On the morning of Monday, August 13,Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13, He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

It didn’t. He spent the next four hours burning through $13, from the account, plugging any winnings back into the machine, until he had only $4, left. Around noon, he gave up.

Stevens, 52, left the casino and wrote a five-page letter to Stacy. A former chief operating officer at Louis Berkman Investment, he gave her careful financial instructions that would enable her to avoid responsibility for his losses and keep her credit intact: She was to deposit the enclosed check for $4,; move her funds into a new checking account; decline to pay the money he Reel Gambler Slots Machine the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas; disregard his credit-card debt (it was in his name alone); file her tax returns; and sign up for Social Security survivor benefits. He asked that she have him cremated.

He wrote that he was “crying like a baby” as he thought about how much he loved her and their three daughters. “Our family only has a chance if I’m not around to bring us down any further,” he wrote. “I’m so sorry that I’m putting you through this.”

He placed the letter and the check in an envelope, drove to the Steubenville Reel Gambler Slots Machine office, Reel Gambler Slots Machine mailed it. Then he headed to the Jefferson Kiwanis Youth Soccer Club. He had raised funds for these Reel Gambler Slots Machine fields, tended them with his lawn mower, and watched his daughters play on them.

Stevens parked his Jeep in the gravel lot and called Ricky Gurbst, a Cleveland attorney whose firm, Squire Patton Boggs, represented Berkman, where Stevens had worked for 14 years—until six and a half months earlier, when the firm discovered that he had been stealing company funds to feed his gambling habit and fired him.

Stevens had a request: “Please ask the company to continue to pay my daughters’ college tuition.” He had received notification that the tuition benefit the company had provided would be discontinued for the fall Wicked Jackpots Casino Bonos. Failing his daughters had been the final Underwater World Slots Machine said he would pass along the request.

Then Stevens told Gurbst that he was going to kill himself.

“What? Wait.”

“That’s what I’m going to do,” Stevens said, and promptly hung up.

He next called J. Timothy Bender, a Cleveland tax attorney who had been advising him on the IRS’s investigation into his embezzlement. Up until that point, he had put on a brave face for Bender, saying he would accept responsibility and serve his time. Now he told Bender what he was about to do. Alarmed, Bender tried to talk him out of it. “Look, this is hard enough,” Stevens said. “I’m going to do it.” Click.

At p.m., Stevens texted Stacy, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. “I love you.” He then texted the same message to each of his three daughters in succession.

He took off his glasses, his glucose monitor, and his insulin pump—Stevens was a diabetic—and tucked them neatly into his blue thermal lunch bag with the sandwich and apple he hadn’t touched.

He unpacked his Browning semiautomatic gauge shotgun, loaded it, and sat on one of the railroad ties that rimmed the parking lot.

Then he dialed and told the dispatcher his plan.

Scott Stevens hadn’t always been a gambler. A native of Rochester, New York, he earned a master’s degree in business and finance at the University of Rochester and casumo casino a successful career. He won the trust of the steel magnate Louis Berkman and worked his way up to the position of COO in Berkman’s company. He was meticulous about finances, both professionally and personally. When he first met Stacy, inhe insisted that she pay off her credit-card debt immediately. “Your credit is all you have,” he told her.

They married the following year, had three daughters, and settled into a comfortable life in Steubenville thanks to his position with Berkman’s company: a six-figure salary, three cars, two country-club memberships, vacations to Mexico. Stevens doted on his girls and threw himself into causes that benefited them. In addition to the soccer fields, he raised money to renovate the middle school, to build a new science lab, and to support the French Club’s trip to France. He spent time on weekends painting the high-school cafeteria and stripping the hallway floors.

Stevens got his first taste of casino gambling while attending a trade show in Las Vegas. On a subsequent trip, he hit a jackpot on a slot machine and was hooked.

Scott and Stacy soon began making several trips a year to Vegas. She liked shopping, sitting by the pool, even occasionally playing the slots with her husband, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. They brought the kids in the summer and made a family vacation of it by visiting the Grand Canyon, the Hoover Dam, and Disneyland. Reel Gambler Slots Machine home, Stevens became a regular at the Mountaineer Casino. Over the next six years, his gambling hobby became an addiction. Though he won occasional jackpots, some of them six figures, he lost far more—as much as $ million in a single year.

Stevens methodically concealed his addiction from his wife, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. He handled all the couple’s finances. He kept separate bank accounts. He used his work address for his gambling correspondence: W-2Gs (the IRS form used to report gambling winnings), Reel Gambler Slots Machine, wire transfers, casino mailings. Even his best friend and brother-in-law, Carl Nelson, who occasionally gambled alongside Stevens, had no inkling of his problem. “I was shocked when I found out afterwards,” he says. “There was a whole Scott I didn’t know.”

When Stevens ran out of money at the casino, he would leave, write a company check on one of the Berkman accounts for which he had check-cashing privileges, and return to the casino with more cash. He sometimes did this three or four times in a single day. His colleagues did not question his absences from the office, because his Reel Gambler Slots Machine involved overseeing various companies in different locations. By the time the firm detected irregularities and he admitted the extent of his embezzlement, Sumo Spins Slots Machine likable, responsible, trustworthy company man—had stolen nearly $4 million.

Stacy had no idea. In Vegas, Stevens had always kept plans to join her and the girls for lunch. At home, he was always on time for dinner. Saturday mornings, when he told her he was headed into the office, she didn’t question him—she knew he had a lot of responsibilities. So Noahs Ark Slot was stunned when he called her with bad news on January 30, She was on the stairs with a load of laundry when the phone rang.

“Stace, I have something to tell you.”

She heard the burden in his voice. “Who died?”

“It’s something I have to tell you on the phone, because I can’t look in your eyes.”

He paused. She waited.

“I might be coming home without a job today. I’ve taken some money.”

“For what?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“How much? Ten thousand dollars?”

“No.”

“More? One hundred thousand?”

“Stace, it’s enough.”

Stevens never did come clean with her about how much he Reel Gambler Slots Machine stolen or about how often he had been gambling. Even after he was fired, Stevens kept gambling as often as five or six times a week, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. He gambled on his wedding anniversary and on his daughters’ birthdays. Stacy Reel Gambler Slots Machine that he was irritable more frequently than usual and that he sometimes snapped at the girls, but she figured that it was the fallout of his unemployment. When he headed to the casino, he told her he was going to see his therapist, that he was networking, that he had other appointments. When money appeared from his occasional wins, he claimed that he had been doing some online trading, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. While they lived off $50, that Stacy had in a separate savings account, he drained their (k) of $, emptied $50, out of his wife’s and daughters’ ETrade accounts, maxed out his credit card, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, and lost all of a $, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, personal loan he’d taken out from PNC Bank.

Stacy did not truly understand the extent of her husband’s addiction until the afternoon three police officers showed up at her front door with the news of his death.

Afterward, Stacy studied gambling addiction and the ways slot machines entice customers to part with their money. Inshe filed a lawsuit against both Mountaineer Casino and International Game Technology, the manufacturer of the slot machines her husband played. At issue was the fundamental question of who killed Scott Stevens. Did he die because he was unable to rein in his own Superman The Movie Slots Machine need to gamble? Or was he the victim—as the suit alleged—of a system carefully calibrated to prey upon his weakness, one that robbed him of his money, his hope, and ultimately his life?

Less than 40 years ago, casino gambling was illegal everywhere in the United States outside of Nevada and Atlantic City, New Jersey. But Reel Gambler Slots Machine Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act intribal and commercial casinos have rapidly proliferated across the country, with some 1, now operating in 40 states. Casino patrons bet more than $37 billion annually—more than Americans spend to attend sporting events ($ billion), go to the movies ($ billion), Reel Gambler Slots Machine, and buy music ($ billion) combined.

The preferred mode of gambling these days is electronic gaming machines, of which there are now almost 1 million nationwide, offering variations on slots and video poker. Their prevalence has accelerated addiction and reaped huge profits for casino operators. A significant portion of casino revenue now comes from a small percentage of customers, most of them likely addicts, playing machines that are designed explicitly to lull them into a trancelike state that the industry refers to as “continuous gaming productivity.” (In a report, the American Gaming Association, an industry trade group, claimed that “the prevalence of pathological gambling … is no higher today than it was inReel Gambler Slots Machine Nevada was the only state with legal slot machines. And, despite the popularity of slot machines and the decades of innovation surrounding them, when adjusted for inflation, there has not been a significant increase in the amount spent by customers on slot-machine gambling during an average casino visit.”)

“The manufacturers know these machines are addictive and do their best to make them addictive so they can make more money,” says Terry Noffsinger, Reel Gambler Slots Machine lead attorney on the Reel Gambler Slots Machine suit. “This isn’t negligence. It’s intentional.”

Noffsinger, 72, has been here before. A soft-spoken personal-injury attorney based in Indiana, he has filed two previous lawsuits against casinos. Inhe sued Aztar Indiana Gaming, of Evansville, on behalf of David Williams, then 51 years old, who had been an auditor for the State of Indiana. Williams began gambling after he received a $20 voucher in the mail from Casino Aztar. He developed a gambling addiction that cost him everything, which in his case amounted to about $, Noffsinger alleged that Aztar had violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act by engaging in a “pattern of racketeering activity”—using the mail to defraud Williams with continued enticements to return to the casino. But the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana granted summary judgment in favor of Aztar, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit instructed the district court to dismiss the case, declaring, “Even if Alcatraz Slots Machine statements in these communications could be considered ‘false’ or ‘misrepresentations,’ it is clear that they are nothing more than sales puffery on which no person of ordinary prudence and comprehension would rely.”

Four years later, Noffsinger filed a suit on behalf of Jenny Kephart, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, then 52 years old, against Caesars Riverboat Casino, in Elizabeth, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, Indiana, alleging that the casino, aware that Kephart was a pathological gambler, knowingly enticed her into gambling in order to profit from her addiction. Kephart had filed for bankruptcy after going broke gambling in Iowa, and moved to Tennessee. But after she inherited close to $1 million, Caesars began inviting her to the Indiana riverboat casino, where she gambled away that inheritance and more. When the casino sued her for damages on the money she owed, Kephart countersued. She denied the basis of the Caesars suit on numerous grounds, including that by giving her “excessive amounts of alcohol … and then claiming that it was injured by her actions or inactions,” Caesars waived any claim it might have had for damages under Indiana law. Although Kephart ultimately lost her countersuit, the case went all the way to the Indiana Supreme Court, which ruled in that the trial court had been mistaken in Reel Gambler Slots Machine Caesars’s motion to dismiss her counterclaim. “The existence of the voluntary exclusion program,” the judge wrote, referring to the option Indiana offers people to ban themselves from casinos in the state, “suggests the legislature intended pathological gamblers to take personal responsibility to prevent and protect themselves against compulsive gambling.” (Caesars did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Noffsinger had been planning to retire before he received Stacy Stevens’s phone call, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. But after hearing the details of Scott Stevens’s situation—which had far more serious consequences than his previous two cases—he eventually changed his mind. Unlike in his earlier gambling cases, however, he decided to include a products-liability claim in this one, essentially arguing that slot machines are knowingly designed to deceive players so that when they are used as intended, they cause harm.

In focusing on the question of product liability, Noffsinger was borrowing from the rule book of early antitobacco litigation strategy, which, over the course of several decades and countless lawsuits, ultimately succeeded in getting courts to hold the industry liable for the damage it wrought on public health. Noffsinger’s hope was to do the same with the gambling industry. When Noffsinger filed the Stevens lawsuit, John W, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. Kindt, a professor of business and legal policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, described it as a potential “blockbuster case.”

Even by the estimates of the National Center for Responsible Gaming, which was founded by industry members, to percent of the adult population in the United States—approximately 3 million to 4 million Americans—has a gambling disorder. That is more than the number of women living in the U.S. with a history of breast cancer. The center estimates that another 2 to 3 percent of adults, or Reel Gambler Slots Machine additional 5 million to 8 million Reel Gambler Slots Machine, meets some of the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for addiction but have not yet progressed to the pathological, or disordered, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, stage. Others outside the industry estimate the number of gambling addicts in the country to be higher.

Such addicts simply cannot stop themselves, regardless of the consequences. “When you’re dealing with an addict active in their addiction, they’ve lost all judgment,” says Valerie Lorenz, the author of Compulsive Gambling: What’s It All About? “They can’t control their behavior.”

Gambling is a drug-free addiction. Yet despite the fact that there is no external chemical at work on the brain, the neurological and physiological reactions to the stimulus are similar to those of drug or alcohol addicts. Some gambling addicts report that they experience a high resembling that produced by a powerful drug. Like drug addicts, they develop a tolerance, and when they cannot gamble, they show signs of withdrawal such as panic attacks, anxiety, insomnia, headaches, and heart palpitations.

Neuroscientists have discovered characteristics that appear to be unique to the brains of addicts, particularly in the dopaminergic system, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, which includes reward pathways, and in the prefrontal cortex, which exerts executive control over impulses. Reel Gambler Slots Machine seen a disregulated reward system,” says Jon Grant, a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago. “The frontal parts of the brain that tell us ‘Hey, stop!’ are less active, and parts that anticipate rewards tend to be stronger.”

Gambling addicts may have a genetic predisposition, though a specific marker has not yet been uncovered. Environmental factors and personality traits—a big gambling win within the past year, companions who gamble regularly, impulsivity, depression—may also contribute to the development of a gambling problem. Whatever the causes, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, there’s widespread agreement that certain segments of the population are simply more vulnerable to addiction. “You can’t turn on and turn off certain activities Reel Gambler Slots Machine the brain,” says Reza Habib, a psychology professor at Southern Illinois University, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. “It’s an automatic physiological response.”

Scott Stevens’s story is not anomalous. Given the guilt and shame involved, gambling addiction frequently progresses to a profound despair. The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates that one in five gambling addicts attempts suicide—the highest rate among addicts of any kind. There are no accurate figures for suicides related to gambling problems, but there are ample anecdotes: the police officer who shot himself in the head at a Detroit casino; the accountant who jumped to his death from a London skyscraper in despair over his online-gambling addiction; the year-old student who killed himself in Las Vegas after losing his financial-aid money to gambling; and, of course, Stevens himself.

Problem gamblers are worth a lot of money to casinos. According to some research, 20 percent of regular gamblers are problem or pathological gamblers. Moreover, when they gamble, they spend—which is to say, lose—more than other players. At least nine independent studies demonstrate that problem gamblers generate anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of total gambling revenues.

Casinos know exactly who their biggest spenders are. According to a article in Time magazine, back in the s casino operators bought records from credit-card companies and mailing lists from direct-mail marketers. One of the latter, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, titled the “Compulsive Gamblers Special,” promised to deliver the names ofpeople with “unquenchable appetites for all forms of gambling.” The casinos used these records and lists to target compulsive gamblers—as Caesars was alleged to have done with Jenny Kephart.

These days, the casinos have their own internal methods for determining who their most attractive customers are. According to Natasha Dow Schüll, an NYU professor who spent more than 15 years researching the industry, culminating in her book, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, 70 percent of patrons now use loyalty cards, which allow the casinos to track such data points as how frequently they play electronic gaming machines, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, how long they play, how much they bet, how often they win and lose, what times of day they visit, and so on. Each time a patron hits the Spin or the Deal button, which can be as frequently as to 1, times an hour, the casino registers the Reel Gambler Slots Machine. Even gamblers who choose to forgo loyalty cards do not necessarily escape the casino’s watchful eye. In some machines, miniature cameras watch their faces and track their playing behavior.

Several companies supply casinos with ATMs that allow patrons to withdraw funds through both debit and cash-advance functions, in some cases without ever leaving the machines they are playing. (Some of the companies also sell information on their ATM customers to the casinos.) “The whole premise of the casino is to get people to exceed their limits,” says Les Bernal, the national director of the advocacy organization Stop Predatory Gambling. “If you’re using the casino ATM, it’s like painting yourself orange.”

All of these data have enabled casinos to specifically target their most reliable spenders, primarily problem gamblers and outright addicts. Despite those customers’ big losses—or rather, because of their losses—the casinos lure them to return with perks that include complimentary drinks and meals, limo service, freebies from the casino gift shop, golf excursions for their nongambling spouses, and in some cases even first-class airfare and suites in five-star hotels. They also employ hosts who befriend large spenders and use special offers to encourage them to stay longer or return soon. Some hosts receive bonuses that are tied to the amount customers spend beyond their expected losses, which are calculated Reel Gambler Slots Machine the data gathered from previous visits. As Richard Daynard, a law professor at Northeastern University and the president of the Public Health Advocacy Institute, explained at the group’s forum on casino gambling in the fall of“The business plan for casinos is not based on the occasional gambler. The business plan for casinos is based on the addicted gambler.”

Casinos have developed formulas to calculate the “predicted lifetime value” of any given individual gambler. Gamblers are assigned value rankings based on this amount; the biggest losers are referred to as “whales.” These gamblers become the casinos’ most sought-after repeat customers, the ones to whom they market most aggressively with customized perks and VIP treatment.

Caroline Richardson, for example, became a Regal Riches Slot Machine Review for the Ameristar Casino in Council Bluffs, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, Iowa. In alone, she lost nearly $2 million, primarily Reel Gambler Slots Machine the casino’s slot machines. The casino allegedly allowed her to go behind the cashier’s “cage,” an area normally off-limits to patrons, to collect cash to gamble. It increased the limits on some slot machines so that she could spend more on single games. It also made a new machine off-limits to other customers so that Richardson could be the first to play it. Management assigned Richardson an executive host, who offered her free drinks, meals, hotel stays, and tickets to entertainment events.

So claimed a suit brought against the casino by Richardson’s employer, Colombo Candy & Tobacco Wholesale. Richardson, the company’s controller, embezzled $ million over Reel Gambler Slots Machine course of two years to support All British Casino SlotsTop Game Variety gambling addiction, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. (InRichardson, then 54, was sentenced to 14 to 20 years in prison for the crime.) The thefts ultimately put the company out of business. The suit claimed that the casino had ample reason to presume that Richardson, who earned about $62, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, a year, had come into the money she gambled by fraudulent means. (A representative for Ameristar Casino declined to comment on the lawsuit.)

The U.S. District Court for Nebraska agreed that Colombo had sufficiently proved its initial claim of unjust enrichment, which the casino would have to defend itself against. The suit, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, however, stalled when Colombo’s president and CEO, Monte Brown, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, and his wife, Jenise, ran out of money to pay their attorneys and had to file for personal bankruptcy, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. “They found someone who had the addiction and the ability to steal, and they exploited it,” Monte Brown says. “The casino embezzled from us Reel Gambler Slots Machine an employee.” Jenise adds, “For people to do that to other people, it’s evil.”

Walk into the Mountaineer Casino in West Virginia, and the slot machines overwhelm you—more than 1, of them, lights blinking, animated screens flashing, the simulated sound of clinking coins blaring across the floor. The machines have names such as King Midas, Rich Devil, Cash Illusions, Titanic, and Wizard of Oz. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and here inside the windowless, clockless, cavernous space, a few patrons are clustered around a craps table, a roulette table, and a handful of card tables. But the vast majority sit at the slot machines. Slots and video poker have become the lifeblood of the American casino. They generate nearly 70 Reel Gambler Slots Machine of casino revenues, according to a American Gaming Association report, up from 45 percent four decades ago. Three The Mummy Slots of five casino visitors say their favorite activity is playing electronic gaming machines. Their popularity spells profits not only for casinos but for manufacturers as well. International Game Technology, which, as the world’s largest manufacturer of slot machines, has made many of the ,plus slot machines in the U.S., earned $ billion in revenues in fiscal year Poly Diamonds Slots Machine year, Gtech, an Italian lottery company, acquired IGT and adopted its name in a $ billion deal.)

These are not your grandma’s one-armed bandits. Today’s electronic gaming machines, or EGMs, feature highly sophisticated computers driven by complex algorithms. Old-fashioned three-reel slot machines consisted of physical reels that were set spinning by the pull of a lever. Each reel would have, for example, 22 “stops”: 11 different symbols, and 11 blank spaces between the symbols, for a total of 10, possible combinations. If the same symbol aligned on the payline on all three reels when they stopped spinning, the player would win a jackpot that varied in size depending on the symbol. The odds were straightforward and not terribly hard to calculate.

The big breakthrough in slots technology was the invention of “virtual reel mapping” in According to NYU’s Schüll, about 20 to 30 percent of slot machines today resemble the old-fashioned ones, with physical spinning reels. But where each reel stops is no longer determined by the force of a good pull of the lever. Rather, a computer chip within the machine chooses an outcome using “virtual reels,” which may include different quantities of the various symbols—more blank spaces, for instance, and fewer symbols for big jackpots, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. The physical reels are not spinning until they run out of momentum, as it might appear. Rather, the chips “tell” them where to stop the moment a customer pulls the lever or pushes the button. Thus it is possible for game designers to reduce the odds of hitting a big jackpot from 1 in 10, Cash Wizard Slot 1 in million. Moreover, it is almost impossible for a slots player to have any idea of the actual odds of winning any jackpot, however large or small.

Virtual reel mapping has also enabled a deliberately misleading feature, the “near miss.” That’s when a jackpot symbol appears directly above or below the payline. The intent is to give the player the impression of having almost won—when, in fact, he or she is no closer to having won than if the symbol had not appeared on the reel at all. Some slot machines are specifically programmed to offer up this near-miss result far more often than they would if they operated by sheer chance, and the psychological impact can be powerful, leading players to think, I was so close. Maybe next time. (As I. Nelson Rose, a professor at Whittier Law School Winter Wonderland Slots Machine the author of Gambling and the Law, has written, Nevada regulations operate on the theory that a sophisticated player would be able to tell the real odds of winning by playing a machine long enough, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. The gambling industry maintains that deceptive near misses do not occur Mr Billionaire Slot North American gaming machines, but as Schüll has noted, it has developed a more narrow definition of deceptive near misses, which still allows for “subliminal inducements.”)

Research has shown that an elevated number of near-miss results does increase playing time. Indeed, as early asB. F. Skinner, the godfather of modern behaviorism, noted, “ ‘Almost hitting the jack pot’ increases the probability that the individual will play the machine.” This effect is even stronger for gambling addicts, whose brains respond to near misses more like wins than like losses. “The near misses [trigger] the same brain response as a win,” says Reza Habib, the Southern Illinois University psychology professor.

Yet another feature made possible by virtual reel mapping is the uneven distribution of winning symbols among virtual reels, known as “starving reels.” For instance, a 7 may come up four times on the first virtual reel and five times on the second but only once on the third. The first two reels are thus much more likely to hit a 7 than the last one, but you wouldn’t know this by looking at the physical reels. Just as the craps player expects the dice to be numbered 1 to 6 and the blackjack player expects the dealer to use conventional decks of 52 cards, it’s natural for the slot-machine player to expect equal odds on each of the reels, says Roger Horbay, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, a former gambling-addiction therapist and an expert on electronic gaming machines. “Unbalanced reel design enables EGMs to present to the player screens which are rich in symbols but which are designed to limit winning combinations in a manner incommensurate with the appearance of the screen,” Horbay writes in “Unbalanced Reel Gaming Machines,” a paper he co-authored with Tim Falkiner in

Astonishingly, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, the patent application for virtual reel mapping, the technology that made all these deceptive practices possible, was straightforward about its intended use: “It is important,” the application stated, “to make a machine that is perceived to present greater chances of payoff than it actually has within the legal limitations that games of chance must operate.” Countries such as Australia and New Zealand have outlawed virtual reel mapping because of the harm the inherent deception inflicts upon players.

In the United States, by contrast, the federal government granted the patent for virtual reel mapping in IGT purchased the rights to it in and later licensed the patent to other companies. “Imagine sitting around a boardroom table, thinking of what’s fair, and coming up with this,” says Kevin Harrigan, a co-director of a gambling-research lab at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario. “It just seems wrong to me.”

The Nevada State Gaming Control Board approved virtual-reel slot machines in Interestingly, during hearings on the subject, Ray Pike, the attorney representing IGT—the very company that would subsequently buy the rights to the patent for virtual reel mapping and manufacture hundreds of thousands of slot machines—called these overrepresented near misses “false advertising,” adding, “There is a deception involved with this kind of a machine.” Yet he also stated that if the board approved virtual reel mapping, “certainly we would like to be able to do that”—create the appearance of near misses above and below the payline—“because I think that is a competitive advantage.”

Of course, classic, spinning-reel slot machines make up only a fraction of the electronic gaming machines available at most casinos. Technology has evolved such that many machines lack physical reels altogether, instead merely projecting the likenesses of spinning symbols onto a video screen. These machines allow “multiline” play, an innovation that became common in the s. Instead of betting on one simple payline, players are able to bet on multiple patterns of paylines—as many as on some machines. This allows for more opportunities to win, but the results are often deceptive. For instance, if you bet $1 on each of five different patterns and then get a $3 payout on one pattern, the machine will treat you like a winner, with flashing lights and congratulatory videos and the requisite clinking of virtual coins. The reality, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, of course, is that you have lost $2.

“The brain somehow registers a Reel Gambler Slots Machine Kevin Harrigan says. “No matter what you think, physically you’re being affected by these things—the lights, the sounds, the graphics—as a win. You can get to of these false wins, which we also call losses, an hour. That’s a lot of positive reinforcement.”

Losses disguised as wins also create a “smoother ride,” as some within the industry call it, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, allowing a machine to slowly deplete a player’s cash reserves, rather than taking them in a few large swipes. Because the machine is telling the player he or she is winning, the gradual siphoning is less noticeable.

Related to the video slot machines are video-poker terminals, which IGT began popularizing in The standard five-card-draw game shows five cards, each offering Play Victorian Villain Free Slot Game the option to hold or replace by drawing a card from the 47 remaining in the virtual deck. The games require more skill—or at least a basic understanding of probabilities—than the slot machines do. As such, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, they appeal to people who want to have some sense of exerting control over the outcome.

But over time, designers of video-poker machines discovered that they could influence gamblers’ behavior by manipulating game details. They saw, for instance, patrons going more often for four of a kind than the royal flush, a rarer but more lucrative hand, and they adjusted the machines accordingly. Video poker also offers its own version of losses disguised as wins. Today’s “multihand” video-poker machines—triple-play, play, and even play—allow patrons to play multiple hands simultaneously. This creates an experience similar to multiline slots, in which players are likely to “win back” a portion of each bet by frequently hitting small pots even as they are steadily losing money overall.

Regardless of the machine—slots, video poker—casinos’ ultimate goal is to maximize players’ “time on device.” This is crucial for casinos, because given enough time, the house always wins. Local regulations typically stipulate that machines must pay out 85 to 95 percent of the bets placed on them—which means that for every Reel Gambler Slots Machine inserted into the machine, on average, the player will lose $5 to $ Whatever the exact figure, the house odds make it such that if a player plays long enough, she will eventually lose her money.

Technological innovations have not only rendered electronic gaming machines wildly profitable; they have also, according to experts, made them more addictive. “They’re creating problem gamblers as much as they are preying upon problem gamblers,” says Natasha Schüll.

A crucial element in modern gambling machines is speed. Individual hands or spins can be completed in just three or four seconds. Wander through a casino at almost any hour, and you’ll see people transfixed before the machines, their fingers poised over the buttons, jabbing at them like rats in cages. The ability to immediately access additional cash at many machines “shrink[s] the time that transpires between a player’s impulse to continue gambling and the means to continue gambling, thus minimizing the possibility for reflection and self-stopping that might arise in that pause,” Schüll writes in Addiction by Design. They’re lulled into a “state of suspended animation that gamblers call the zone.”

For many gambling addicts, the zone itself becomes more desirable even than winning. Schüll describes it as “a state of ongoing, undiminished possibility that came to trump the finite reward of a win.” The zone provides an escape from life’s daily troubles, from past trauma, and even from the gambling debt accumulating with each spin. Players have gone for 14, 15, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, 16 hours or more playing continuously. They have become so absorbed in the machines that they left their young children unattended in cars, wet themselves without noticing, and neglected to eat for hours.

Casinos and game designers have come up with many ways to keep patrons at their machines and playing rapidly. The chairs are ergonomically designed so that someone can sit comfortably for long stretches. Winnings can be converted back to credits or printed on vouchers to be redeemed later, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. Waitresses come by to take drink orders, obviating the need for players to get up at all.

The all-consuming nature of electronic gaming machines also speeds up the onset of addiction, which has earned slot machines descriptions such as “electronic morphine” and the “crack cocaine of gambling.” Schüll notes that a study showed that “individuals who regularly played video gambling devices became addicted three to four times more rapidly than other gamblers (in one year, versus three and a half years), even if they had regularly engaged in other forms of gambling in the past without problems.”

Public-policy advocates compare slot machines to cigarettes. Both, they claim, are products specifically and deliberately engineered to have addictive properties that are known to hook users. “The EGM and tobacco industries intend users to consume their products in precisely the ways that directly, and without further mediation, initiate the [causal] chain that results in known harms,” writes James Doughney, a professorial fellow in economics at Victoria University, in Melbourne, in a paper published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction.

Regardless of whatever “pleasures” smoking and EGMs may provide, it is true that both products also cause death … Almost all smokers will smoke potentially lethal amounts. The EGM product, used precisely as intended, will cause users to lose control of time and money in sufficient numbers for the industry to flourish.

Cigarette manufacturers were held accountable for the health problems caused by their product after Jeffrey Wigand, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, a former executive at the tobacco Reel Gambler Slots Machine Brown & Williamson, spoke out in the mids about the way his firm had manipulated the levels of nicotine to make cigarettes more addictive.

Terry Noffsinger’s legal team grasped Reel Gambler Slots Machine similarities, going so far as to bring on board Sharon Y. Eubanks, an attorney with the West Virginia law firm Bordas & Bordas. Eubanks was the lead counsel for the Justice Department in successful federal litigation against the tobacco industry between and She joined Noffsinger in representing Stacy Stevens after he convinced her that the deception used by the gambling industry paralleled that of the tobacco industry. “The tobacco and gambling industries are basically working from the same playbook, using highly engineered products to hook consumers,” Eubanks says.

Casinos are highly attentive to their patrons’ “pain points”—the moments when they are getting close to giving up. The data they track in real time on player cards alert them to these pain points: a big loss, for instance, or when credits start to run low after a dry run. Hosts are also on the lookout for telling behavior, such as someone striking a machine in frustration or slumping over it in discouragement. When hosts spot someone in a state like this, they may swoop in and offer a voucher for some free credits, a drink, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, or perhaps a meal in the restaurant, where the player can take a break until the resistance passes and he can resume gambling. The hosts may also offer encouraging words such as You’ll win it back, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. “To me, that is the most vile and venal example of the casino’s intention to trap and Drie Sterren Slot Machine Review captive problem and addictive gamblers,” Lissy Reel Gambler Slots Machine, a senior staff attorney at the Public Health Advocacy Institute, said at the group’s forum.

When players do exhaust all their funds, casinos will sometimes loan them additional money, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. This is what happened to Noffsinger’s former client Jenny Kephart. Inshe spent an entire night gambling at Caesars Riverboat Casino, drinking strong alcoholic beverages provided for free. Reel Gambler Slots Machine she eventually came to the end of her money playing blackjack, the casino offered her a counter check, basically a promissory note, to enable her to keep playing. She signed the check and gambled away the money. That happened five more times. By the end of the night, she had racked up $, in debt owed to the casino. When she couldn’t repay it, the casino sued her. Noffsinger countersued on her behalf. After Kephart’s suit was dismissed, the casino’s original suit was settled confidentially.

Experts say casinos should be aware that when they extend credit to losing patrons, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, they are by definition enabling problem gamblers. “Any gambler who seeks credit for continued gambling has automatically fulfilled one (and perhaps three) of the ten diagnostic criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association for a ‘pathological gambler’ (as well as for a ‘problem gambler’),” wrote the University of Illinois’ Kindt in the Mercer Law Review. “Theoretically, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, any gambling facility granting credit (particularly over $) to a [gambler] has actual or constructive knowledge that the gambler is problematic.”

Bars that serve alcohol to inebriated customers who then injure someone, say by striking that person with their vehicle, can be held liable according to “dramshop” laws, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. Casinos might similarly be held liable for the financial consequences suffered by gamblers to whom they extend credit beyond a certain limit. Inthe widow of a man who killed himself after racking up insurmountable debt at a Mississippi casino sued the casino under an extrapolation of dramshop laws. As her attorney told the Chicago Tribune, “Feeding Eric Kimbrow credit was the equivalent of giving him alcohol.” But her $50 million lawsuit became moot when the casino went bankrupt. So far, no U.S. court has ruled on such a case against a casino and no state legislature Reel Gambler Slots Machine enacted comparable laws that apply to casinos.

Nor should they, according to the gambling industry. “There is no liability to the casino,” says Geoff Freeman, the president and CEO of the American Gaming Association. “There is a set standard to NIP Slots Machine inebriation. Nothing of that sort exists to measure what the level is to have gambled too much.”

Stacy Stevens’s suit charged that the Mountaineer Casino, knowing what it knew about her husband and knowing about the harm that can befall gambling addicts, “had a duty to protect Scott Stevens from itself.” She claimed that his suicide was foreseeable by the casino, “yet no attempts were made to Reel Gambler Slots Machine on the research of NYU’s Schüll, the Stevens suit charged that Mountaineer Casino and IGT “have knowingly and intentionally taken advantage of casino patrons, exploiting and causing harm to them, by employing and concealing the present state of gambling with slot machines.” It further claimed that “modern slot machines create, encourage, sustain, and exploit behaviors associated with addiction (e.g., longer, faster, more intensive play)” and that “even when played as intended, slot machines cause users to suffer losses and other detrimental effects.” This formed the foundation of Stacy Stevens’s complaint as a products-liability case: The design of the machines itself, the suit alleged, was responsible for her husband’s addiction and eventual death.

Mountaineer Casino and IGT both declined repeated requests for comment. The casino’s attorneys did maintain the industry position, however, in a motion to Reel Gambler Slots Machine the Stevens complaint, asserting that “nationally utilized and government approved slot machines cannot be found defectively designed or lacking proper warning because of a plaintiff’s unreasonable misuse.”

Mountaineer Casino further maintained the party line that the duty to protect problem gamblers from gambling “belongs to the individual gambler.” As the American Gaming Association’s Freeman argues, “They should have the responsibility to put themselves on a list not to be there.” He is referring to the option states offer residents to voluntarily place themselves on a self-exclusion list, which bans them from gambling activities in that state, and from collecting winnings if they violate the ban. (It does not, however, prevent them from losing money if they visit a casino despite the restriction.) Some experts believe self-exclusion lists are not effective, because they seem to be erratically enforced. Despite the presence of sophisticated surveillance technology, patrons are not routinely screened for their self-exclusion status. “If a self-excluded gambler goes to a casino, it’s okay for them to lose money, but once they start winning, a worker taps the gambler on the shoulder and says, ‘You’re being arrested for trespassing,’ ” says Lorenz, the author of Compulsive Gambling. “Go to any casino, and the gamblers will tell you this is happening with regularity.”

Given that casino operators and slot-machine manufacturers are adamant that the blame for gambling addiction resides with the individual, it is not surprising that research by the industry-funded National Center for Responsible Gaming favors studies directed toward confirming this conclusion. Of the approximately $17 million that the NCRG has allotted for research since its inception init has not spent a nickel studying slot machines and the impact they have on those who play them. (According to Chris Reilly, a senior research director at the NCRG, though the majority of the group’s funding comes from commercial casinos and manufacturers, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, the center maintains a firewall between its contributors and its researchers. Members of the board of directors, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, she asserts, do not make research decisions, and the center has a separate scientific advisory board.)

“It’s a mistake to focus on the machine, because it’s just this thing,” Reilly says. She says that the problem is rooted in the individual. “We Reel Gambler Slots Machine know why the gambler Reel Gambler Slots Machine cognitive disorders” or Reel Gambler Slots Machine issues. “That’s what feeds their addiction.”

That’s not right, says Roger Horbay, the EGM expert and former gambling-addiction therapist. Independent research not funded by the NCRG has shown how false wins, near misses, and other such features influence gamblers, especially the way they perceive expected outcomes. “We’ve been treating these people like they’re messed up, but it’s the machines that are messing them up,” he says. “A lot of the so-called cognitive distortions were actually caused by the machines, not [because the users] were making errors in thinking. Most of them are making correct conclusions based on deceptive information. It’s the lie of the technology that’s the problem.”

Keith Whyte, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, the executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, says that although the industry should have a role in research and public-education efforts, it cannot be effective on its own. (The group, which maintains a neutral Reel Gambler Slots Machine toward legal gambling, receives a large share of its funding from the industry.) “We can’t rely on the people who provide the Reel Gambler Slots Machine and profit from it to educate the public on the risks,” he says. “It needs to be a broad-based public-health effort.”

Almost a decade after the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act launched the dramatic expansion of casino gambling into new jurisdictions, the federal government appointed a commission to study the impact of the proliferation. Based on findings that suggested the rate of problem gambling could be twice as high within a mile radius of a gambling facility, the National Gambling Impact Study Commission in recommended “a pause in the expansion of gambling in order to allow time for an assessment of the costs and benefits already visible, as well as those which remain to be identified.”

Despite that warning, states have been unable to resist the continued expansion of casino gambling, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. One reason for the ongoing growth is the financial clout of the industry itself. Inwhen nine states were considering gambling measures, gambling proponents raised more than $ million, compared with about $ million by gambling opponents, according to a report by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. “Predatory gambling interests are now the most powerful lobby in the country on the state level because government is a partner with them,” says Les Bernal of Stop Predatory Gambling. “They are literally going out and buying the political process.”

Indeed, experts argue that many states have created a government-gambling complex that implicates them in the casinos’ practices. Many states provide tribal casinos with regional monopolies in exchange for revenues skimmed off the top of casino profits—as much as 30 to 40 percent in some places. West Virginia has a proprietary interest in the slot machines’ software. Kansas actually owns the games and operations of nontribal casinos. New Jersey, Delaware, and Rhode Island have all provided financial bailouts to faltering casinos. “It’s a pretty sleazy way to fund state government,” says Peter Franchot, the comptroller of Maryland. “We have set ourselves up in partnership with a predatory industry … The profits come mainly from a group of addicts that are recruited and nurtured by casinos until they’re out of money.”

Communities typically build casinos based on a mirage of false promises: that they will provide jobs, fund schools, and boost Reel Gambler Slots Machine local economy. But Earl Grinols, an economics professor at Baylor University, in Texas, and the author of Gambling in America: Costs and Benefits, has estimated that every dollar of benefit a casino brings to a community entails about $3 in social costs—whether it’s increased crime, or declining productivity, or more spending on services such as unemployment payments, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. “It’s a social negative,” Grinols told me. “Casino gambling is bad for the economy. It should not be allowed by anyone, anywhere, anytime.”

In defense of its products and practices, the gambling industry insists that it is heavily regulated and therefore safe. As the attorneys for Mountaineer Casino argued in their motion to dismiss the Stevens suit, “Gaming is highly regulated in each state where it is legalized … If gambling were deemed unsafe or to pose unreasonable harm to citizens … it would not have been legalized.” But this “if it’s legal, it must be safe” Reel Gambler Slots Machine fails to acknowledge the inadequacies of existing regulations. “Regulators are supposed to protect players and the industry,” says I. Nelson Rose, the author of Gambling and the Law, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. “But it’s just not at the top of the government’s or industry’s priorities to be thinking about how to protect players.”

Each state in which gambling is legal has set up its own commission to regulate the industry, but there seems to be a symbiotic relationship between regulators and the industry, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. There are numerous instances of former regulators’ being hired by casinos or other gambling interests. Many gaming-commission members—including those who approve applications for casino licenses—are advised by consultants for private companies also on casino payrolls. “I think society in general has been led to believe that this is a highly regulated and fair industry because the regulators test everything,” Roger Horbay says. “But they would be shocked if they knew even slot machines don’t have to comply with consumer-protection laws.”

Horbay points to informed choice as the central tenet of consumer protection, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, which is Dou Di Zhu Plus Slots Machine when you apply for Reel Gambler Slots Machine loan, the bank has to tell you the Reel Gambler Slots Machine rate and how it’s calculated. It’s why many state lotteries have to disclose their odds, and it’s why even the contests on the backs of cereal boxes list the chances of winning a prize. Yet such essential disclosure is not required of electronic gaming machines. “These machines present all sorts of deceptive trade practices that wouldn’t be allowed in any other industry, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, not even in other gambling games,” he says. “The standard for game fairness is nonexistent on slots.”

As it happens, the Nevada State Gaming Control Board addressed exactly this question during its hearings on virtual-reel technology. As Richard Hyte, then a Nevada commissioner, explained, if slot machines were to disclose a player’s odds of winning a payout, that would “take away the mystery, the excitement and entertainment and risk of playing those machines.”

In June, the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals ruled on Stacy Stevens’s suit, determining that “no duty of care under West Virginia law exists on the part of manufacturers of video lottery terminals, or the casinos in which the terminals are hollywood casino sports book, Reel Gambler Slots Machine protect users from compulsively gambling.” The opinion, written by Justice Brent Benjamin, declared that electronic gaming machines

exist in West Virginia for the express purpose of providing an economic boon to the State and its political subdivisions in the form of increased public Reel Gambler Slots Machine, to the citizenry in the form of enhanced employment opportunities, and to the racetrack industry for the additional benefit of the dependent local economies.

West Virginia might have been a difficult venue in which to make Stevens’s case. The state has a Reel Gambler Slots Machine interest in the slot machines’ software, and legalized gambling provided more than $ million Reel Gambler Slots Machine fiscal yearReel Gambler Slots Machine, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government. (For the sake of comparison, the state’s total tax revenues were only about $5 billion.) Little wonder that the court’s ruling focused on the “economic boon,” “increased public revenues,” and “enhanced employment opportunities” provided by gambling, as opposed to the state’s responsibilities to problem gamblers. As Sharon Eubanks, Noffsinger’s co-counsel on the Stevens suit, notes: “What this tells us is the states are addicted to gambling themselves. They seem unwilling to deal with the social costs.”

Les Bernal of Stop Predatory Gambling agrees that the close relationship between the state and its gambling interests was crucial: “I don’t think it has something to do with it; I think it has everything to do with it. Essentially what the West Virginia Supreme Court has said is that gambling interests in West Virginia are immune from liability.”

In West Virginia, Indiana, and other states, the courts Reel Gambler Slots Machine deferred to the state legislatures’ intentions in their decisions, but the legislators don’t always know better—in part because they may have been informed principally by gambling interests. Former West Virginia House Majority Leader Rick Staton has expressed regret over his role in expanding legalized gambling in the state. “I think Reel Gambler Slots Machine Temple Quest: Spinfinity Slots Machine, no pun intended, played,” he told the Charleston Gazette, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. He’s not alone. Stan Rosenberg, the president of the Massachusetts Senate, helped lead his state’s drive to legalize casinos in despite being unaware of near misses, false wins, and other EGM practices. “I don’t know the engineering and science of it,” he admits.

Noffsinger concludes that this “is basically the end of Reel Gambler Slots Machine efforts in West Virginia.” But he believes the movement to hold casinos liable for problem gambling is only building momentum: “One of the things that has happened is that the public is learning more about it. There have been more people who have lost a lot of money, there have been more people who have had to file bankruptcy, there have been more people who have embezzled, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, there have been more people who Hjul Vegas Casino Bonuser committed suicide. What’s amazing to me is that not one time has the evidence that we alleged in our complaint been tested in a court of law with sworn testimony and a trial and a ruling.”

And that, according to several experts, is what it will probably take—a court trial, which would open access to private industry documents. “The industry knows if any court gets to the point of discovery, they’re in real trouble,” says Kindt, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “They know what they’ve got in their marketing plans and their documents. They cannot afford to have that made public, because it would confirm what everybody knows: that one- to two-thirds of their income comes from the roughly 10 to 20 percent of their customers who are pathological and problem gamblers.” Kindt continued, “The Stevens case is getting Reel Gambler Slots Machine publicity and national recognition. The more lawyers read about it, the more they are going to start smelling blood in the water. It just takes for a case to be brought up in the right jurisdiction.”

On his last Christmas, shortly before he lost his job, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, Scott Stevens did not buy his wife or three daughters any presents, and he couldn’t bring himself to open the presents they had bought him. He didn’t feel that he deserved them, and he gave in only after his daughters begged him. A photograph of him later that week, when he was deep-sea fishing in Cabo San Lucas, a place that usually brought him happiness, reveals the heaviness in his expression—his eyes defeated, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, his smile gone.

In the months after he was fired, Stevens tried taking the antidepressant Paxil and saw a therapist, but he did not admit to Stacy that he was still gambling almost every day, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. As spring turned into summer, he knew that charges from the IRS were forthcoming following its investigation into his embezzlement and that even after serving time in prison, he would Reel Gambler Slots Machine still be on the hook for the hundreds of thousands of dollars he owed in back taxes and penalties, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. His former employer seemed close to pressing charges, having put the police on notice. He would never be able to work in the financial sector again. Once the affair hit the papers, his family would be dragged through the gantlet of small-town gossip and censure. He could see no way to spare them other than to sacrifice himself.

By mid-afternoon on August 13,Stacy had started to worry. Why hadn’t Reel Gambler Slots Machine responded to her texts? That wasn’t like him. She texted him that they would eat dinner early to accommodate the girls’ evening activities. “Why aren’t you answering me?” she texted. But she got no response until about an hour later, when he sent his last text to her: “I love you.”

Distressed, Stacy responded, “Honey, I love you. Please come home.” She telephoned his therapist to ask whether she had seen him, Reel Gambler Slots Machine to no avail.

Shortly after that, Stacy’s phone rang. It was Tim Bender, the Cleveland tax attorney helping Stevens with his IRS troubles. Stevens had just called him. Bender had tried to talk him out of killing himself, but Stevens had hung up. Bender said he would call

All Stacy could do was pray: “Please, God. Please, please, please. Let things be okay.”

Then she heard sirens. Lots of them.

Police officers from the neighboring town of Wintersville arrived at the soccer fields within six minutes of Stevens’s own call. They found Stevens sitting on the railroad tie by his Jeep. Two sheriff’s deputies and an Ohio highway patrolman also pulled into the complex.

They spoke to Stevens across the gravel parking lot.

“Stand up. Show us your hands.”

But Stevens was not going to back down. This was his family’s only chance, his final gamble.

He raised the muzzle of the shotgun to his chest, reached for the trigger, and squeezed.

The room is abuzz with beeps, bells and flashing lights. Well-dressed men and women wander about, pushing buttons and pulling levers, watching cherries and sevens spin on liquid crystal displays. But these men and women aren't here for fun. They're here for business, and their business is gambling.

From April 29 to May 1,the Palais des Congrès de Montréal in Montréal, Quebec, hosted the 12th annual Canadian Gaming Summit. In a massive showroom, slot machine makers from across the country presented their wares: tall, noisy boxes decorated with images of pigs and pirates and martini glasses.

Though diverse in appearance, all slot machines, according to some mental health experts, have something in common: they are psychologically deceptive and make gambling addicts of people who aren't predisposed to addictions.

We've been treating these people like they're messed up, but it's the machines that are messing them up, says Roger Horbay, a former addiction therapist who now runs Game Planit Interactive Corp., a company that advocates for consumer protection in the gambling industry.

Advocates for the gambling industry disagree, claiming electronic gaming machines are benign &#x; designed to entertain, not manipulate.

Problem gambling prevalence studies show that gambling addicts are much more likely to play electronic gaming machines (slot machines, poker machines, video lottery terminals) than table games like blackjack. A survey indicated that almost half of video lottery terminal players in Nova Scotia were at risk for problem gambling. The Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission reported in that 71% of its clients with gambling addictions had no problems before playing video lottery terminals. One study found that some 60% of gaming machine revenue in Canada comes from problem gamblers. By contrast, problem gamblers accounted for less than a quarter Reel Gambler Slots Machine lottery and bingo revenues (Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy ;41 ).

Canadians hooked on gaming machines suffer little inconvenience in finding their next fix. Ontario has about 22 gaming machines, all slots. Quebec has a mix of slots and video lottery terminals, almost 19 in total. In Newfoundland, where bars have no competition from casinos or racetracks, there are about video lottery terminals: per capita, 3 times more than Ontario.

All those machines make for big profits. Of the $ billion reaped by Ontario's gambling industry in fiscal year /07, $3 billion came from slot machines. The percentage of fiscal year /07 gambling revenues from electronic gaming machines in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta was Reel Gambler Slots Machine slot game online $ million), 83% (of $ million) and 87% (of $ billion), Reel Gambler Slots Machine, respectively.

Before gaming machines exploded in popularity in the s, most of the gambling addicts Horbay saw had other psychosocial problems. This indicated they were likely predisposed to addiction. But as the number of problem machine gamblers increased, he noticed many didn't exhibit other addictive behaviours. They were what Horbay refers to as normals.

In other games, like poker, most people have misconceptions about their skill levels. They are easier to treat. But machine gamblers really are conditioned by the machine. You get the impression you can beat the machine.

As a Reel Gambler Slots Machine, says Horbay, many people have been led to believe they are suffering from cognitive distortion when, in reality, they are reaching proper conclusions based on misleading information. Research out of the University of Waterloo shows that the features of a typical slot machine suggest that players should win about 2 to 5 times the amount they wager, which, if true, would mean casinos lose money on slots (Journal of Gambling Issues ;), Reel Gambler Slots Machine. Logic dictates that casinos wouldn't line their floors with row upon row of slot machines if they weren't cash cows. But critics of gambling practices claim the devices condition users to abandon logic.

Robert Simpson, chief executive Reel Gambler Slots Machine of the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre, claims slot machines are designed to create an illusion of favourable odds that gets people playing &#x; and keeps them playing. All these design characteristics in EGMs electronic gaming machines give people the wrong impression of how the machines work, such that they actually believe that over time, the more they play, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, the more likely they are to win.

Horbay and Simpson both cite a slot machine Reel Gambler Slots Machine called virtual reel mapping as being particularly deceptive. Old mechanical slot machines had a set number of reels containing a set number of symbols, each equally likely to appear on the payline after each spin. In the s, however, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, slots makers incorporated electronics into their products and programmed them to weigh particular symbols. Thus the odds of losing Reel Gambler Slots Machine appearing on the payline became disproportionate to their actual frequency on the physical reel. The patent granted on this technology (United States Patent No. 4 ) states: It is important to make a machine that is perceived to present greater chances of payoff than it actually has within the legal limitations that games of chance must operate.

The Waterloo research paper indicates virtual reel mapping also increases the probability that winning combinations will appear just above or below the payline, which, according to addiction experts, makes gamblers believe they are always on the verge of winning. Gamblers are also largely unaware that the reels on slot Reel Gambler Slots Machine are often unbalanced. On a 3-reel machine, for example, a winning symbol may appear more often on the first 2 reels than on the last. Many modern gaming machines use electronic animation instead of reels, but a disconnect remains between how the game is displayed and how it actually operates. Other features considered deceptive by critics include differing symbol sizes (winning symbols are larger), stop buttons (give the illusion of control though the outcome is determined on initial wager) and frequent small wins (accompanied by flashing lights and bells).

Bill Rutsey, chief executive officer of the Canadian Gaming Association, an organization that calls itself the voice of Canada's gaming entertainment industry, says most gamblers know gaming machines have random outcomes and play them for excitement. Virtual reel mapping and unbalanced reels are not deceptive features, he says.

The whole issue there is did you win or didn't you win. If you didn't win, you didn't win, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. I think it's pretty clear when you're playing the game whether or not you've won, or when you do win and when you don't win &#x; whether the Sports Interaction Review is balanced or unbalanced, you end up with the same result. Either you have a winning combination or you have a losing combination.

The reason problem gamblers prefer gaming machines is also easy to explain, says Rutsey. Research shows that about 1% of the population are problem gamblers. Since about 75% of casino patrons list slots as their favourite game, it only makes sense, he says, that many problem gamblers fall within that majority. To claim the machines make addicts is untrue, he adds. It's kind of like saying beer causes alcoholism because most alcoholics drink beer.

Horbay, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, considers machine gaming the most addictive, and yet least regulated, form of gambling. Casinos would never get away with using loaded dice or with stacking a deck of cards, he says, which are akin to the deceptive features of gaming machines. He proposes that the government phase out virtual reel mapping (already illegal in Australia and New Zealand) and unbalanced reels. Gamblers would also suffer fewer problems, he says, if electronic gaming machines displayed how much they stand to lose on each bet.

The treatment field has been doing these players a disservice, says Horbay. Let's stop labeling and pathologizing them. These are normal people. Let's look at the source of the harm. &#x; Roger Collier, CMAJ

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Figure. It may seem as if uncertainties shroud slot machines and other electronic gaming machines, but several things are clear: they're a cash cow for governments and use technologies that are considered deceptive. Image by: sweetandsour / ingalex.de

Casino gambling machine

"One-Armed Bandit", "Slot Machine", "Fruit machine", and "Pokies" redirect here. For the album, see One-Armed Bandit (album). For the band, see Reel Gambler Slots Machine Machine (band), Reel Gambler Slots Machine. For other uses, see Fruit machine (disambiguation) and Pokey (disambiguation).

Row of digital-based slot machines inside a casino in Las Vegas

A slot machine (American English), fruit machine (British English) or poker machine (Australian English and New Zealand English) is a gambling machine that creates a game of chance for its customers. Slot machines are also known pejoratively as one-armed bandits because of the large mechanical levers affixed to the sides of early mechanical machines and the games' ability to empty players' pockets and wallets as thieves would.^[1]

A slot machine's standard layout features a screen displaying three or more reels that "spin" when the game is activated. Some modern slot machines still include a lever as a skeuomorphic design trait to trigger play, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. However, the mechanics of early machines have been superseded by random number generators, and most are now operated using buttons and touchscreens.

Slot machines include one or more currency detectors that validate the form of payment, whether coin, cash, voucher, or token. The machine pays out according to the pattern of symbols displayed when the reels stop "spinning". Slot machines are the most popular gambling method in casinos and constitute about 70% of the average U.S. casino's income.^[2]

Digital technology has resulted in variations on the original slot machine concept. As the player is essentially playing a video game, manufacturers are able to offer more interactive elements, such as advanced bonus rounds and more varied video graphics.

Etymology[edit]

The "slot machine" term derives from the slots on the machine for inserting and retrieving coins.^[3] "Fruit machine" comes from the traditional fruit images on the spinning reels such as lemons and cherries.^[4]

History[edit]

"Liberty Bell" machine, manufactured by Charles Fey.

Sittman and Pitt of Brooklyn, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, New York developed a gambling machine in that was a precursor to the modern slot machine. It contained five drums holding a total of 50 card faces and was based on poker. The machine proved extremely popular, and soon Reel Gambler Slots Machine bars in the city had one or more of them. Players would insert a nickel and pull a lever, which would spin the drums and the cards that they held, the player hoping for a good poker hand. There was no direct payout mechanism, so a pair of kings might get the player a free beer, whereas Reel Gambler Slots Machine royal flush could pay out cigars or drinks; the prizes were wholly dependent upon what the establishment would offer. To improve the odds for the house, Sweetie Land Slots Machine cards were typically removed from the deck, the ten of spades and the jack of hearts, doubling the odds against winning a royal flush. The drums could also be rearranged to further reduce a player's chance of winning.

Because of the vast number of possible wins in the original poker-based game, it proved practically impossible to make a machine capable of awarding an automatic payout for all possible winning combinations. At some time between and ,^[5]Charles Fey of San Francisco, California devised a much simpler automatic mechanism^[6] with three spinning reels containing a total of five symbols: horseshoes, diamonds, spades, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, hearts and a Liberty Bell; the bell gave the machine its name. By replacing ten cards with five symbols and using three reels instead of five drums, the complexity of reading a win was considerably reduced, allowing Fey to design an effective automatic payout mechanism. Three bells in a row produced the biggest payoff, ten nickels (50¢). Liberty Bell was a huge success and spawned a thriving mechanical gaming device industry. After a few years, the devices were banned in California, but Fey still could not keep up with the demand for them from elsewhere. The Liberty Bell machine was so popular that it was copied by many slot-machine manufacturers, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. The first of these, also called the "Liberty Bell", was produced by the manufacturer Herbert Mills in Bymany "bell" machines had been installed in most cigar stores, saloons, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, bowling alleys, brothels and barber shops.^[7] Early machines, including an Liberty Bell, are now part of the Nevada State Museum's Fey Collection.^[8]

The first Liberty Bell machines produced by Mills used the same symbols on the reels as did Charles Fey's original. Soon afterward, another version was produced with patriotic symbols, such as flags and wreaths, on the wheels, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. Later, a similar machine called the Operator's Bell was produced that included the option of adding a gum-vending attachment. As the gum offered was fruit-flavored, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, fruit symbols were placed on the reels: lemons, cherries, oranges and plums. A bell was retained, and a picture of a stick of Bell-Fruit Gum, the origin of the bar symbol, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, was also present. This set of symbols proved highly popular and was used by other companies that began to make their own slot machines: Caille, Watling, Jennings and Pace.^[9]

A commonly used technique to avoid gambling laws in a number of states was to award food prizes. For this reason, a number of gumball and other vending machines were regarded with mistrust by the courts. The two Iowa cases of State v. Ellis^[10] and State v. Striggles^[11] are both used in criminal law classes to illustrate the concept of reliance upon authority as it relates to the axiomatic ignorantia juris non excusat ("ignorance of the law is no excuse").^[12] In these cases, a mint vending machine was declared to be a gambling device because the machine would, by internally manufactured chance, occasionally give the next user a number of tokens exchangeable for more candy. Despite the display Reel Gambler Slots Machine the result of the next use on the machine, the courts ruled that "[t]he machine appealed to the player's propensity to gamble, and that is [a] vice."^[13]

InBally developed the first fully electromechanical slot machine called Money Honey (although earlier machines such as Bally's High Hand draw-poker machine had exhibited the basics of electromechanical construction as early as ). Its electromechanical workings made Money Honey the first slot machine with a bottomless hopper and automatic payout of up to coins without the help of an attendant.^[14] The popularity of this machine led to the increasing predominance Cat Queen slot electronic games, with the side lever soon becoming vestigial.

The first video slot machine was developed in in Kearny Mesa, California by the Las Vegas–based Fortune Coin Co. This machine used a modified inch (48&#;cm) Sony Trinitron color receiver for the display and logic boards for all slot-machine functions. The prototype was mounted in a full-size, show-ready slot-machine cabinet. The first production units went on trial at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel. After some modifications to defeat cheating attempts, the video slot machine was approved by the Nevada State Gaming Commission and eventually found popularity on the Las Vegas Strip and in downtown casinos. Fortune Coin Co. and its video slot-machine technology were purchased by IGT (International Gaming Technology) in ^{[citation needed]}

The first American video slot machine to offer a Reel Gambler Slots Machine screen" bonus round was Reel ’Em In, developed by WMS Industries in ^[15] This type of machine had appeared in Australia from at least with the Three Bags Full game.^[16] With this type of machine, the display changes to provide a different game in which an additional payout may be awarded.

Operation[edit]

RAY's Ruusu and Tuplapotti slot machines in Finland

Depending on the machine, the player can insert cash or, in "ticket-in, ticket-out" machines, a paper ticket with a barcode, into a designated slot on the machine. The machine is then activated by means of a lever or button (either Reel Gambler Slots Machine or on a touchscreen), which activates reels that spin and stop to rearrange the symbols. If a player matches a winning combination of symbols, the player earns credits based on the paytable. Symbols vary depending on the theme of the machine. Classic symbols include objects such as fruits, bells, and stylized lucky sevens. Most slot games have a theme, such as a specific aesthetic, location, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, or character. Symbols and other bonus features of the game are typically aligned with the theme. Some themes are licensed from popular media franchises, including films, television series (including game shows such as Wheel of Fortune), entertainers, and musicians.

Multi-line slot machines have become more popular since the s. These machines have more than one payline, meaning that visible symbols that are not aligned on the main horizontal may be considered as winning combinations. Traditional three-reel slot machines commonly have one, three, or five paylines while video slot machines may have 9, 15, 25, or as many as different paylines. Most accept variable numbers of credits to play, with 1 to 15 credits per line being typical, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. The higher the amount bet, the higher the payout will be if the player wins.

One of the main differences between video slot machines and reel machines is in the way payouts are calculated. With reel machines, the only way to win the maximum jackpot is to play the maximum number The Price Is Right Slots Machine coins (usually three, sometimes four or even five coins per spin). With video machines, the fixed payout values are multiplied by the number of coins per line that is being bet. In other words: on a reel machine, the odds are more favorable if the gambler plays with the maximum number of coins available.^[17] However, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, depending on the structure of the game and its bonus features, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, some video slots may still include features that improve chances at payouts by making increased wagers.

"Multi-way" games eschew fixed paylines in favor of allowing symbols to pay anywhere, as long as there is Reel Gambler Slots Machine least one in at least three consecutive reels from left to right. Multi-way games may be configured to Reel Gambler Slots Machine players to bet by-reel: for example, on a game with a 3x5 pattern (often referred to as a way game), playing one reel allows all three symbols in Reel Gambler Slots Machine first reel to potentially pay, but only the center row pays on the remaining reels (often designated by darkening the unused portions of the reels). Other multi-way games use a 4x5 or 5x5 pattern, where there are up to five symbols in each reel, allowing for up to 1, and 3, ways to win respectively, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. The Australian manufacturer Aristocrat Leisure brands games featuring this system as "Reel Power", "Xtra Reel Power" and "Super Reel Power" respectively. A variation involves patterns where symbols pay adjacent to one another. Most of these games have a hexagonal reel formation, and much like multi-way games, any patterns not played are darkened out of use.

Denominations can range from 1 cent ("penny slots") all the way up to $ or more per credit. The latter are typically known as "high limit" machines, and machines configured to allow for such wagers are often located in dedicated areas (which may have a separate team of attendants to cater to the needs of those who play there). The machine automatically calculates the number of credits the player receives in exchange for the cash inserted. Newer machines often allow players to choose from a selection of denominations on a splash screen or menu.

Terminology[edit]

A bonus is a special feature of the particular game theme, which is activated when certain symbols appear in a winning combination. Bonuses and the number of bonus features vary depending upon the game. Some bonus rounds are a special session of free spins (the number of which is often based on the winning combination that triggers the bonus), Reel Gambler Slots Machine with a different or modified set of winning combinations as the main game and/or other multipliers or increased frequencies of symbols, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, or a "hold and re-spin" mechanic in which specific symbols (usually marked with values of credits or other prizes) are collected and locked in place over a finite number of spins. In other bonus rounds, the player is presented with several items on a screen from which to choose. As the player chooses items, a number of credits is revealed and awarded. Some bonuses use a mechanical device, such as a spinning wheel, that works in conjunction with the bonus to display the amount won.

A candle is a light on top of the slot machine. It flashes to alert the operator that change is needed, hand pay is requested or a potential problem with the machine. It can be lit by the player by pressing the "service" or "help" button.

Carousel refers to a grouping of slot machines, usually in a circle or oval formation.

A coin hopper is a container where the coins that are immediately available for payouts are held. The hopper is a mechanical device that rotates coins into the coin tray when a player collects credits/coins (by Reel Gambler Slots Machine a "Cash Out" button). When a certain preset coin capacity is reached, a coin diverter automatically redirects, or "drops", excess coins into a "drop bucket" or "drop box". (Unused coin hoppers can still be found even on games that exclusively employ Ticket-In, Ticket-Out technology, as a vestige.)

The credit meter is a display of the amount of money or number of credits on the machine, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. On mechanical slot machines, this is usually a seven-segment display, but video slot machines typically use stylized text that suits the game's theme and user interface.

The drop bucket or drop box is a container located in a slot machine's base where excess coins are diverted from the hopper. Typically, a drop bucket is used for low-denomination slot machines and a drop box is used for high-denomination slot machines. A drop box contains a hinged lid with one or more locks whereas a drop bucket does not contain a lid. The contents of drop buckets and drop boxes are collected and counted by the casino on a scheduled basis.

EGM is short for "Electronic Gaming Machine".

Free spins are a common form of bonus, where a series of spins are automatically played at no charge at the player's current wager. Free spins Reel Gambler Slots Machine usually triggered via a scatter of at least three designated symbols (with the number of spins dependent on the number of symbols that land). Some games allow the free spins bonus to "retrigger", which adds additional spins on top of those already awarded. There is no theoretical limit to the number of free spins obtainable. Some games may have other features that can also trigger over the course of free spins.

A hand pay refers to a payout made by an attendant or at an exchange point ("cage"), rather than by the slot machine itself. A hand pay occurs when the amount of the payout exceeds the maximum amount that was preset by the slot machine's operator. Usually, the maximum amount is set at the level where the operator must begin to deduct taxes. A hand pay could also be necessary as a result of a short pay.

Hopper fill slip is a document used to record the replenishment of the coin in the coin hopper after it becomes depleted as a result of making payouts to players. The slip indicates the amount of coin placed into the hoppers, as well as the signatures of the employees involved in the transaction, the slot machine number and the location and the date.

MEAL book (Machine entry authorization log) is a log of the employee's entries into the machine.

Low-level or slant-top slot machines include a stool so the player may sit down. Stand-up or upright slot machines are played while standing.

Optimal play is a payback percentage based on a gambler using the optimal strategy in a skill-based slot machine game.

Payline is a line that crosses through one symbol on each reel, along which a winning combination is evaluated, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. Classic spinning reel machines usually have up to nine paylines, while video slot machines may have as many as one hundred. Paylines could be of various shapes (horizontal, vertical, oblique, triangular, zigzag, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, etc.)

Persistent state refers to passive features on some slot machines, some of which able to trigger bonus payouts or other special features if certain conditions are met over Wild Circus Slots Machine by players on that machine.^[18]

Roll-up is the process of dramatizing a win by playing sounds while the meters count up to the amount that has been won.

Short pay refers to a partial payout made by a slot machine, which is less than the amount due to the player. This occurs if the coin hopper has been depleted as a result of making earlier payouts to players. The remaining amount due to the player is either paid as Reel Gambler Slots Machine hand pay or an attendant will come and refill the machine.

A scatter is a pay combination based on occurrences of a designated symbol landing anywhere on the reels, rather than falling in sequence on the same payline. A scatter pay usually requires a minimum of three symbols to land, and the machine may offer increased prizes or jackpots depending on the number that land. Scatters are frequently used to trigger bonus games, such as free spins (with the number of spins multiplying based on the number of scatter symbols that land), Reel Gambler Slots Machine. The scatter symbol usually cannot be matched using wilds, and some games may require the scatter symbols to appear on consecutive reels in order to pay. On some multiway games, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, scatter symbols still pay in unused areas.

Taste is a reference to the small amount often paid out to keep a player seated and continuously betting. Only rarely will machines fail to pay even the minimum out over the course of several pulls.

Display screen of a slot machine in tilt mode

Tilt is a term derived from electromechanical slot machines' "tilt switches", Reel Gambler Slots Machine, which would make or break a circuit when they were tilted or otherwise tampered with that triggered an alarm. While modern machines no longer have tilt switches, any kind of technical fault (door switch in the wrong state, reel motor failure, out of paper, etc.) is still called a "tilt".

A theoretical hold worksheet is a document provided by the manufacturer for every slot machine that indicates the theoretical percentage the machine should hold based on the amount paid in. The worksheet also indicates the reel strip settings, number of coins that may be played, the payout schedule, the number of reels and other information descriptive of the particular type of slot machine.

Volatility or variance refers to the measure of risk associated with playing a slot machine. A low-volatility slot machine has regular but smaller wins, while a high-variance slot machine has fewer but bigger wins.

Weight count is an American term referring to the total value of coins or tokens removed from a first council casino machine's drop bucket or drop box for counting by the casino's hard count team through the use of a weigh scale.

Wild symbols substitute for most other symbols in the game (similarly to a joker card), usually excluding scatter and jackpot symbols (or offering a lower prize on non-natural combinations that include wilds), Reel Gambler Slots Machine. How jokers behave are dependent on the specific game and whether the player is in a bonus or free games mode. Sometimes wild symbols may only appear on certain reels, or have a chance to "stack" across the entire reel.

Pay table[edit]

Main article: Pay table

Each machine has a table that lists the number of credits the player will receive if the symbols listed on the pay table line up on the pay line of the machine. Some symbols are wild and can represent many, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, or all, of the other symbols to complete a winning line. Especially on older machines, the pay table is listed on the face Rocket Reel Slots Machine the machine, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, usually above and below the area containing the wheels. On video slot machines, they are usually contained within a help menu, along with information on other features.

Technology[edit]

Reels[edit]

Historically, all slot machines used revolving mechanical reels to display and determine results. Although the original slot machine used five reels, simpler, and therefore more reliable, three reel machines quickly became the standard, Reel Gambler Slots Machine.

A problem with three reel machines is that the number of combinations is only cubic &#; the original slot machine with three physical reels and 10 symbols on each reel had only 10³ = 1, possible combinations. This limited the manufacturer's ability to offer large jackpots since even the rarest event had a likelihood of %. The maximum theoretical payout, assuming % return to player would be times the bet, but that would leave no room for other pays, making the machine very high risk, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, and also quite boring.

Although the number of symbols eventually increased to about 22, allowing 10, combinations,^[19] this still limited jackpot sizes as well as the number of possible outcomes.

In the s, however, slot machine manufacturers incorporated electronics into their products and programmed them to weight particular symbols. Thus the odds of losing symbols appearing on the payline became disproportionate to their actual frequency on the physical reel. A symbol would only appear once on the casino san marino displayed to the player, but could, in fact, occupy several stops on the multiple reel.

InInge Telnaes received a patent for a device titled, "Electronic Gaming Device Utilizing a Random Number Generator for Selecting the Reel Stop Positions" (US Patent ),^[20] which states: "It is important to make a machine that is perceived to present greater chances of payoff than it actually has within the legal limitations that games of chance must operate."^[21] The patent was later bought by International Game Technology and has since expired.

A virtual reel that has virtual stops per reel would allow up to ³ = 16, final positions, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. The manufacturer could choose to offer a $1 million jackpot on a $1 bet, confident that it will only happen, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, over the long term, once every million plays.

Computerization[edit]

With microprocessors now ubiquitous, the computers inside modern slot machines allow manufacturers to assign a different probability to every symbol on every reel. To the player, it might appear that a winning symbol was "so close", whereas in fact the probability is much lower.

In the s in the U.K., machines embodying microprocessors became common. These used a number of features to ensure the payout was controlled within the limits of the gambling legislation. As a coin was inserted into the machine, it could go either directly into the cashbox for the benefit of the owner or into a channel that formed the payout reservoir, with the microprocessor monitoring the number of coins in this channel. The drums themselves were driven by stepper motors, controlled by the processor and with proximity sensors monitoring the position of the drums. A "look-up table" within the software allows the processor to know what symbols were being displayed on the drums to the gambler. This allowed the system to control the level of payout by stopping the drums at positions it had determined. If the payout channel had filled up, the payout became more generous; if nearly empty, the payout became less so (thus giving good control of the odds).

Video slot machines[edit]

Video slot machines do not use mechanical reels, but use graphical reels on a computerized display. As there are no mechanical constraints on the design of video slot machines, games often use at least five reels, and may also use non-standard layouts. This greatly expands the number of possibilities: a machine can have 50 or more symbols on a reel, giving odds as high as million to 1 against &#; enough for even the largest jackpot. As there are so many combinations possible with five reels, manufacturers do not need free 5 no deposit casino weight the payout symbols (although some may still do so). Instead, higher paying symbols will typically appear only once or twice on each reel, while more common symbols earning a more frequent payout will appear many times. Video slot machines usually make more extensive use of multimedia, and can feature more elaborate minigames as bonuses. Modern cabinets typically use flat-panel displays, but cabinets using larger curved screens (which can provide a more immersive experience for the player) are not uncommon.^[22]

Video slot machines typically encourage the player to play multiple "lines": rather than simply taking the middle of the three symbols displayed on each reel, a line could go Diamond Slot Machine Review top left to the bottom right or any other pattern specified by the manufacturer. As each symbol is equally likely, there is no difficulty for the manufacturer in allowing the player to take as many of the possible lines on offer as desire &#; the long-term return to the player will be the same. The difference for the player is that the more lines they play, the more likely they are to get paid on a given spin (because they are betting more).

To avoid seeming as if the player's money is simply ebbing away (whereas a payout of credits on a single-line machine would be bets and the player would feel they had made a substantial win, on a line machine, it would only be five bets and not seem as significant), manufacturers commonly offer bonus games, which can return many times their bet. The player is encouraged to keep playing to reach the bonus: even if they are losing, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, the bonus game could allow them to win back their losses.

Random number generators[edit]

All modern machines are designed using pseudorandom number generators ("PRNGs"), which are constantly generating a sequence of simulated random numbers, at a rate of hundreds or perhaps thousands per second. As soon as the "Play" button is pressed, the most recent random number Lucky Dragons Machine A Sous Examen used to determine the result. This means that the result varies depending on exactly when the game is played. A fraction of a second earlier or later and the result would be different.

It is important that the machine contains a high-quality RNG implementation. Because all PRNGs must eventually repeat their number sequence^[23] and, if the period is short or the PRNG is otherwise flawed, an advanced player may be able to "predict" the next result. Having access to the PRNG code and seed values, Ronald Dale Harris, a former slot machine programmer, discovered equations for specific gambling games like Keno that allowed him to predict what the next set of selected numbers would be based on the previous games played.

Most machines are designed to defeat this by generating numbers even when the machine is not being played so the player cannot tell where in the sequence they are, even if they know how the machine was programmed.

Payout percentage[edit]

Slot machines are typically programmed to pay out as winnings 0% to 99% of the money that is wagered by players, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. This is known as the "theoretical payout percentage" or RTP, "return to player". The minimum theoretical payout percentage varies among jurisdictions and is typically established by law or regulation. For example, the minimum payout in Nevada is 75%, in New Jersey 83%, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, and in Mississippi 80%. The winning patterns on slot machines &#; the amounts they pay and the frequencies of those payouts &#; are carefully selected to yield a certain fraction of the money paid to the "house" (the operator of the slot machine) while returning the rest to the players during play. Suppose that a certain slot machine costs $1 per spin and has a return to player (RTP) of 95%. It can be calculated that, over a sufficiently long period such as 1, spins, the machine will return an average of $, to its players, who have inserted $1, during that time. In this (simplified) example, the slot machine is said to pay out 95%. The operator keeps the remaining $50, Within some EGM development organizations this concept is referred to simply as "par". "Par" also manifests itself to gamblers as promotional techniques: "Our 'Loose Slots' have a 93% payback! Play now!"^{[citation needed]}

A slot machine's theoretical payout percentage is set at the factory when the software is written. Changing the payout percentage after a slot machine has been placed on the gaming floor requires a physical swap of the software or firmware, which is usually stored on an EPROM but may be loaded onto non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM) or even stored on CD-ROM or DVD, depending on the capabilities of the machine and the applicable regulations. Based on current technology, this is a time-consuming process and as such is done infrequently.^{[citation needed]} In certain jurisdictions, such as New Jersey, the EPROM has a tamper-evidentseal and can only be changed in the presence of Gaming Control Board officials. Other jurisdictions, including Nevada, randomly audit slot machines to ensure that they contain only approved software.

Historically, many casinos, both online and offline, have been unwilling to publish individual game RTP figures, making it impossible for the player to know whether they are playing a "loose" or a "tight" game. Since the turn of the century, some information regarding these figures has started to come into the public domain either through various casinos releasing them—primarily this applies to online casinos—or through studies by independent gambling authorities.^{[citation needed]}

The return to player is not the only statistic that is of interest. The probabilities of every payout on the pay table is also critical. For example, consider a hypothetical slot machine with a dozen different values on the pay table. However, the probabilities of getting all the payouts are zero except the largest one. If the payout is 4, times the input amount, and it happens every 4, times on average, the return to player is exactly %, but the game would be dull to play. Also, most people would not win anything, and having entries on the paytable that have a return of zero would be deceptive. As these individual probabilities are closely guarded secrets, it is possible that the advertised machines with high return to player simply increase the probabilities of these jackpots. The casino could legally place machines of a similar style payout and advertise that some machines have % return to player. The added advantage is that these large jackpots increase the excitement of the other players.

The table of probabilities for a specific machine is called the Probability and Accounting Report or PAR sheet, also PARS commonly understood as Paytable and Reel Strips, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. Mathematician Michael Shackleford revealed the PARS for one commercial slot machine, an original International Gaming TechnologyRed White and Blue machine. This Reel Gambler Slots Machine, in its original form, is obsolete, so these specific probabilities do not apply. He only published the odds after a fan of his sent him some information provided on a slot machine that was posted on a machine in the Netherlands. The psychology of the machine design is quickly revealed. There are 13 possible payouts ranging from to 2, The payout comes every 8 plays. The payout comes every 33 plays, whereas the payout comes every plays. Most players assume the likelihood increases proportionate to the payout. The one mid-size payout that is designed to give the player a thrill is the payout. It is programmed to occur an average of once every plays. The payout is high enough to create excitement, but not high enough that it makes it likely that the player will take their winnings and abandon the game, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. More than likely the player began the game with at least 80 times his bet (for instance there are 80 quarters in $20). In contrast the payout occurs only on average of once every 6, plays. The highest payout of 2, occurs only on average of once every 64³ =plays since the machine has 64 virtual stops. The player who continues to feed the machine is likely to have several mid-size payouts, but unlikely to have a large payout. He quits after he is bored or has exhausted his bankroll.^{[citation needed]}

Despite their confidentiality, occasionally a PAR sheet is posted on a website. They have limited value to the player, because usually a machine will have 8 to 12 different possible programs with varying payouts. In addition, slight variations of each machine (e.g., with double jackpots or five times play) are always being developed. The casino operator can choose which EPROM chip to install in any particular machine to select the payout desired. The result is that there is not really such a thing as a high payback type of machine, since every machine potentially has multiple settings. From October to Februarycolumnist Michael Shackleford obtained PAR sheets for five different nickel machines; four IGT games Austin Powers, Fortune Cookie, Leopard Spots and Wheel of Fortune and one game manufactured by WMS; Reel 'em In. Without revealing the proprietary information, he developed a program that would allow him to determine with usually less than a dozen plays on each machine which EPROM chip was installed. Then he did a survey of over machines in 70 different casinos in Las Vegas. He averaged the Reel Gambler Slots Machine, and assigned an average payback percentage to the machines in each casino. The resultant list was widely publicized for marketing purposes (especially by the Palms casino which had the top ranking).^{[citation needed]}

One reason that the slot machine is so profitable to a casino is that the player must play the high house Reel Gambler Slots Machine and high payout wagers along with the low house edge and low payout wagers. In a more traditional wagering game like craps, the player knows that Reel Gambler Slots Machine wagers have almost a 50/50 chance of winning or losing, but they only pay Flame dancer limited multiple of the original bet (usually no higher than three times). Other bets have a higher house edge, but the player Reel Gambler Slots Machine rewarded with a bigger win (up to thirty times in craps). The player can choose what kind of wager he wants to make. A slot machine does not afford such an opportunity. Theoretically, the operator could make these probabilities available, or allow the player to choose which one so that the player is free to make a choice. However, no operator has ever enacted this strategy. Different machines have different maximum payouts, but without knowing the odds of getting the jackpot, there is no rational way to differentiate.

In many markets where central monitoring and control systems are used to link machines for auditing and security purposes, usually in wide area networks of multiple venues and thousands of machines, player return must usually be changed from a central computer rather than at each machine. A range of percentages is set in the game software and selected remotely.

InReel Gambler Slots Machine, the Nevada Gaming Commission began working with Las Vegas casinos on technology that would allow the casino's management to change the game, the odds, and the payouts remotely. The change cannot be done instantaneously, but only after the selected machine has been idle for at least four minutes. After the change is made, the machine must be locked to new players for four minutes and display an on-screen message informing potential players that a change is being made.^[24]

Linked machines[edit]

Some varieties of slot machines can be linked together in a setup sometimes known as a "community" game. The most basic form of this setup involves progressive jackpots that are shared between the bank of machines, but may include multiplayer bonuses and other features.^[25]

In some cases multiple machines are linked across multiple Reel Gambler Slots Machine. In these cases, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, the machines may be owned by the manufacturer, who is responsible for paying the jackpot. The casinos lease the machines rather than owning them outright. Casinos in New Jersey, Nevada, and South Dakota now offer multi-state progressive jackpots, which now offer bigger jackpot pools.^[26][27]

Fraud[edit]

Mechanical slot machines and their coin acceptors were sometimes susceptible to cheating devices and other scams. One historical example involved spinning a coin with a short length of plastic wire. The weight and size of the coin would be accepted by the machine and credits would be granted. However, the spin created by the plastic wire would cause the coin to exit through the reject chute into the payout tray. This particular scam has become obsolete due to improvements in newer slot machines. Another obsolete method of defeating slot machines was to use a light source to confuse the optical sensor used to count coins during payout.^[28]

Modern slot machines are controlled by EPROM computer chips and, in large casinos, coin acceptors have become obsolete in favor of bill acceptors. These machines and their bill acceptors are designed with advanced anti-cheating and anti-counterfeiting measures and are difficult to defraud. Early computerized slot machines were sometimes defrauded through the use of cheating devices, such as the "slider", "monkey paw", "lightwand" and "the tongue". Many of these old cheating devices were made by the late Tommy Glenn Carmichael, a slot machine fraudster who reportedly stole over $5 million.^[29] In the modern day, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, computerized slot machines are fully deterministic and thus outcomes can be sometimes successfully predicted.^[30]

Skill stops[edit]

Skill stop buttons predated the Bally electromechanical slot machines of the s and s. They appeared on mechanical slot machines manufactured by Mills Novelty Co, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. as early as the mid s. These machines had modified reel-stop arms, which allowed them to be released from the timing bar, earlier than in a normal play, simply by pressing the buttons on the front of the machine, located between each reel.

"Skill stop" buttons were added to some slot machines by Zacharias Anthony in the early s. These enabled the player to stop each reel, allowing a degree of "skill" so as to satisfy the New Jersey gaming laws of the day which required that players were able to control the game in some way. The original conversion was applied to approximately 50 late-model Bally slot machines. Because the typical machine stopped the reels automatically in less than 10 seconds, weights were added to the mechanical timers to prolong the automatic stopping of the reels. By the time the New Jersey Alcoholic Beverages Commission (ABC) had approved the conversion for use in New Jersey arcades, the word was out and every other distributor began adding skill stops. The machines were a huge hit on the Jersey Shore and the remaining unconverted Bally machines were destroyed as they Reel Gambler Slots Machine become instantly obsolete.^{[citation needed]}

Legislation[edit]

United States[edit]

In the United States, the public and private availability of slot machines is highly regulated by state governments. Many states have established gaming control boards to regulate the possession and use of slot machines and other form of gaming.

Nevada is the only state that has no significant restrictions against slot machines both for public and private use. In New Jersey, slot machines are only allowed in hotel casinos operated in Atlantic City. Several states (Indiana, Louisiana and Missouri) allow slot machines (as well as any casino-style gambling) only on licensed riverboats or permanently anchored barges. Since Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi has removed the requirement Reel Gambler Slots Machine casinos on the Gulf Coast operate on barges and now allows them on land along the shoreline. Delaware allows slot machines at three horse tracks; they are regulated by the state lottery commission. In Wisconsin, bars and taverns are allowed to have up to five machines. These machines usually allow a player to either take a payout, or gamble it on a double-or-nothing "side game".

The territory of Puerto Rico places significant restrictions on slot machine ownership, but the law is widely flouted and slot machines are common in bars and coffeeshops.^[31]

In regards to tribal casinos located on Native American reservations, slot machines played against the house and operating independently from a centralized computer system are classified as "Class III" gaming by the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), and sometimes promoted as "Vegas-style" slot machines.^[32] In order to offer Class III gaming, tribes must enter into a compact (agreement) with the state that is approved by the Department of the Interior, which may Reel Gambler Slots Machine restrictions on the types and quantity of such games. As a workaround, some casinos may operate slot machines as "Class II" games—a category that includes games where players play exclusively against at least one other opponent and not the house, such as bingo or any related games (such as pull-tabs). In these cases, the reels are an entertainment display with a pre-determined outcome based on a centralized game played against other players. Under the IGRA, Class II games are regulated by individual tribes and the National Indian Gaming Commission, and do not require any additional approval if the state already permits tribal 777 Golden Wheel Slots Machine historical race wagering terminals operate in a similar manner, with the machines using slots as an entertainment display for outcomes paid using the parimutuel betting system, based on results of randomly-selected, previously-held horse races (with the player able to view selected details about the race and adjust their picks before playing the credit, or otherwise use an auto-bet system).^[35]

Private ownership[edit]

See also: United States slot machine ownership regulations by state

Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia place no restrictions on private ownership of slot machines. Conversely, in Connecticut, Hawaii, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Tennessee, private ownership of any slot machine is completely prohibited. The remaining states allow slot machines of a certain age (typically 25–30 years) or slot machines manufactured before a specific date.

Canada[edit]

The Government of Canada has minimal involvement in gambling beyond the Canadian Criminal Code. In essence, the term "lottery scheme" used in the code means slot machines, bingo and table games normally associated with a casino. These fall under the jurisdiction of the province or territory without reference to the federal government; in practice, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, all Canadian provinces operate gaming boards that oversee lotteries, casinos and video lottery terminals under their jurisdiction.

OLG piloted a classification system for slot machines at the Grand River Raceway developed by University of Waterloo professor Kevin Harrigan, as part of its PlaySmart initiative for responsible gambling. Inspired Reel Gambler Slots Machine nutrition labels on foods, they displayed metrics such as volatility and frequency of payouts.^[36] OLG has also deployed electronic gaming machines with pre-determined outcomes based on a bingo or pull-tab game, initially branded as "TapTix", which visually resemble slot machines.^[37]

Australia[edit]

In Australia "Poker Machines" or "pokies"^[38] are officially termed "gaming machines". In Australia, gaming machines are a matter for state governments, so laws vary between states. Gaming machines are found in casinos (approximately one in each major city), pubs and clubs in some states (usually sports, social, or RSL clubs). The first Australian state to legalize this style of gambling was New South Wales, when in they were made legal in all registered clubs in the state. There are suggestions that the proliferation of poker machines has led to increased levels of problem gambling; however, the precise nature of this link is still open to research.^[39]

In the Australian Productivity Commission reported that nearly half Australia's gaming machines were in New South Wales. At the time, 21% of all the gambling machines in the world were operating in Australia and, on a per capita basis, Australia had roughly five times as many gaming machines as the United States. Australia ranks 8th in total number of gaming machines after Japan, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, U.S.A., Italy, U.K., Spain and Germany. This primarily is because gaming machines have been legal in the state of New South Wales since ; over time, the number of machines has grown to 97, (at Decemberincluding the Australian Capital Territory). By way of comparison, the U.S. State of Nevada, which legalised gaming including slots several decades before N.S.W., hadslots operating.^[40]

Revenue from gaming machines in pubs and clubs accounts for more than half of the $4 billion in gambling revenue collected by state governments in fiscal year &#;^{[citation needed]}

In Queensland, gaming machines in pubs and clubs must provide a return rate of 85%, while machines located in casinos must provide a return rate of 90%.^{[citation needed]} Most other states have similar provisions. In Victoria, gaming machines must provide a minimum return rate of 87% (including jackpot contribution), including machines in Crown Casino. As of December 1,Victoria banned gaming machines that accepted $ notes; all gaming machines made since comply with this rule. This new law also banned machines with an automatic play option. One exception exists in Crown Casino for any player with a VIP loyalty card: they can still insert $ notes and use an autoplay feature (whereby the machine will automatically play until credit is exhausted or the player intervenes). All gaming machines in Victoria have an information screen accessible to the user by pressing the "i key" button, showing the game rules, paytable, return to player percentage, and the top and bottom five combinations with their odds. These combinations are stated to be played on a minimum bet (usually 1 credit per line, with 1 line or reel played, although some newer machines do not have an option to play 1 line; some machines may only allow maximum lines to be played), excluding feature wins.

Western Australia has the most restrictive regulations on electronic gaming machines in general, with the Crown Perth casino resort being the only venue allowed to Reel Gambler Slots Machine them,^[41] and banning slot machines with spinning reels entirely. This policy had an extensive political history, reaffirmed by the Royal Commission into Gambling:^[42]

Poker machine playing is a mindless, repetitive and insidious form of gambling which has many undesirable features. It requires no thought, no skill or social contact. The odds are never about winning. Watching people playing the machines over long periods of time, the impressionistic evidence at least is that they are addictive to many people. Historically poker machines have been banned from Western Australia and we consider that, in the public interest, they should stay banned.

While Western Australian gaming machines are similar to the other states', they do not have spinning reels. Therefore, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, different animations are used in place of the spinning reels in order to display each game result.

Nick Xenophon was elected on an independent No Pokies ticket in the South Australian Legislative Council at the South Australian state election on percent, re-elected at the election on percent, and elected to the Australian Senate at the federal election on percent. Independent candidate Andrew Wilkie, an anti-pokies campaigner, was elected to the Australian House of Representatives seat of Denison at the federal election. Wilkie was one of four crossbenchers who supported the GillardLabor government following the hung parliament result. Wilkie immediately began forging ties with Xenophon as soon as it was apparent that he was elected. In exchange for Wilkie's support, the Labor government are attempting to implement precommitment technology for high-bet/high-intensity poker machines, against opposition from the Tony AbbottCoalition and Clubs Australia.

During the COVID pandemic ofevery establishment in the country that facilitated poker machines was shut down, in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus, bringing Australia's usage of poker machines effectively to zero.^[43]

Russia[edit]

In Russia, "slot clubs" appeared quite late, only in Beforeslot machines were only in casinos and small shops, but later slot clubs began appearing all over the country. The most popular and numerous were "Vulcan " and "Taj Mahal". Since when gambling establishments were banned, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, almost all slot clubs disappeared and are found only in a specially authorized gambling zones.

United Kingdom[edit]

Row of old fruit machines in Teignmouth Pier, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, Devon

Slot machines are covered by the Gambling Actwhich superseded the Gaming Act ^[44]

Slot machines in the U.K. are categorised by definitions produced by the Gambling Commission as part of the Gambling Act of

Casinos built under the provisions of the Act are allowed to house either up to twenty machines of categories B–D or any number of C–D machines. As defined by the Act, large casinos can have a maximum of one hundred and fifty machines in any combination of categories B–D (subject to a machine-to-table ratio of ); small casinos can have a maximum of eighty machines in any combination of categories B–D (subject to a machine-to-table ratio of ).

Category A[edit]

Category A games were defined in preparation for the planned "Super Casinos". Despite a lengthy bidding process with Manchester being chosen as the single planned location, the development was cancelled soon after Gordon Brown became Reel Gambler Slots Machine Minister of the United Kingdom. As a result, there are no lawful Category A games in the U.K.

Category B[edit]

Category B games are divided into subcategories. The differences between B1, B3 and B4 games are mainly the stake and prizes as defined in the above table. Category B2 games &#; Fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTs) &#; have quite different stake and prize rules: FOBTs are mainly found in licensed betting shops, or bookmakers, usually in the form of electronic roulette.

The games are based on a random number generator; thus each game's probability of getting the jackpot is independent of any other game: probabilities are all equal. If a pseudorandom number generator Dead World Slots Machine used instead of a truly random one, probabilities are not independent since each number is determined at least in part by the one generated before it.

Category C[edit]

Category C games are often referred to as fruit machines, one-armed bandits and AWP (amusement with prize). Fruit machines are commonly found in pubs, clubs, and arcades. Machines commonly have three but can be found with four or five reels, each with 16–24 symbols printed around them. The reels are spun each play, from which the appearance of particular combinations of symbols result in payment of their associated winnings by the machine (or alternatively initiation of a subgame). These games often have many extra features, trails and subgames with opportunities to win money; usually more than can be won from just the payouts on the reel combinations, Reel Gambler Slots Machine.

Fruit machines CryptoWild Casino Bonuses the U.K. almost universally have the following features, generally selected at random using a pseudorandom number generator:

• A player (known in the industry as a punter) may be given the opportunity to hold one or more reels before spinning, meaning they will not be spun but instead retain their displayed symbols yet otherwise count normally for that play. This can sometimes increase the chance of winning, especially if two or more reels are held.
• A player may also be given a number of nudges following a spin (or, in some machines, as a result in a subgame). A nudge is a step rotation of a Reel Gambler Slots Machine chosen by the player (the machine may not allow all reels to be nudged for a particular play).
• Cheats can also be made available on the internet or through emailed newsletters to subscribers. These cheats give the player the impression of an advantage, whereas in reality the payout percentage remains exactly the same. The most widely used cheat is known as hold after a nudge and increases the chance that the player will win following an unsuccessful nudge. Machines from the early s did not advertise the concept of hold after a nudge when this feature was first introduced, it became so well known amongst players and widespread amongst new machine releases that it is now well-advertised on the machine during play. This is characterized by messages on the display such as DON'T HOLD ANY or LET 'EM SPIN and is a designed feature of the machine, not a cheat at all. Holding the same pair three times on three consecutive spins also gives a guaranteed win on most machines that offer holds.

It is known for machines to pay out multiple jackpots, one after the other (this is known as a "repeat") but each jackpot requires a new game to be played so as not to violate the law about the maximum payout on a single play. Typically this involves the player only pressing the Start button at the "repeat" prompt, for which a single credit is taken, regardless of whether this causes the reels to spin or not. Machines are also known to intentionally set aside money, which is later awarded in a series of wins, known as a "streak". The minimum payout percentage is 70%, with pubs often setting the payout at around 78%, Reel Gambler Slots Machine.

Japan[edit]

Further information: Pachinko

Japanese slot machines, known as pachisuro (パチスロ) or pachislot from the words "pachinko" and "slot machine", are a descendant of the traditional Japanese pachinko game. Slot machines are a fairly new phenomenon and they can be found mostly in pachinko parlors and the adult sections of amusement arcades, known as game centers.

The machines are regulated with integrated circuits, and have Fire queen different levels changing the odds of a The levels provide a rough outcome of between 90% to % (% for skilled players). Japanese slot machines are "beatable". Parlor operators naturally set most machines to simply collect money, but intentionally place a few paying machines on the floor Reel Gambler Slots Machine that there will be at least someone winning,^{[citation needed]} encouraging players on the losing machines to keep gambling, using the psychology of the gambler's fallacy.

Despite the many varieties of pachislot machines, there are certain rules and regulations put forward by the Security Electronics and Communication Technology Association (保安電子通信技術協会), an affiliate of the National Police Agency, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. For example, there must be Reel Gambler Slots Machine reels. All reels must be accompanied by buttons which allow players to manually stop them, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, reels may not spin faster than 80 RPM, and reels must stop within seconds of a button press. In practice, this means that machines cannot let reels slip more than 4 symbols. Other rules include a 15 coin payout cap, a 50 credit cap on machines, a 3 coin maximum bet, and other such regulations.^{[citation needed]}

Although a 15 coin payout may seem quite low, regulations allow "Big Bonus" (c. – coins) and "Regular Bonus" modes (c. coins) where these 15 coin payouts occur nearly continuously until the bonus mode is finished. While the machine is in bonus mode, the player is entertained with special winning scenes on the LCD display, and energizing music is heard, payout after payout.

Three other unique features of Pachisuro machines are "stock", "renchan", and tenjō (天井). On many machines, when enough money to afford a bonus is taken in, the bonus is not immediately awarded. Typically the game merely stops making the reels slip off the bonus symbols for a few games. If the player fails to hit the bonus during these "standby games", it is added to the "stock" for later collection. Many current games, after finishing a bonus round, set the probability to release additional stock (gained from earlier players failing to get a bonus last time the machine stopped making the reels slip for a bit) very high for the first few games. As a result, a lucky player may get to play several bonus rounds in a row (a "renchan"), making payouts of 5, or even 10, coins possible. The lure of "stock" waiting in the machine, and the possibility of "renchan" tease the gambler to keep feeding the machine. To tease them further, there is a tenjō (ceiling), a maximum limit on the number of games between "stock" release. For example, if the tenjō is 1, and the number of games played since the last bonus is 1, the player is guaranteed to release a bonus within just 10 games.

Because of the "stock", "renchan", and tenjō systems, it is possible to make money by simply playing machines on which someone has just lost a huge amount of money. This is called being a "hyena". They are easy to recognize, roaming the aisles for a "kamo" ("sucker" in English) to leave his machine.

In short, the regulations allowing "stock", "renchan", and tenjō transformed the pachisuro from a low-stakes form of entertainment just a few years back to hardcore gambling. Many people may be gambling more than they can afford, and the big payouts also lure unsavory "hyena" types into the gambling halls.

To Reel Gambler Slots Machine these social issues, a new regulation (Version ) was adopted in which caps the maximum amount of "stock" a machine can hold to around 2,–3, coins' worth of bonus games. Moreover, all pachisuro machines must be re-evaluated for regulation compliance every three years. Version came out inso that means all those machines with the up to 10, coin payouts will be removed from service by

Jackpot disputes[edit]

Electronic slot machines can malfunction. When the displayed amount is smaller than the one it is supposed to be, the error usually goes unnoticed. When it happens the other way, disputes are likely.^[45] Below are some notable arguments caused by the owners of the machines saying that the displayed amounts were far larger than the ones patrons should get.

United States of America[edit]

Two such cases occurred in casinos in Colorado inReel Gambler Slots Machine, where software errors led to indicated jackpots of $11 million and $42 million.^{[citation needed]} Analysis of machine records by the state Gaming Commission revealed faults, with the true jackpot being substantially smaller.^[46] State gaming laws did not require a casino to honour payouts in that case, Reel Gambler Slots Machine.

Vietnam[edit]

On October 25,while a Vietnamese American man, Ly Sam, was playing a slot machine in the Palazzo Club at the Sheraton Saigon Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, it displayed that he had hit a jackpot of US$55,^[47] The casino refused to pay, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, saying it was a machine error, Mr Ly sued the casino.^[48] On January 7,the District 1 People's Reel Gambler Slots Machine in Ho Chi Minh City decided that the casino had to pay the amount Mr Ly claimed in full, not trusting the error report from an inspection company hired by the casino.^[49] Both sides appealed thereafter, and Mr Ly asked for interest while the casino refused to pay him.^[50] In January,the news reported that the case had been settled out of court, and Mr Ly had received an undisclosed Reel Gambler Slots Machine gambling and slot machines[edit]

Mills Novelty Co. Horse Head Bonus antique slot machine

Natasha Dow Schüll, associate professor in New York University's Department of Media, Culture and Communication, uses the term "machine zone" to describe the state of immersion that users of slot machines experience when gambling, where they lose a sense of time, space, bodily awareness, and monetary value.^[52]

Mike Dixon, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo,^[53] studies the relationship between slot players and machines. In one of Reel Gambler Slots Machine studies, players were observed experiencing heightened arousal from the sensory stimulus coming from the machines. They "sought to show that these 'losses disguised as wins' (LDWs) would be as arousing as wins, and more arousing than regular losses."^[54]

Psychologists Robert Breen and Marc Zimmerman^[55][56] found that players of video slot machines reach a debilitating level of involvement with gambling three times as rapidly as those who play traditional casino games, even if they have engaged in other forms of gambling without problems.

Eye-tracking research in local bookkeepers' offices in the UK suggested that, in slots games, the reels dominated players' visual attention, and that problem gamblers looked more frequently at amount-won messages than did those without gambling problems.^[57]

The 60 Minutes report "Slot Machines: The Big Gamble"^[58] focused on the link between slot machines and gambling addiction, Reel Gambler Slots Machine.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

Bibliography[edit]

• Brisman, Andrew. The American Mensa Guide to Casino Gambling: Winning Ways (Stirling, ) ISBN&#;X
• Grochowski, John. The Slot Machine Answer Book: How They Work, How They've Changed, and How to Overcome the House Advantage (Bonus Books, ) ISBN&#;
• Legato, Frank. How to Win Millions Playing Slot Machines! Or Lose Trying (Bonus Books, ) ISBN&#;

External links[edit]

The gaming industry is big business in the U.S., contributing an estimated US$ billion to the economy each year, while generating $38 billion in tax revenues and supporting 17 Reel Gambler Slots Machine jobs.

What people may not realize is that slot machines, video poker machines and other electronic gaming devices make up the bulk of all that economic activity. At casinos in Iowa and South Dakota, for example, such devices have contributed up to 89 percent of annual gaming revenue.

Spinning-reel slots in particular are profit juggernauts for most casinos, outperforming table games like blackjack, video poker machines and other forms of gambling.

What about slot machines makes them such reliable money makers? In part, it has something to do with casinos’ ability to hide their true price from even the savviest of gamblers, Reel Gambler Slots Machine.

The price of a slot

An important economic theory holds that when the price of something goes up, demand for it tends to fall.

But that depends on price transparency, which exists for most of the day-to-day purchases we make. That is, other than visits to the doctor’s office and possibly the auto mechanic, we know the price of most products and services before we decide to pay for them.

Slots may be even worse than the doctor’s office, in that most of us will never know the true price of our wagers. Which means the law of supply and demand breaks down.

Casino operators usually think of price in terms of what is known as the average or Night of the Raven Slots Machine house advantage on each bet placed by players. Basically, it’s the long-term edge that is built into the game. For an individual player, his or her limited interaction with the game will result in a “price” that looks a lot different.

For example, consider a game with a 10 percent house advantage – which is fairly typical. This means that over the long run, the game will return 10 percent of all wagers it accepts to the casino that owns it. So if it accepts $1 million in wagers over 2 million spins, it would be expected to pay out $, resulting in a casino gain of $, Thus from the management’s perspective, the “price” it charges is the 10 percent it expects to collect from gamblers over time.

Individual players, however, will likely define price as the cost of the spin. For example, if a player bets $1, spins the reels and receives no payout, that’ll be the price – not 10 cents.

So who is correct? Both, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, in a way. While the game has certainly collected $1 from the player, management knows that eventually 90 cents of that will be dispensed to other players.

A player could never know this, however, given he will only be playing for an hour or two, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, during which he may hope a large payout will make up for his many losses and then some. And at this rate of play it could take years of playing a single slot machine for the casino’s long-term advantage to become evident.

Short-term vs. long-term

This difference in price perspective Reel Gambler Slots Machine rooted in the gap between the short-term view of the players and the long-term view of management. This is one of the lessons I’ve learned in my more than three decades in the gambling industry analyzing the performance of casino games and as a researcher studying them.

Let’s consider George, who just got his paycheck and heads to the casino with $80 to spend over an hour on a Tuesday night. There are basically three outcomes: He loses everything, hits a considerable jackpot and wins big, or makes or loses a little but manages to walk away before the odds turn decidedly against him.

Of course, the first outcome is far more common than the other two – it has to be for the casino to maintain its house advantage. The funds to pay big jackpots come from frequent losers (who get wiped out). Without all these losers, there can be no big winners – which is why so many people play in the first place.

Specifically, the sum of all the individual losses is used to fund the big jackpots. Therefore, to provide enticing jackpots, many players must lose all of their Tuesday night bankroll.

What is less obvious to many is that the long-term experience rarely occurs at the player level. That is, players rarely lose their $80 in a uniform manner (that is, a rate of 10 percent per spin). If this were the typical slot experience, it would be predictably disappointing. But it would make it very easy for a player to identify the price he’s paying.

Raising the price

Ultimately, the Reel Gambler Slots Machine is selling excitement, which is comprised of hope Reel Gambler Slots Machine variance. Even Guess Train Slots Machine a slot may have a modest house advantage from management’s perspective, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, such as 4 percent, it can and often does win all of George’s Tuesday night bankroll in short order.

This is primarily due to the variance in the slot machine’s pay table – which lists all the winning symbol combinations and the number of credits awarded for each one. While the pay table Reel Gambler Slots Machine visible to the player, the probability of producing each winning symbol combination African Grand Casino 241% Match hidden. Of course, these probabilities are a critical determinant of the house advantage – that is, the long-term price of the wager.

This rare ability to hide the price of a good or service offers an opportunity for casino management to raise the price without notifying the players – if they can get away with it.

Casino managers are under tremendous pressure to maximize their all-important slot revenue, but they do not want to kill the golden goose by raising Reel Gambler Slots Machine “price” too much. If players are able to detect these concealed price increases simply by playing the games, then they may choose to play at another casino.

This terrifies casino operators, as it is difficult and expensive to recover from perceptions of a high-priced slot product.

Getting away with it

Consequently, many operators resist increasing the house advantages of their slot machines, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, believing that players can detect these price shocks.

Our new research, however, has found that increases in casino tattoo casino advantage have produced significant gains in revenue with no signs of detection even by savvy players. In multiple comparisons of two otherwise identical reel games, the high-priced games produced significantly greater revenue for the casino. These findings were confirmed in a second study.

Further analysis revealed no evidence of play migration from the high-priced games, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, despite the fact their low-priced counterparts were located a mere 3 feet away.

Importantly, these results occurred in spite of the egregious economic disincentive to play the high-priced games. That is, the visible pay tables were identical on both the high- and low-priced games, within Reel Gambler Slots Machine of the two-game pairings. The only difference was the concealed probabilities of each payout.

Armed with this knowledge, management may be more willing to increase prices, Reel Gambler Slots Machine. And for price-sensitive gamblers, Reel Gambler Slots Machine, reel slot machines may become something to avoid.