Maybe you’ve seen this story floating around the news lately.
It’s not really a huge pitting but just a minor annoyance with the way the media has told this story for for a dramatic effect by stretching the facts.
When I heard this story last night on the news they clearly stated that she had won the $2.4 million by putting one nickel in the slot and winning on her first pull.
I immediately called B.S. on this knowing that to win that kind of money on a nickel slot you need to be playing “max” credits per spin to win. Usually something like 10 lines x 9 credits per line or 90 nickels ($4.50). Sure makes a nice story with the “only a nickel” line but this lady was playin $4.50 pulls, not 5 cents. I’m not doubting that it may have been her first pull on that machine.
I noticed today online they have changed the wording from “one nickel” to “a couple nickels”. Nice try but there is still a big difference between “a couple” and “90”.
Just another day of sensationalism from the meida I guess.
The story says she won it on a Giant Wheel of Fortune machine. I have never seen a nickel machine, but the one cent machines require $4.00 per pull to win the jackpot (40 lines, 10 per line). So if this is the same game with a different denomination, $4.00 x 5 would be $20.00 per pull on a nickel machine.
On NBC it said “…she moved and placed a maximum bet of $3.75 twice, and on that second spin all of the Wheel Of Fortunes lined up across the middle of the screen.”
I didn’t even have to click open the story to know it was misleading. I live here in Las Vegas and they have “penny slots” all over the place.
First of all, hardly any slots accept coins anymore, so you have put in a minimum of a $1.00 bill. And yes, you could play 1 cent per game, and if you win huge, you might get ten dollars, but the odds of that are like winning the lottery.
The only way to win a substantial amount of money on a penny slot machine is to play the maximum number of coins - most likely 250 coins in this case, meaning $2.50…so when someone wins millions on a penny slot, trust me, they played more than a penny to win it.
Same goes for nickels. For that matter, even the quarter games require more than one quarter to win anything worth mentioning on the evening news.
These machines are usually come-ons for the newbie rubes…“look honey, we only have to play a penny to win enough to retire!” Read the fine print, people.
I do know people who swear they win at these penny and nickel machines, but they usually stick a hundred dollar bill in the machine, play maximum coins ($2.50 or so a game) and then when they win 10X or 25X or !00X or 1000 times their bet, it starts to add up big time.
I believe it was last year on Mother’s Day a woman won over a million dollars on a nickel slot machine (playing maximum coins). This would not have been big news for the local television stations except for the fact that the same woman had won over a million dollars the year before on the same nickel machine!
I’ve watched my husband win $375 on a penny machine playing off one $20 bill, so I know it’s possible. It’s just not likely. Fact is, you can lose more money faster on the penny and nickel machines if you bet big than you can on some of the larger denomination games – on the traditional reel slots, for example, most of the dollar slots max bet is either $2 or $3, whereas on the nickel machines it can be considerably more than that.