust the casino and it’s not well-regulated, they have much more effective ways to cheat you.
While this is a risk, I don’t think it’s a major one. As xizor points out, casino gaming is a pretty heavily regulated industry. The average payout of slot machines is carefully calibrated and regulated by the gaming commission.
Although issues like this make big headlines, a casino that was trying to pull something on its customers (I mean, aside from the obvious ploy of offering games with only negative expected value) would simply make the jackpots less likely. There’s no way for individual customers to audit the average payout of a machine, so it would be incredibly foolish to try to cheat customers out of legitimate wins when you could just make legitimate wins less likely.
The reason to require a minimum payout on a malfunction is not to catch unscrupulous slot-machine runners. It’s to (hopefully) even out the result of bugs. The only malfunctions that will be noticed by customers are the ones that result in apparent wins that aren’t legitimate. The times that they lose due to a software bug are not distinguishable from the times they lose legitimately, and likely won’t be investigated. So you need some punitive damages when the bug is noticed to balance out the ones that won’t be noticed (all of which are in favor of the house).
But the penalty should be some reasonable value, not necessarily one dependent on the value of the buggy win.
It would probably get tossed out in an instant. The Washington State Gaming Commission has the final word, and the evidence offered by the casino is pretty solid. She’ll take her $10.50 and like it.
Perhaps, but there’s certainly a difference between an accidental malfunction and one that is intentionally caused. It would be a pretty silly law that ignored you beating on the machine with a baseball bat prior to the error.
Sure. But most cases are not quite so simple or clear-cut.
There have been cases of people who discover buggy video poker games and make bunches of money.
Generally, these people aren’t doing anything violent to the machine. They’re simply taking game actions in a particular order that causes the average payout to be in their favor. Have they done something wrong? Or is it simply that the game the casino is offering is not the game the casino thought it was playing.
Compare to someone who notices that a roulette wheel isn’t fair, or that a deck of cards is marked. Profiting from that knowledge is generally allowed.
Is there a substantive difference between the two?
Casinos LOVE it when a player wins big at one of their slots. It’s great press, they get a picture taken with a giant novelty cheque, and the picture goes up in a very well traveled location to be seen by all and sundry. And the slots still rake in mountains of cash. There is literally zero upside to doing what you describe above.
Especially because most of the progressive pots are spread out on many machine in many different casinos. The payout is so rare and the liability is spread out so much that there is little downside with the big payouts. They are also paid as an annuity over many years.
No, but she has a good chance of driving customers away from that place and into the arms of any number of other places that have slot machines that are “honest.”
Not that these machines are not honest, but to the public, it can appear so, and no one wants to go where there is even a slight chance of dishonesty.
Gambling bores me. Reading that press release confirms its not for me. Too complicated and I’m smart enough to know the house always win in the end. Payouts are just the cost of doing business.