Malfunction Costs Couple $11 Million Slot Machine Jackpot

ainandil writes "Engineering mistakes, while frustrating, seldom definitively alter the end user's life. Not so in Cripple Creek, Colorado — MaryAnn and Jim McMahon thought their money troubles were over when they hit an $11 million jackpot at a casino Tuesday. Before paying the jackpot, the Wildwood Casino turned the machine over to the Colorado Gaming Division for inspection. A glitch was found, aha! The Wildwood Casino blamed a slot machine malfunction for the $11 million jackpot. Total actually won by the McMahons? $1,627.82."

Comments

Mistake my ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's be clear. The 'engineering mistake' was that the machine hit the jackpot.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's be clear, it's called "welching," the casino should pay out the jackpot and the slot machine maker should pay the casino for his "engineering mistake." Nevada (or wherever) should enact a law such as that, but it won't happen soon. And it's why part of the reason not to gamble in the first place.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[ls671]

About having the machine inspected when you lose to make sure no 'engineering mistake' were made ?

This is stupid, it should be like in baseball where faulty referee calls are considered part of the game. Especially since I have never heard of machine getting inspected when you lose ;-)

Re:Mistake my ass.

[fearlezz]

That actually was a mistake.

I read an article a while ago about a guy who uploaded the software of a slot machine to a vmware-like environment. This way, he could revert back to the very same state over and over again. The machine always gave the user the impression that if he had made another decision, he would have won the jackpot. Except for when the user actually made that decision.

So I think any slot machine paying big bucks is either programmed to do so periodically as a way of marketing the casino or otherwise suffering from a serious bug.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[twistedsymphony]

I worked in an arcade repairing machines for 3 years... we bought a few dozen decommissioned slot machines from casinos that I retrofitted to dispense prize tokens as opposed to money.

I can tell you that the machines are absolutely programmed to make you lose even if you hit the buttons at the exact right time to stop the rollers. Basically the operator programs the payout to be a ratio of the money deposited. Our machines were programmed to dispense 2 cents worth of prize tokens for every 25 cents deposited. The machine word operate honestly until the ratio got too far in the user's favor, then it would cheat on the last roller to correct the ratio. a jack pot scenario would only be allowed to happen if the ratio was already deep in the favor of the operator.

It was pretty comical, with the machine open I could stop the rollers right in the position I wanted by hand, and if the machine decided to "correct" the ratio it would use the stepper motor to index the last roller one or two positions past where I had stopped it. Pretty much undetectable to the human eye while the thing is spinning.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Glendale2x]

Every machine here in Nevada says right on the front "malfunction voids play" or something similar.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[ChromeAeonium]

I've always assumed most games of 'skill' are rigged. Remember those Storm Stopper games that look like a glass dome with the spinning light that you try to catch on the jackpot (you see them at Chuck E. Cheese places)? Every time, I hit it on either side of the jackpot. You'd think that I'd have at least 1/3 chance of getting if if that's the case, but I rarely actually got it. I would think that most games even outside casinos (cranes, stackers, those vertical ones with the red lights) that appear to be be dependent on skill are, once you hit a certain level, mostly luck. They're kinda fun to put a few quarters in, and I get that someone has to make money, but still, rigging is rigging.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[MaskedSlacker]

They're inspected regularly, which is approximately how often the players lose.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[The Clockwork Troll]

The light accelerates or slows down in the vicinity of the jackpot light. Also, the jackpot bulb resistance could be different. So yes to some extent it's luck but it is winnable.

I win these pretty frequently when I take my family to these places, but when I stop and reflect, even 25 cents (best case scenario) for 100 "tickets" or whatever the reset value of the jackpot is, turns out to be a pretty shitty deal when you see what you can redeem 100 tickets for (and more realistically, I spend at least 10 quarters/tokens for a win, so it's even worse -- but the kids love to see it).

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was younger, the local football club used to sell scratch-cards in the town each weekend. They sold them for years. They were 25p each, with a max possible win of £20. I can remember buying a few from time to time, maybe winning £1 very occasionally.
Then, when we were about 14 somebody found out that a shed near the football club had boxes and boxes full of these unopened (and by then out-of-date) cards, and we took tens of thousands of them. We would spend ages scratching them off, looking for 'winners'. Took so long, that we gave up on that and we learnt just to scratch of the 'void if removed' box and recognise the most common codes... something like 18414 would always mean a loser, 85413 would be a £1 winner etc... we were always looking for a really unusual number that would be the £20 winner.
Any we never found one, not one £20 winner, despite examining tens of thousands of cards over several months.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[failedlogic]

"They actually won $1627.82," said Burmania, "The $11 million was what we call a 'reset value.' It's what the jackpot would have been after the prize was claimed."

I don't get this last sentence it seems ambiguous. It seems to indicate to me that the "reset value", in this case an $11 million jackpot, would have been the prize on the next play. Had the couple been able to play one more round the prize -would- have been the $11 million. Since this mechanical error caused the machine to be shut down, the couple lost out anyways.

I would think that 1 months' worth of business would easily have that casino lose more than $11 million. I'd say pay them out, or they risk losing more money long term.

I thought the Gaming Commission was to be a neutral party. Instead, I found the rep's behavior in the video absolutely inappropriate since he's laughing throughout the interview.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[hduff]

All games of "chance" and "skill" (like carnival games) are deliberately skewed in favor of the owner, otherwise there would be no profit in owning them. They are meant for entertainment of the customers, not their retirement plan. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.

That said, the owners could be less greedy.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[WCguru42]

They're inspected regularly, which is approximately how often the players lose.

Regularly is much less that almost always.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[PopeRatzo]

Every machine here in Nevada says right on the front "malfunction voids play" or something similar.

And clearly, a jackpot is a major malfunction for the casino owners.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[PopeRatzo]

And yet, there are lots of people who believe that "internet gaming" should be legal. And by "gaming", I do not mean fragging noobs on Modern Warfare 2.

If you gamble on the internet, and believe there is any skill involved, or that there is any opportunity for profit, you are a fool.

As my grandpa used to say, the odds of winning are the same whether you play or not.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

True, however what most people expect for skill games is that the stacking is visible and forms a barrier they can be aware of and try to overcome by skill, and for nonskill games that it's ruled by luck and the stacking is due to skewed probabilities.

Deviations from this would cause upset in all other games than slot machines. For example:
- A game of shooting ducks (skill based) with a toy rifle, except that there is nothing in the rifle and the "hit/miss" is faked using a hidden and precise launcher.
- A game of roulette (luck based), except that there are electromagnets underneath that go on and off to control the movements of the ball.

Why are people upset when a machine controls their payout pattern instead of skill, luck? Well, why would they be upset if human court judges could be replaced by robots proven to use statistical techniques to have the same hit/miss rate as humans?

Re:Mistake my ass.

[thoughtfulbloke]

When you try to throw a ring over a peg at a carnival, there is the assumption that there is a very, very small chance you might win. But as this recent case (involving statistics, forensics, and side-show con artists) shows, in the U.K. at least the odds can't be too far in the houses favour.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[HangingChad]

I thought the Gaming Commission was to be a neutral party.

Sure, they're neutral. The same way MMS and Interior Dept were neutral in the BP oil spill. The gaming commission depends on the casinos for their livelihood, many of them come from a background in gaming. If there's no consequence for "mistakes" like this, they'll keep happening. There's no incentive to insure accuracy.

I'd take that prize money and hire a lawyer, subpoena the machine records and the gaming commission investigation notes.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Cylix]

A great deal of the confusion regarding games of chance is that they are actually games of chance. This a heavily regulated economy from the slot machines in vegas to the super stacker II game in the local pub.

Every machine has a payout ratio and slots actually tend to be closer to 1. This is essentially how all games of chance function and much like some other posters have pointed out... it is how the machines are designed.

Legally, the unit is set to within a specific level of commission for payout. In the casino territory there are regulators onsite that you can appeal to if you feel you have been cheated. They literally must take the unit offline for inspection and sent you a notice to their findings.

The system works both ways with the advantage being to the house. They know when the payout has been incorrectly dispensed because there is a tightly held ratio that should be observed. All large payouts will also require the machine to be inspected. There will be no slipping through the cracks on foul play.

There are a good number of stories regarding games of chance. My favorite being an engineer who spotted the pseudo random number generator was somewhat predictable in a kino game. This guy happened to be one of the state inspectors, but like any red blooded human he decided to keep it under his hat.

Him and his friends did not win a great deal because nearly immediately the payout ratio (predicted) was found to be too high in favor of the human.

On the plus side, there appear to be some tails that the super stacker II game is ready to payout.

Now, does it suck they did not get the 11 million. Unfortunately, they found the illusion of winning in vegas was pretty much just that.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Glendale2x]

It's not fair and the house always has the advantage. This is a given, otherwise the casino wouldn't profitable and continue to exist. When you choose to play a certain machine part of the gamble you're making is hoping your machine doesn't malfunction.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[somersault]

Regularly is any amount of time as long as it's regular

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

When you choose to play a certain machine part of the gamble you're making is hoping your machine doesn't malfunction.

I don't see that assessment being all that good for business. That kind of 'gamble' is about on the level of gambling that you won't choke to death on the olive in the martini they comp you. In other words it's not a fun gamble. People come to vegas for the thrill. There is absolutely no thrill in hoping the machine doesn't fail and fool you into thinking you hit the jackpot.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[cynyr]

well if the machine is always in a state of "malfunction" and the owner doesn't care if the win is below ${SMALLVALUE} but when it is ${VALUE} they take the machine in and wow.. look at that... it's "Malfunctioning" again. IT should be that they machines needs a 2x per month inspection, if the last time it was was over 14 days, the win of the player stands. The casino needs to be proactive in finding malfunction or it eats the cost. Of course the last few times i went to the casino it wasn't to win, but to hang out with some friends, and after we had all spent $40 we called it a night. in the end it wasn't much more expensive than dinner+movie+bar.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[ultranova]

The system works both ways with the advantage being to the house. They know when the payout has been incorrectly dispensed because there is a tightly held ratio that should be observed. All large payouts will also require the machine to be inspected. There will be no slipping through the cracks on foul play.

A machine that guarantees a certain percentage of return within a certain time window (probably measured in games played) is not random. If it's not random there's a pattern to how it dispenses winnings. If there's a pattern to it, it should be possible to notice which machines are about to increase their payoff to even the ratio, so it just might be possible to increase your rate of return.

Of course this doesn't guarantee that you can get it over 1. And it especially doesn't guarantee that the casino won't declare you a cheater and ban you, or do something nastier - frankly, these parasites are worse than Al Capone, who at least was providing an actual service to his customers.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Glendale2x]

People do pick specific machines for its feel or luck. Some are even known to be cursed and people avoid them. Choosing one and hoping for the best out of it is very much a part of it.

If you're looking for a thrill, then table games like craps or roulette are probably more up your alley. There's much more energy and excitement around those than zoning out at a slot for an hour and hitting a button.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[this great guy]

Just like these claw crane games that you find in vide arcades or amusement parks: those with a joystick to control a crane to grab stuffed animals or whatnot. Curious, one day I browsed the web to find operator's manuals, and they are programmed to make it look like the crane accidentally drops objects. The operator can enter parameters to define the average price of prizes, the average winning rate, etc so that in the end, just like slot machines, the payout percentage can be controlled very precisely. For more info read Machine configuration and chances of winning.

Knowing this completely takes the fun out of it, doesn't it ?

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Low Ranked Craig]

part of the reason not to gamble in the first place

It's one reason not to play slots, I'll give you that. It has nothing to do with playing games like craps or blackjack. I usually do OK playing craps... OK as in I break even or win more than I lose, but I'm very small stakes when I play, and I don't make sucker bets.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

People do pick specific machines for its feel or luck. Some are even known to be cursed and people avoid them. Choosing one and hoping for the best out of it is very much a part of it.

The whole idea of machines being cursed or loose is something that players feel they have control over because they make the decision based on their experiences or talking story with other players. That's nothing like evaluating whether a machine will give you a false jackpot.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[sjames]

It's one thing for it to be skewed by nature, it's fully expected for the house to have an advantage, or the house would end up bankrupt eventually.

It's quite another when the machine cheats by trying to make the odds for the player look substantially better than they really are or even playing psychological games like making an unusually large numbers of losses look like you "just missed" when, in fact, the pre-computed odds meant you never actually had a chance.

Some digitally controlled slot machines would do that by making an unusually large number of losses into a 'near miss'. I'm not sure if that has yet been banned anywhere but I recall it being discussed.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> "malfunction voids play"

It should say that on electronic voting machines too.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Le Marteau]

OK, how about this: A blackjack dealer tells a customer he has won $11 million dollars.

Should the casino have to pay the customer $11 million dollars because of a faulty dealer?

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Ogive17]

Eh, not saying it can't be fixed but some buddies and I had one figured out at a Dave and Buster's... I think we hit the jackpot 60% of the time and racked up a ton of tickets just prior to 'cashing out'.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[rjstanford]

Actually a pretty interesting case. It wasn't that the game was hard, but it was hard enough to be considered a game of luck, rather than skill, which therefore counted as gambling rather than whatever it was not-permitted as. And, of course, running a gambling game requires rather more in the way of permits and rules. Well ruled, that judge!

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Le Marteau]

There are plenty of people who make a living playing poker on the internet.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[magarity]

Did the machine just say they won or did the wheels spin around and come up triple bar? That's more like the dealer dealing a winning hand and then saying it didn't count because the cards weren't shuffled well enough.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[realityimpaired]

And in *this* country, a malfunction would be too bad for the casino owner, and they'd still have to pay out. If they had a problem with doing that, they'd have to take it up with their insurance company, or with that of the company that caused the malfunction.

Yet another reason why things are royally borked in the US....

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Blue Stone]

Then the onus should be on the casino to ONLY allow functional machines to operate and be played.

If the machine is on the floor, the casino is stating that the machine has been tested and is fit-for-purpose. Otherwise they're essentially saying, these machines might be broken; where the error would result in OUR loss we will void your winnings; where the error might be your loss, that's tough cheese.

That's basically a scam. The law should be changed, or they should basically admit that 'anything goes' and the casino can always weasel out of any situation. (Maybe in big neon letters above the door).

Re:Mistake my ass.

[debatem1]

Its funny though, I had a friend who could literally take those claw machines for everything in them. Was a great girl-getting ploy.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Anonymous Struct]

Every slot machine should be required to have this ratio and a statement that the machine will cheat to enforce the ratio printed right on the front.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Gamer_2k4]

They're inspected regularly, which is approximately how often the players lose.

So why do glitches only come up when players hit jackpots?

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Theaetetus]

Did the machine just say they won or did the wheels spin around and come up triple bar? That's more like the dealer dealing a winning hand and then saying it didn't count because the cards weren't shuffled well enough.

Sounds more like they won, it paid out their $1k winnings... and then paid them again. So it's like the dealer's not paying attention and pays out twice. They still lose.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[scatterbrained]

I used to design hardware for slot machines some years ago. It's my understanding that what you describe is illegal in all the jurisdictions I know of (adjusting the payouts to meet a certain ratio as the game goes on). The odds for each individual play are fixed which sets the payout ratio by averaging over time.

The heart of the game is a big random number generator. There are many more possible outcomes than can be represented by the numbers/symbols on the reels. There is a mapping between the random numbers and what the payouts are, this sets the odds. After the next random number is determined, the machine decides what it wants to show on the reels. Usually it likes to show some kind of near miss to keep up player interest. There are other algorithm adjustments you can make to make a machine make frequent small payouts, or occasional big payouts.

When I was working on stuff, there was a place called GLI (Gaming Labs Inc I think) where you submitted your games for testing. Usually the state gaming commissions would accept GLI testing as proof (or at least partial proof) that your machine was okay. Sort of a underwriters labs for gaming.

I really doubt the casino is trying to rip them off. This is horrible publicity for them. They are usually very happy to pay if the claim is legit - they know it just adds to the draw, and they'll get the money back from you :-)

Re:Mistake my ass.

[rhvarona]

I worked for a while for a company that makes software for modern slot machines.  Each state and indian reservation has different rules, but in the one we wrote software for it works almost like a roll of scratch-off lottery tickets.

When developing a new game, the company decides on the payout, for example, 95%, which means that on average, out of every $1 played, the company pays out 95 cents back to the players.  The company then decides on the prize distribution, for example (not a real game distribution, just an example):
Count   Prize   Payout Amount
387,251 0       0
10,000  1       10,000
2,000   5       10,000
500     25      12,500
200     200     40,000
30      1,000   30,000
15      5,000   75,000
3       30,000  90,000
1       100,000 100,000

400,000 136,231 367,500 Total

So out of 400,000 games played of $1 each, the casino is paying out $367,500 and making $32,500 profit.  The prizes are randomized and the resulting distribution inspected to make it is distributed appropriately.

The prize distribution is saved in a central casino database.  Every time a play happens, while the graphics or reels are moving, the machine talks to the central server over a secure network and requests the next available prize.  The server finds the next prize in the the list, marks it as played, and sends it to the machine.  If it is a win, lights flash, bells ring, etc.

Casinos in general want big jackpots, as loud and as attention getting as possible, since it gets more players to play longer.  They have no interest in cheating you out out of big prize, since they are making money on average every time you play.  Their interest is to keep you putting in money into the machine as long as possible, and they do that by having jackpots as often as they have calculated they should do it.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[thetoadwarrior]

I'd agree. It sounds like a case of someone not wanting to (or can't) pay out. As long as the user did not intentionally cause an error to cheat they should get the pay out. I don't like the idea over suing over anything but I'd sure as hell take them to court over this.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

what he described are not casino machines but arcade machines that dispense "tickets". In that case nobody cares if you rig the whole thing 100% in your favor.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[HungryHobo]

and how often do the players get their cash back when the glitches go that way?

Re:Mistake my ass.

[icebike]

They also list the maximum payout.

Anything above that automatically must be a malfunction.

If under that maximum value, there is no other basis for claiming malfunction.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[adamofgreyskull]

They were taken to court? And got community service? 2600 to 1 is "practically impossible"? Why the hell aren't Camelot taken to court? The odds of winning the lottery jackpot are millions to one. Also: it was £3 for 5 throws, and yet: "Within eight minutes they had spent £70 - and won nothing.". So the girls threw 58.3333333 times each in 8 minutes. Nice.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[turbidostato]

"If you gamble on the internet, and believe there is any skill involved, or that there is any opportunity for profit, you are a fool."

Not so simple.

There are in fact no choices when you game against the dealer but there's no problem when you gamble against other players (like in poker) as long as the dealer doesn't commit fraud.

But given news like this one, it seems that fraud is an accepted and legal practice on some States.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[erroneus]

Worse, it's probably completely illegal for them to do that. If the machine has a fault, it is not the player's problem. It is the problem of the people making the gambling machine available. They should be required to pay the full amount.

I haven't read the article yet, but I'll bet the winners file a law suit over it.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Kitkoan]

Every machine here in Nevada says right on the front "malfunction voids play" or something similar.

Yeah, but the casino owners will happily allow you to pump more money thats non-refundable into those malfunctioning machines while skipping out on the payouts due to that 'malunction voids play' sticker.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Xeno man]

The dealer isn't part of the game. It's the dealers job to run the game. The game it self determines winners and losers. If I'm playing blackjack and I have 25 and the dealer says winner, that is his mistake and I'm not entitled to any winnings. If I hit a blackjack and the dealer says looser, I am entitled to my winnings. If the dealer is not shuffling correctly and I'm winning, that's the casinos problem to fix but that doesn't change my past winnings or losses. If I don't like the way the dealer is shuffling, it's up to me to walk away from the table.

As for the slot machine, if the wheels all came up jackpot, they should get the money, regardless of any errors the machine may have had. If the wheels came up anything else but said jackpot anyway, then no they shouldn't win. It's as simple as that. If casinos want their games run by computers, they need to accept any errors they make. No different when an employee fucks up.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Xeno man]

They can put "playing this game constitutes an agreement to transfer your soul and children to casino ownership"
Just because you put shit on the side of a slot machine doesn't make it law. Lawyers do that kind of thing all of the time. This is why license agreements and contracts are 20 pages long. Half of the thing is the company lawyers claiming the right to anything and everything under the sun then put in the line, Items are void where state law prohibit. They claim you have no rights unless you know what your rights are and fight for them, only then will they back off because they know what rights you really do have.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[jd]

The thing with probability is that the past should not alter the future. If you toss a coin, the chances of it being heads on any given toss are fixed. Even if you have tossed tails a dozen times on a perfectly fair coin, the odds of the next toss being heads are still 50/50.

Gambling on a machine has little to do with probability. Even so, there is a difference between a system that is skewed in the house's favor because the game is unbalanced versus a system that is skewed in the house's favor because it's rigged. An unbalanced system can still be "fair" in that you know that you have a non-zero chance of winning at any given time. In a rigged game, the chance of winning is either 1 or 0. It can never be anything in between. Even if both produce the same number of winners and losers in a day, with the winnings for each being identical, anyone with a sense of fairness is going to prefer the "honestly unbalanced" system over the rigged one.

Why? Because in an unbalanced system, the house is also gambling. It is a contest, no matter how warped. It is possible, as with the coin tossing, for the house to lose more than it expects on a given day. It is also possible for the house to win more. It'll even out in the end. In the rigged system, the winnings are pre-determined. The house is guaranteed to win around X amount from a given machine. It has zero risk.

In this particular case, a valid result according to the rules of the game was rejected because the game wasn't corrupt enough. It would be on-par to someone racing in Formula 1 being disqualified despite a perfect race because the bribed engineer failed to remove the fuel tank. IMHO, if a player plays by the rules and wins by the rules, they are entitled to victory under the rules. It is a bet, with agreed-upon odds, agreed-upon stakes and agreed-upon victory conditions. If a betting office was found doping racehorses or bribing footballers, do you seriously imagine they'd be able to claim they could withhold winnings when the person they tried to make lose won anyway?

Casinos in the US are not betting offices or really "gambling". You can't gamble in a deterministic world, you can merely win or lose when instructed to do so. I doubt this case will force any kind of change to the system, but I'd rather see ACTUAL gambling legalized in the US and game-rigging of any kind banned outright. Mind you, this would mean putting half of Nevada in jail. Not that I can see anything wrong with doing that.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[FunkSoulBrother]

A machine that guarantees a certain percentage of return within a certain time window (probably measured in games played) is not random. If it's not random there's a pattern to how it dispenses winnings. If there's a pattern to it, it should be possible to notice which machines are about to increase their payoff to even the ratio, so it just might be possible to increase your rate of return.

You're misunderstanding how a "percent of return" works. There is no time window -- the machine has no memory of what the last spin was, each spin is an independent event. It can be determined mathematically via pay tables to make sure its pay approaches its setting, say, 90%, over time. There is no reason programatically why you couldn't hit 10 jackpots back to back, it's just that the odds would be astronomical.

Imagine a simplified machine that internally rolls a ten sided die. Everything is a loss except if the die rolls "9". Machine costs $1 to play. If you get a "9", you get $5. Surely you can see where this machine, over thousands of spins, would make money, and a very predictable amount, too. But no matter what the previous roll was, you'd still always have a 1 in 10 shot of winning $5.

That is how slot machines work, with a lot more numbers and a lot more bells and whistles.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[MacWiz]

In a casino, poker is the only game where you do not play against the house.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[rtb61]

No point. From a consumer perspective, they buy the gambling round and they pay for the machine to produce the results. How the machine produces the result and what it displays is the responsibility of the service provider not the customer. The machine produce a error result, from the customer perspective the contractual result is they are owed the result displayed.

The casino is of course not at fault, their recourse is to sue the manufacturer for the faulty product, end of story. They are obligated to pay what they sold, place a bet, for a gaming chance and win the displayed result. If the casino made the machine, well, they are screwed, if they didn't make the machine than the manufacturer is screwed unless they had contractual conditions that excused them from gambling losses including losses resulting from negligent work.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Tuoqui]

Just do like South park and declare shenanigans. Then you get a bunch of sticks and beat the people who ripped you off up or something :P

Re:Mistake my ass.

[araupp]

good point, lol

Re:Mistake my ass.

[ncgnu08]

Ummm... excuse me, but when you declare shenanigans it is time to get your brooms out, not sticks!

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Pinky's Brain]

The casino is always trying to rip you off, but in this case it's probably just the normal rip off and a machine failure.

That couple should put up a web page of exactly what happened with the name of the casino mentioned as many times as possible and in big letters at the top ... with a bit of luck the casino will pay them to take it down.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[dominious]

Exactly, at least in poker you know you give about 10% as rake and that's basically it. The rest of the money goes to good poker players.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Tuidjy]

You are exactly right. It is actually illegal in some jurisdiction (Nevada, at least) to make a gambling machine where the user's skill can influence the outcome. Even the ones that look like a video game where you control an avatar (a dude, a car or a spaceship) are absolutely not rewarding skill or penalizing inability.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[maxwell demon]

It's one thing to have the probabilities being low. That's expected. It's another thing to lie about the probabilities (which is what those hidden mechanisms actually do).

For example, say I have a game where you win if six dice show a six at the same time, then you know it's a low probability, and it's your choice if you want to play anyway. But if I use biased dice which give a six with less than 1/6 probability, without telling you about this, it's not OK. It's fraud, plain and simple. This is also true if I only use the biased dice in case I think you are winning too much.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[maxwell demon]

So in effect, it's a draw without put back? In that case, you should avoid machines which have given out a jackpot, because that one is already taken and won't come again until the next fresh list is uploaded.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Splab]

There are machines wrongly programmed, but other than that, I call bullshit on you.

Those cranes use a pneumatic pump to grab items and it's set to not pick something up untill a certain amount of games has been played.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[debatem1]

call away; doesn't change the fact that it happened. My ex-girlfriend probably still has the pile of those giant koosh ball things that he won for her, although I think I'd be more comfortable with you not being aware of that.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[TheTurtlesMoves]

That's basically a scam.

When you can get banned from a casino/s for winning too much, what part of a casinos operation isn't a scam?

Re:Mistake my ass.

[anegg]

Malfunctions should void losses as well, then. If the casino gets a "second chance" for every big win, then the only way to correctly apply the rules of chance to the process is for the machine to be inspected after every loss as well.

This is relatively infeasible. So casinos should be offered the option of paying out the win even though the machine malfunctioned if they will not inspect the machine after every loss. Then it becomes a business decision. They can either constantly inspect the machines, or they can pay out the winners that occur even though a machine was "defective" so that they can keep the income from the losses that occurred while the machine was "defective."

Regardless of how they chose to implement, unless a win occurs in the first play after a machine is certified as working, with a subsequent examination showing that the machine is malfunctioning, the casino should have to pay. The risk that the machine is defective is thus embedded in the overall risk of play, with both parties taking on the risk.

In order to cover the possibility that a casino would just have a set of "broken" machines that never paid out a big win, the normal inspections and certification of correct operation would still need to be enforced.

In a perfect world, the machines would have to display (on a card next to the payment slot) how much money they have paid out (on average) for every dollar wagered. I suspect this would be ignored by many, but would probably prove useful information to a few.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[GrayNimic]

That's basically a scam. The law should be changed, or they should basically admit that 'anything goes' and the casino can always weasel out of any situation. (Maybe in big neon letters above the door).

Most of them have that. The sign reads "casino".

Re:Mistake my ass.

[nabsltd]

Show me a documented example of a licensed casino owner keeping a machine on the floor after discovering that it was defective.

I suspect it happens all the time.

Suppose a machine was defective in such a way that it would never hit the biggest jackpot listed. Since that happens only once every few years, it may never be known. And, when such a machine is "inspected", it may not even be noticed if the error is subtle enough. Especially since it's in the casino's interest to not have the machine 100% functional. Then, any large jackpot payout can be avoided, even if the error isn't directly related to that jackpot. In my example, if the biggest jackpot is $X million progressive and can't be won due to an error in programming, but hit something like 5,000 times your bet, the casino could still void your win due to "malfunction".

Re:Mistake my ass.

[nabsltd]

The heart of the game is a big random number generator. There are many more possible outcomes than can be represented by the numbers/symbols on the reels. There is a mapping between the random numbers and what the payouts are, this sets the odds. After the next random number is determined, the machine decides what it wants to show on the reels. Usually it likes to show some kind of near miss to keep up player interest. There are other algorithm adjustments you can make to make a machine make frequent small payouts, or occasional big payouts.

Although this is the closest description in this thread of how slot machines work, it's still a bit off, but even Wikipedia gets it right.

To see all the gory details, and why you see the "near miss", check out The Wizard of Odds. The Q&A about slots (and other games) at that site is also a good resource.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[grahamd0]

frankly, these parasites are worse than Al Capone, who at least was providing an actual service to his customers.

So are the casinos. That service is "entertainment". If you're a gambling addict or terribly naive, it might not be the service you think they're providing, but it's still a service that is considered by many to be perfectly legitimate.

Many people go to casinos expecting, or at least willing to accept, losing some money in the name of having a good time.

Personally, I don't get the appeal of slot machines, but to each their own.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[toddestan]

I know a guy who could almost always win one of those machines at a local place within about 5 plays. Then something changed, and no matter how many times he played he could not win for anything despite many tries. A figured they must have changed something in the machine to make it nearly or always unwinnable. A few months later the place went out of business, I guess it was a desperation move on the part of the owners.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[ElizabethGreene]

This rule was created after a chap managed to find a way to hot-piggyback another chip on one of the the proms in a machine, causing it to load his software. He'd then pull the piggybacked hardware leaving a machine with no evidence of tampering other than the code in RAM. He would then set a machine to Jackpot, walk away, and an accomplice come behind and win it all.

His name was Dennis Nikrasch. There is a CourtTv Masterminds episode about him.

Excluding PVP games, the house is honest. They have the advantage and that should be a known and accepted fact. Slot machines are on a fixed payout schedule, and the casino will tell you what their target Payout % is if you ask. ... This is why I play poker.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[loshwomp]

Just like these claw crane games that you find in vide arcades or amusement parks

Dubious programming craw crane games is just a red herring. The real scam with those crane games is that the prizes inside aren't worth the money even if you had a 100% success rate in grabbing them.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[DarwinSurvivor]

And yet the house still makes a profit :P

Re:Mistake my ass.

[sciencewhiz]

Selection Bias. Given that machines are tested periodically, it's reasonable to assume that more machines are fixed silently then make the news.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[kyteland]

No, the $11 million would have been the prize the next time the jackpot was awarded, not the next play. You aren't awarded the jackpot every play. Still the $11,000,600 number was an error. It should have displayed $600 which was the correct reset value. This couple won $1600, plain and simple.

I'm not sure which manufacturer this game was on, but evidently the display sequence showed four things to the screen after they won:
1) The word JACKPOT
2) The prize just won, ie $1600
3) The word CURRENT
4) The next prize reset value, in this case $11,000,600 although it should have said $600

So while there was definitely a malfunction there was no ambiguity that they didn't win that much money. Their prize was the $1600.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[turbidostato]

"And yet the house still makes a profit"

Of course yes. But it makes its profit indepently of your ballance; that's why you could expect getting benefits (at the expense of other players, never against the house).

Re:Mistake my ass.

[ekhben]

It would be cheaper to give the commissioner a free hotel room for the night, $100 worth of chips, and a hooker. Bonus points if you put a camera in the room and hold the footage for blackmail in case bribery ever stops working.

Insurance companies, after all, can't afford to pay out if claims are ever made.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[countach]

I'd bet good money the contract with the manufacturer has an exclusion clause for this scenario.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[compwizrd]

there was a machine up at toronto's D&B that we almost completely cleaned out.. the one where the pushrod goes into the round tube to either push a prize or a "xxx tickets".

We were playing for awhile and someone realized that when you won the 250 tickets thing, instead of removing one play, it would add 3.

Combined with the fact the machine would lose track of where the home was and would keep resetting upwards closer and closer to the 250 button, it became trivial to hit that dozens of times in a row.. and when the machine would track too high to hit the button, just use up a play to send it all the way up to the top and hold that for a bit till time ran out.. it would reset and start from the bottom again.

I think I ended up with something like 15,000 tickets before we had to go home.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[mabhatter654]

we've been over this before. In today's casinos almost all the machines are connected to a computer network. The NETWORK SERVER picks the winners and losers based on an established probability agreed upon by the casino and the games commission.

In short all of the "chance" machines are really more like getting scratch-off lottery tickets. There is a fixed number of winners already picked out, each game you play is like tearing one card off the roll of lottery tickets at the local kwiki-mart. Of course that's not the game you are TOLD you are playing.... when you play slots you expect the computer is acting "just like a machine" but it's not....

Re:Mistake my ass.

[mabhatter654]

exactly, casinos are set up more like lottery tickets. The server decides what win you get when you put the money in. Essentially all the "tickets" are printed already, just like lottery tickets have serial numbers. In this case the casino determined the "ticket" was a "misprint" because it didn't match the price associated. Of course, ALL THE MACHINES ARE SUSPECT, if they're going to claim that... because they are all managed at once.. so the managing server is also at fault... there's no way to know for sure.

Personally, I think they should be required to eat the loss upto the amount of the jackpot, or refund ALL the money the whole bank of machines took in for the shift, or whatever time since the last maintenance...if ONE play is void, they ALL should be void because you don't know when the error happened (except they DO know, and they aren't entirely honest that the individual machines do not have "independant" chances of winning)

Re:Mistake my ass.

[hesaigo999ca]

They should bring the casino to court, if the machine said that you won that jack pot, and the bells and whistles sounded off, you won the jackpot. End of story, trying to open up the machine and see what is going one, gives me the idea the machine was programmed to never let someone win....and this is why i will never go to a casino. They had to open it up because they could not believe it....

Boss>How could OUR machine give out a win, oh that's why, the programmer screwed up...what are we going to do
Second boss>Say exactly that, there was a programming error and they did not win...its sort of the truth isnt it?
Boss>Ok sorry there folks, you actually won 1/100 what we should be paying, thank you for being so gullible. good bye

Re:Mistake my ass.

[2obvious4u]

A long time ago, maybe twenty years, I emptied one of those machines. It only happened one, I think the animals were stuffed in to loosely. Usually they pack them in tight, once they loosen up you can pull a bunch out.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[Joe Snipe]

Angrily is any amount of rage as long as it's anger.
Hungrily is any amount of craving as long as it's hunger.
Poorly is any amount of underachieving as long as it's poor.
Stupidly is any amount of idiocy as long as it's stupid.

This is what makes a +3 insightful these days?

Re:Mistake my ass.

[twistedsymphony]

I'm not exactly sure where our slot machines came from (the arcade I worked at was in New England, so may be Atlantic City?) But last time I was in Las Vegas I don't recall any slot machines having buttons to stop the rollers. it was pure "chance" in that you pulled the lever and the rollers would stop themselves after a few seconds.

it could be that they've since changed laws outlawing the "near miss" forced condition, or it simply varies by state.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[twistedsymphony]

Not all of them area like that, I can tell you that one of the machines at my arcade had any kind of "fake drop" condition. Working at the arcade I played them enough just in testing them after maintenance and repair that I could collect a prize almost always without fail.

typically, at least the older games, are skewed in the operator's favor by having a weak claw grip with slippery claws, and in the case of stuffed animals they would get packed tight enough that the crane was strong enough to move them a little but not strong enough to actually pull them out.

I could write a book about all the ridiculous hidden tricks employed in "redemption" type games. Personally I always preferred pinball, because there's no hidden agenda, it's pure skill and the prize is your enjoyment of playing the game.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[somersault]

Most people seem to think that "regularly" means "often".

Re:Mistake my ass.

[sjames]

Yes, and on some of those machines, they deliberately stop those rollers so that 2/3 of a jackpot combination comes up and the 3rd shows the 3rd part above or below the window far more often than chance. No payout but the user THINKS he 'just missed' and so tries a few more times than otherwise.

Doing that doesn't affect the actual payout ratio or skew the actual odds of winning, but plays on the psychology of the user.

Some argue that the odds and payout are the same so it's fair, others maintain that all odds BUT the actual odds of winning are skewed and it's a cheat.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[kalirion]

At least in normal cases, they don't take away your winnings when they ban you. Of course, you're unlikely to win $11 million by counting cards in black jack.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[jimthehorsegod]

Well then that's directly at odds with the GP's post - that 'rogue' wins can be detected because they fall outside the target payout ratio limits

Re:Mistake my ass.

[FunkSoulBrother]

Well then that's directly at odds with the GP's post - that 'rogue' wins can be detected because they fall outside the target payout ratio limits

Yeah, I don't work in the industry so I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the GP was just getting at that rogue wins could be "detected" in so much as they would be highly improbable due to math, but not impossible.

Consider this situation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerball#Fortune_cookie_payout

"The Powerball drawing on March 30, 2005 game produced an unprecedented 110 second-prize winners, all of whom picked the five white balls correctly but missed the red Powerball. The total payout to 5+0 winners was $19.4 million; 89 plays won $100,000 each, with the other 21 plays winning $500,000 each due to the PowerPlay option.

Powerball officials initially suspected a reporting error or fraud. However, it turned out that all 110 winners had received their numbers from fortune cookies made by Wonton Food Inc., a fortune cookie factory in Long Island City, Queens, New York. The factory had printed the five regular numbers (22, 28, 32, 33, and 39) on thousands of fortunes. The sixth number in the fortune, 40, did not match the Powerball number, 42. None of the employees of Wonton Food played those numbers (at the time, the closest jurisdiction with Powerball was Connecticut.) Since the matches had been the result of a coincidence rather than foul play, the payouts were made
"

Surely, it was smart of the lottery to investigate this... 110 winners for that prize is way outside of what the math dictates 'should' happen. In this case they weren't fraudulent, but this is a reasonable threshold to suspect it.

The same would be the case if you beat trillion-to-one (worse?) odds and jackpotted a slot machine 10 times in a row. Completely possible on any legal slot machine in the USA, but I'd be worried about the casino calling BS on it, just due to the miniscule odds that it could happen.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[jimthehorsegod]

Yes that does make sense, but whilst the lottery result you quote is a one-off event with unlikely results, the (G?)GP's post indicated that people cheating an imperfect Kino machine were caught early doors because the ratio didn't match. If the aim of the machine is simply to have hard-coded probabilities that by their nature will cause the payout level over infinite time to be, say, 97% then a payout level of 105% over a week, or even two weeks just isn't necessarily cause for concern - ditto the period where the payout level is 90% What I'm meaning is that in a constantly repeated series of non-rigged probability-based games being played, on what grounds could you say 'this is being cheated' given that the payout ratio must by definition vary all over the place?

Re:Mistake my ass.

[FunkSoulBrother]

What I'm meaning is that in a constantly repeated series of non-rigged probability-based games being played, on what grounds could you say 'this is being cheated' given that the payout ratio must by definition vary all over the place?

I'm not sure. Hopefully the casino would take a few straight weeks of 110% and then put some additional security on the game, to start observing whether the general public is on a heater, or if its the same 10 guys who seem to win consistently. Then try and reverse engineer their scheme. If you can't, or maybe they are just freakishly lucky and don't even have a scheme, then you just ban them for being "too good", under threat of trespass.

Re:Mistake my ass.

[makomk]

The Wikipedia article on the topic suggests machines like the ones you worked on, where the prize is selected from a pool of prizes by a central machine, are known as Class II machines or video lottery terminals. Proper slot machines are actually random with each game independent of previous games, but they're not legal in as many states.

Law Suit!!!!

[arthurpaliden]

Its the American way.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[Raven42rac]

"If you do hit a jackpot are they going to come up with another story? It's a malfunction? It's not right," Jim McMahon said.

What a crock of shit, I think they have a case.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[casings]

Won't matter. This has happened before and they have never had to pay out.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[History's Coming To]

So presumably everyone who played the machine previously can claim their stakes back...the machine was faulty. You can't have it both ways.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[wygit]

Of course you can, if you have a few million to contribute to the whores who write the laws.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[meerling]

Yes, it does seem to be happening a lot recently. Suspiciously so... And it should really stop since the majority of the casinos profit comes from slots, and if people stop trusting them, they stop playing them as much, and the casino tanks. Even more so, since this is a well distributed and common type of machine, if it happens at one casino, it will affect all of them. (Unlike having a dealer arrested for cheating, which mostly affects that one casino.)

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[frieko]

Exactly, can I demand an inspection every time I don't win?

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[maxume]

I don't think it will matter that much, the casinos can't really deny that the odds on all the games favor the house and people still show up and spend their money.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[iamhassi]

"Law Suit!!!! Its the American way."

But this one is deserved. I'm sorry casino, if you have a machine that says someone won $11 million, that's what they won.

Let's not forget this is the second time in 3 months: "It's the second time in three months a Colorado slot machine has made a multi-million dollar mistake."

So when's the lottery going to start this scam? "Oh sorry, I know we read your winning numbers but you really didn't win"

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[Cylix]

Yes,

The machine will have to be taken offline for inspection and a report will be mailed to you. I've read up on the gaming commission and several stories. (Mostly in regards to my fascination with that damn super stacker game). The regulations for "games of chance" are pretty much out there for anyone to read. Tons of interesting stories and material there to fill a day of reading.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, can I demand an inspection every time I don't win?

Probably. At least once before the casino escorts you out and suggests strongly that you not return.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[ultranova]

So when's the lottery going to start this scam? "Oh sorry, I know we read your winning numbers but you really didn't win"

A well-organized lottery doesn't give the organizer any more money even if nobody wins; the prize will simply be given to charity or otherwise disposed of. That way there's no incentive to cheat for short-term profits, and the whole things stays running year after year, decade after decade, making money hand over fist the whole time.

Frankly, this entire story is beyond idiotic. The only reason people play is for the dream of striking it rich; lose that and the whole gambling industry goes belly-up. The people who made the decision to not pay have managed to top even the RIAA in sheer stupidity.

Instead of having the zeitgeist be "we won $11 million at Wildwood Casino" it's "don't go to Wildwood Casino, even if you win they'll cheat you out of your winnings". What utter morons.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[cpinetree]

Can you then play one machine, call for an inspection, walk to the next, play, call for inspection, rinse lather repeat? If so, that surely would hurt the casino where it hurts if you and a bunch of friends did this for a week at the casino in question. It would certainly cost them more than just paying the jackpot.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[Kierthos]

You could do this, in theory.

And the casino could ban you, in reality. You see, while casinos will ban you if they catch you cheating or card-counting (card counting is not against the law, but casinos will ban you for it) or for doing any activity they don't like. They can do this because casinos are private property, and thus, the owners and/or employees can restrict you from coming in.

Now yes, if you could convince a large enough group of people to continue doing this to the slot machines, over time, the casino would probably lose money on that part of the games. They would still be raking in money on roulette, poker, blackjack, and every other game in the casino.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[thetoadwarrior]

I think everyone who has been told they won, without cheating, definitely does deserve to win a lawsuit against them. Casinos are heavily rigged against your favour to begin with and they make shit loads of money off of people. If they're going to have broken equipment on the floor they should lose out. Otherwise why bother maintaining any of it. Just let people use it and when it's broken claim it's broken and don't pay out.

Odds are they were too tight to keep the machine in top form or bought something that was broken. Either way the odds of this happening are exceptionally low. Just pay out and don't put the machine back on the floor if they're worried about a defect.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[tompaulco]

So when's the lottery going to start this scam? "Oh sorry, I know we read your winning numbers but you really didn't win"
Happened to me once. I had a ticket from Florida that was a winner (something like 6 bucks, wow). I followed their instructions for redeeming the ticket. Several weeks later I got back a letter from the lottery commission telling me that my ticket was determined not to be a winner. Always make copies.
I heard recently about an issue at a convenience store where someone brought in a ticket and said they thought they had a winner. The clerk replied that they did not and kept the ticket. Later the patron thought he should check the rules online and found out that the ticket had indeed been a winner.
Then there is another case where the government passed a lottery at the people's behest and claimed it would benefit the schools to the tune of millions of dollars a year, but then the government said "Sorry, schools, you really didn't win the jackpot, you only won a couple of hundred grand."

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[noidentity]

Care to share some URLs? I'm drawing a blank on what the hell to search for. Your description left me wanting to read about these events.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[PingPongBoy]

Its the American way

The American way was MMS letting the oil companies write their own inspection reports in pencil, which would be officially completed in ink. If BP coughed up the $11 mil to the winners, that would be

• fair

.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[WillDraven]

Of course if you do this more than once the casino will most likely ask you to leave and never come back.

Re:Law Suit!!!!

[Sancho]

Probably. And the Casino can ask you to leave at any time.

It turns out

[Anonymous Coward]

they'd left out the word "million" in a story title?

Re:It turns out

[Anonymous Coward]

It turns out slashdot submissions are handled by the same slot machine code.

Re:It turns out

[ar1550]

Upon clicking submit: "Come on, big money big money big money!"

[IDLE] [IDLE] [IDLE]

"Stupid machine!"

Lik they say

[Vinegar Joe]

The House always wins.

Re:Lik they say

[Loupis]

Did someone say Lupus?

Re:Lik they say

[Le Marteau]

> The House always wins.

.... over a sufficient period of time.

If the house ALWAYS won, they would be out of business very quickly.

Sometimes, that "sufficient period of time" never happens for some lucky people. Plenty of people have hit jackpots for very large sums, and will NEVER return all their winnings to the casino.

Re:Lik they say

[Life2Death]

Isnt that a rule of acquisition?

Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Jerry]

in recent history that gambling casinos have used "mechanical problems" to evade honoring their promises?

I wager it will be used again. After all, aren't most winners too poor to afford lawyers to fight the casinos? It's the same problem with corporate abuse of DRM and DMCA lawsl.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[larry bagina]

second time? It happens a lot more than that.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[icannotthinkofaname]

After all, aren't most winners too poor to afford lawyers to fight the casinos?

If I win my lawsuit, then I'll get $11 Million or $42 Million or whatever and be able to pay my lawyer. And I remember seeing ads on TV for law firms that don't charge unless they win your case.

Or am I missing something important here?

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[mbone]

Yes. From TOA

"It's the second time in three months a Colorado slot machine has made a multi-million dollar mistake. In March, a machine malfunction was blamed for a $42 million dollar jackpot."

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Kaboom13]

Generally slot machines have a posted maximum jackpot. I don't know about this case but in other cases like this the reported "winnings" have far exceeded the maximum the machine is supposed to possibly give out, as posted on the machine. The real issue here is how crappy the engineering must be on these machines, to allow this to happen so often it routinely makes then news. In my opinion all glitches should require a payout of the maximum possible winnings, which must be clearly posted on the machine, regardless of what it "should" have paid out. That would encourage casinos to invest in machines with actual sound engineering principles, without making them unfairly liable for massive amounts of money when a legitimate freak error occurs (even in the best systems, exceedingly rare circumstances could cause errors). It's a slot machine, it's a simple device, if they spend the money on reasonable robustness they can easily achieve extremely low error rates.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Josh04]

The other side's lawyers charge. The court charges. No-win no-fee isn't no-cost.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[icannotthinkofaname]

Aw, dang it. I knew it was too good to be true. :(

Thank you.

Re: Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Black Parrot]

It's a slot machine, it's a simple device, if they spend the money on reasonable robustness they can easily achieve extremely low error rates.

They already do. I've seen the engineering that goes into slot machines made in the USA, and know a little bit about the certification requirements and procedures. It's jaw-droppingly stiff. After all, these machines deal with *money* instead of mere lives.

If the Colorado Gaming Division says the machine is defective, the couple should sue them for allowing it into service.

Actually, the certification is done by a third party, so the couple should sue the casino and the certifier, and the CGD only if it doesn't revoke the certifying agency's license to certify in their state.

Re: Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Black Parrot]

Actually, the certification is done by a third party

Actually, that assumes that certification works in Colorado the same way it does in the state where I know how it works. If the CGD certifies the machines themselves, worse for them.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[dgatwood]

The court charges, but in general, when you're talking about two parties with dramatically differing levels of available resources, the only time the smaller party pays for the larger party's attorney fees is if the lawsuit is frivolous (summary judgment) or if the law specifically provides for that (e.g. the defense loses certain types of suits). This is clearly not frivolous.

Besides, it would never go to court. The company would almost certainly settle out of court for a few hundred thousand just to get them to shut up. Otherwise, the story hits a few major networks, and that casino's business dries up because people suddenly realize that if they win big, the casino is just going to screw them out of the money.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[CaptainPatent]

What I don't understand is how when something goes wrong on the part of the gamer, the Casino can treat the transaction between the slot machine and gambler as a binding contract, yet when something goes wrong because of a fault on their end they can say "oops, we goofed - let's call it off"

I've heard of a couple of jackpots a while back called off because a user entering the coin, or pulling the lever, or even present while someone they knew gambeled was under the legal gambling age at the time and the jackpot was called off.

It seems only fair then that a goof on their end should not be able to nulify the standing "contract."

It should be the responsibility of the casino to test their equipment (or buy from only the most reliable sources which are well tested.) If there was a glitch in the machine itself, the casino should be responsible to pay out and able to sue the company that made the slot machine.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[AnonymousClown]

After all, aren't most winners too poor to afford lawyers to fight the casinos?

If I win my lawsuit, then I'll get $11 Million or $42 Million or whatever and be able to pay my lawyer. And I remember seeing ads on TV for law firms that don't charge unless they win your case.

Or am I missing something important here?

Assuming they take your case. I knew someone that was in an accident and went to one of those lawyers. They told him to rack up a few thousand dollars in medical expenses and then call them back.

Never hire a lawyer who advertises.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Skim123]

I knew someone that was in an accident and went to one of those lawyers. They told him to rack up a few thousand dollars in medical expenses and then call them back. Never hire a lawyer who advertises.

Any lawyer who is working on contingency - whether she advertises or not - is going to have this same sentiment, because in a civil suit the judgment cannot exceed your damages. If you have an accident and need no medical attention, you were not damaged.

Now, if this person you knew said, "I will put you on retainer and pay you hourly and start with a $1,000 deposit," I'm sure the lawyer would take the case immediately.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[nEoN nOoDlE]

Yeah, but the people who sue casinos are probably willing to take that bet.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Mr. Freeman]

"And I remember seeing ads on TV for law firms that don't charge unless they win your case."

Those lawyers are probably about as qualified to handle a case as a parrot.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Rob the Bold]

in recent history that gambling casinos have used "mechanical problems" to evade honoring their promises?

I believe you're right. This one was in Central City.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Kjella]

Well, here's a follow-up on that $42.9M story:

At the time, the top award on the slot, a progressive game that takes a percentage of bets placed in all similar machines, was $251,183.16. But to be eligible for the top award, a maximum wager of 400 credits, or $4, was required. Chavez's 40-cent wager was eligible for a prize of 20,000 credits, or $200, if she would have hit the progressive.

So.... you're playing a 40 cent game for $200 max, who cares if it shows 42 millions when it's impossible? I can tell you what happened too, a 32 bit unsigned has a max of 4,294,967,295 <-- seem familiar? Somehow a subtraction lacked a bounds check and it underflowed to be UINT_MAX cents. And for that they should pay out 200,000 times her largest possible theoretical winnings? Sorry, but I'll side with the casino on this one.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[belmolis]

When there is a violation of the gaming laws, like the gambler being under-age, the casino has a rock-solid basis for behaving as if there were no contract because it is black-letter law that a contract that violates the law is unenforceable. It's as if the contract had never been made. So it isn't so much the casino insisting that the gambler abide strictly by the contract - rather, the casino is relying on the fact that legally it has no contractual obligations. In non-legal terms of fairness, I see your point, but there's a sound legal basis for the apparent asymmetry.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Smallpond]

I have this system. If the first lawsuit fails, I sue again for twice as much. Then if that fails ...

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Imrik]

They didn't call it off, they paid out the amount that was supposed to be paid to the players. The controversy is that this amount was not the same as the amount the machine told the players they won.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[ari_j]

Coincidentally enough, lawyers who take contingency fees do so on particular types of cases in which they can safely bet that, in the long run, they will come out ahead, just as a casino operates. By handling, for instance, 50 car-accident injury cases in a year, you can afford to win some, lose some, and settle most of them for where you and the other side think the odds line up.

Why do I mention all this? Because it will only make economic sense to an attorney to handle this type of lawsuit on a contingency fee basis if he is sitting on enough money or other reliable cash flow to dedicate his resources to it long enough to get to an outcome, which with this kind of case could certainly involve multiple appeals before you see a dime. You'd also have to have a source of funds for expert witnesses to review the technical aspects of it and testify about what happened and how it happened. In some states, that source of funds must be the client as lawyers are prohibited from paying the costs of a lawsuit as an ethical matter. In the other states, you still need that money to go forward, though.

It would be a fun case, though, if you were a lawyer in the position to handle it on a contingency fee basis or if the clients had another source of money to pay you. (But, as they spend enough money in casinos to hit an $11 million jackpot on a slot machine, the safer bet is that their financial management skills leave them unable to pay out of pocket.)

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely they should pay the amount the machine says the player won. If that's a bug then they can deal with the slot machine manufacturing/distributing company, but pay the player what the machine says is due.

Simply put, the machine should pay the proper amount on all pay combinations. A machine should never lock up except for a genuine winning combination that triggers a handpay, and all touchscreen elements should work 100% of the time on the first touch. These newer video slots with 50 lines, 100 lines, 243 ways to win, 1024 ways to win, etc. if they can't find a way to make those machines absolutely and 100% bug free with all spin combinations tested and verified--then those machines should be illegal meaning the manufacturer cannot sell them to the casinos and the casinos cannot install them for players to play.

After all, the machine will glady take all of a player's money even if they don't win anything, even if their "bonus" round results in zero extra credits, and if there is a malfunction that doesn't pay it's often hidden by all those obscure line shapes so that a player really can't scan all of those pay lines during a free spins bonus round before the next free spin occurs.

"Malfunction voids all pays and plays" should be illegal too, if the machine might malfunction, it should be illegal.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Adrian Lopez]

If a construction crane malfunctions and ends up killing a bunch of people, should the construction company get to avoid liability simply because the machine malfunctioned?

In this case it involves money rather than lives, but I see no reason why casinos should not be liable for problems with the machines they operate.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Joe Tie.]

I think that's his point though. "I didn't mean to do that action, I meant to do this one! I don't actually owe you as much money now." would be laughed away if any player tried to use it.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[AK Marc]

And what happens when you put in $1 and lose and go to the management and say "I mean to put in $0.10, so can you give me my $0.90 back? Or worse, you go "all in" and lose lots, and they say you had a processing error and should have only called?

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Somehow a subtraction lacked a bounds check and it underflowed to be UINT_MAX cents. And for that they should pay out 200,000 times her largest possible theoretical winnings? Sorry, but I'll side with the casino on this one.

And they were too lazy to have a range check in the "display winnings" routine? And what if it were some highly intricate bug, would they then deserve to be penalized?
If anything the straight-forward nature of the bug, as you have described it, points to serious negligence which is all the more reason they should be penalized for it. If they are so sloppy to let such a simple error through their engineering and QA processes, imagine just how many other more complicated failures exist in the system - wonder how many of them work out to be in favor of the casino and so go unnoticed?

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[somersault]

Why would you settle for hundreds of thousands when you can have millions? If they're trying to settle then it sounds like they expect to lose. If they want to keep it quiet they'd need to pay out more to keep me quiet.

Though for that amount of money I wouldn't be surprised if they threatened people with thugs, and hundreds of thousands might be nicer than losing the use of your legs..

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[somersault]

lawyers are prohibited from paying the costs of a lawsuit as an ethical matter

Indeed, it would be far too ethical to help out the defenceless - can't go ruining lawyers' reputations like that!

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[socsoc]

Yet being 19 is no problem at many Indian Casinos?

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[ultranova]

Though for that amount of money I wouldn't be surprised if they threatened people with thugs, and hundreds of thousands might be nicer than losing the use of your legs..

"Don't go to Wildwood Casino, if you win they send mafia thugs after you!"

Just apologize, blame it all on some stupid bureaucrat, pay what you owe and a million extra on top, and go back to making money. Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs; just because you're a CEO doesn't mean you have to be Stupid Evil.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[ari_j]

Those rules are basically just part of "tort reform," which is the politically salable term for sheltering major corporations and insurance companies from having to be held accountable for their own or their insureds' wrongful acts. They make it just that much more difficult for the little guy to have his day in court, which is precisely the goal of all tort reform legislation, whether the legislators or voters understand that or not.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Kalriath]

Indian Casinos are on Sovereign Territory. For all intents and purposes, they aren't even in the United States.

Re: Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Dhalka226]

They should sue the casino and, frankly, should win. That's who their beef is with; they supposedly won $X but weren't given it because they casino--in sole possession of the machines at all times, including before inspection by the way--deemed it faulty. And hell, maybe it was. Why is that the player's problem?

If there is a legitimate malfunction, it should then be up to the casino to sue the manufacturers or maintainers of the devices, or the people who certified them as properly functioning, and prove their case. That's who THEIR beef is with. Somewhere in this chain is a responsible party, and it is not the player.

Things are already SEVERELY skewed in the direction of the casinos (and that's fine). They shouldn't be able to evade responsibility for a jackpot by simply going "oh, no, see, I'm pretty sure this malfunctioned. Let me take this machine into a back room where we can hold it until it's evaluated. Hmm? No, you definitely don't need to be allowed access to our super secret casino holding chambers to ensure it isn't tampered with!" (If you don't think that's how it's happening, just make a quick Google search for payouts that weren't paid because of malfunctions.) As others have pointed out, you'd be laughed out of the joint if you claimed you need the machine inspected because you lost.

You and I are responsible for maintaining our vehicles, our property, our equipment, things we produce; why am I responsible for a malfunctioning machine in their favor but nobody is responsible for a malfunctioning machine in my favor? I'm not looking to zing anybody, I'm not looking to help the "little guy" get rich -- I just want fairness and responsibility. Sometimes that means walloping somebody so hard that they make sure the problem never happens again.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[True Vox]

DAMN YOU! I had FINALLY managed to remove EVERY LAST TVTROPES TAB from my browser! I've been clean for over a month! And then you had to bring that site BACK to my attention. It's like gambling - I just can't walk away! :(

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Kjella]

The rules of the game is an agreement, presumably nobody agreed to be killed by that construction crane. You want every cash register, every online bank, every website, every advertisement to be held to any and all typos and bugs and human errors as absurd contracts? Okay, but it'll go both ways. Don't be surprised then if you click through a license agreement and discover that on page 13, paragraph 45, section 4 you gave all your money to the Church of Scientology. And you'll go "OMG no I'd never do that, it's absurd, it's robbery in broad daylight, it's fraud" they'll go "tough shit, the casino didn't mean to give away $42 million under any circumstances either". Fortunately it doesn't work that way, courts have found these contracts to be unconscionable even if the fault was made by those who'd lose on it, as long as no reasonable person would have given or accepted the contract that way.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Kjella]

"Malfunction voids all pays and plays" should be illegal too, if the machine might malfunction, it should be illegal.

Only a nerd in a basement can manage to mod this up as insightful. In the real world everything can break down or malfunction, there's people all over the system that are human, the developers are human, nothing physical is 100% not even computers themselves that could suffer bit flips or data corruption and so on. Perfection only exist in a fantasy land, one thing how malfunction is handled but contracts can't outlaw reality.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Khyber]

Actually, no. I had a quite competent group work with me after I got nailed by a drunk driver and had a fair portion of my skeleton replaced with titanium.

And they guaranteed me "No win, you pay NOTHING, we handle it all." Right on the contract.

Not all lawyers are 'Ambulance chasers' some are really out to nail the bad guy. This one had a record thicker than my wrist, mostly regarding DUI/DWI. After civil procedures, they even testified on my behalf in court against the man.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Khyber]

The answer to this is to outlaw digital machines and go back to purely physical mechanisms. Then a TRUE malfunction can be determined, by simply observing if there is any damage to any part inside of the machine, or obstruction.

As for only a nerd in a basement, I'm posting from my own business, thank you very much, and I find this very insightful, as it shows critical thinking skills.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[thenextpresident]

Having worked in this environment before, you'd actually do better. You'd give the person their money back, and comp them something. However, people doing this all the time would be asked to leave.

People assume the Casino's are just crooks. That's not really fair. Problems can happen. If someone wins legit, fine, they get the money, and that's it. However, if something goes wrong, things are adjusted. On both sides. Yes, if a machine breaks down and ate someones money, we get the person's money back, comp them something, etc. They are then free to take that money and try again.

Just because you lose and the machine was broken doesn't mean you would have won.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Adrian Lopez]

Fortunately it doesn't work that way, courts have found these contracts to be unconscionable even if the fault was made by those who'd lose on it, as long as no reasonable person would have given or accepted the contract that way.

The key term here being "no reasonable person". When I walk into a casino and a slot machine promises me a prize of X million dollars in exchange for my money, it is not at all unreasonable to conclude that such an amount is what the casino would pay me should I ever hit the jackpot. Unless there are sufficient clues to suggest the amount is in error, the casino should have to pay the advertised amount.

Re: Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[PAjamian]

If the Colorado Gaming Division says the machine is defective, the couple should sue them for allowing it into service.

Actually, the certification is done by a third party, so the couple should sue the casino and the certifier, and the CGD only if it doesn't revoke the certifying agency's license to certify in their state.

The malfunction is going to be something along the lines of a RAM error, where a hardware component failed and caused the issue. This is not something that would or could have been picked up in a certification because the component would have been working just fine then. All the certifier can do is say that the machine is working properly "now", it says nothing of how the machine will operate tomorrow or the next day, and these machines run 24/7/365 for years. The fact that they hold up as well as they do under those conditions shows that they are well engineered to begin with.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[wonkavader]

No, the answer is for the casinos to decide not to use digital machines, because they cost them money.

People should make a huge stink and sue and settle for big amounts just to make them shut up. It should happen whenever a digital machine screws up. The law is unneeded, here.

(Though personally, I think running a casino should be a crime, it ain't gonna get legislated against in my lifetime. Our education system is just too inadequate.)

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[bigstrat2003]

Why would you settle for hundreds of thousands when you can have millions? If they're trying to settle then it sounds like they expect to lose. If they want to keep it quiet they'd need to pay out more to keep me quiet.

Well, ordinarily, I'd say it's because someone is willing to take only 20% (or whatever) rather than have a chance to walk away with nothing... but these are people who frequent casinos, so yeah, that would probably be lost on them.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[bigstrat2003]

A parrot! A parrot!

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Nyder]

Well, here's a follow-up on that $42.9M story:

At the time, the top award on the slot, a progressive game that takes a percentage of bets placed in all similar machines, was $251,183.16. But to be eligible for the top award, a maximum wager of 400 credits, or $4, was required. Chavez's 40-cent wager was eligible for a prize of 20,000 credits, or $200, if she would have hit the progressive.

So.... you're playing a 40 cent game for $200 max, who cares if it shows 42 millions when it's impossible? I can tell you what happened too, a 32 bit unsigned has a max of 4,294,967,295 <-- seem familiar? Somehow a subtraction lacked a bounds check and it underflowed to be UINT_MAX cents. And for that they should pay out 200,000 times her largest possible theoretical winnings? Sorry, but I'll side with the casino on this one.

Thats why you pay people to test the code.

Sorry, I still side with the winners, the casino is just trying to weasel out of paying what it owes. Mistake or not, they are responsible for it.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[maxwell demon]

So you are saying that TV Tropes ruined your life?

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[True Vox]

AHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Threni]

> Weird. Slashdot lets positive contributors disable ads, but not financial contributors.

Work that logic out to its conclusion.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[DigiShaman]

No, the machine should be the maximum amount advertised. If they one jackpot, and the max advertised winnings is 100 thousand dollars, the player does NOT get 100 billion if that's what the screen says.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[countach]

That can't be the case here since they claim the updated value for the jackpot was supposed to be 11 million. So its not like the amount is out of normal scale.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Kalriath]

I tried and gave up. It doesn't really make sense. If I give Slashdot money, I have to see ads. If I post (and don't give Slashdot money) then I can disable them. The "weird" statement is that as a positive contributor I can disable ads - but as soon as I give Slashdot some money, the checkbox disappears and I have to see ads again.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Kalriath]

That's some interesting reading there - thanks for that.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

I've heard of a couple of jackpots a while back called off because a user entering the coin, or pulling the lever, or even present while someone they knew gambled was under the legal gambling age at the time and the jackpot was called off.

When I was 14, I went on a cruise with my parents. The ship had a casino on board with some slot machines and some of the more popular table games. My sister and I would scrounge for loose quarters or get a couple of quarters from our parents, and just drop them in a machine as we passed through. Nobody ever complained until I won $50 on a pull. After dropping in about $2 worth of quarters prior to that. So it was ok if I was underage and spending money, but if I was winning suddenly it was an issue.

Re:Isn't this the SECOND time ...

[Imrik]

A better analogy would be if you put in $1 and the machine said you put in $0.10. In that case I'm fairly sure you could complain.

Winnings

[RobinEggs]

So the casino isn't responsible for the operating condition of their machines, or for standing behind the results said machines promise customers? Why can the gambling industry get away with something we would never tolerate from power companies, car manufacturers, clothing companies, etc.?

They paid for a chance to win, and the machine told them they'd won. It's like buying a new shirt, finding a giant hole in it, and Banana Republic says "Sorry, the sewing machine was miscalibrated! No, we won't take it back. Maybe you can use it as leg warmers or something!"

Re: Winnings

[Black Parrot]

So the casino isn't responsible for the operating condition of their machines, or for standing behind the results said machines promise customers? Why can the gambling industry get away with something we would never tolerate from power companies, car manufacturers, clothing companies, etc.?

There are *very* strict legal certification and tamper-resistance requirements for gambling machines in the USA. The software is about the quality of what they use on the space shuttle. I'll be astonished if the winners' case wouldn't stand up in court.

Re:Winnings

[cheebie]

The slot machines have very clearly printed disclaimers that all malfunctions void the entire transaction. They will get the original bet returned. That's the equivalent of taking that defective shirt back to the store and getting a refund.

It's disappointing for the people that they didn't win their jackpot, but the rules are presented very clearly beforehand.

Re: Winnings

[Anonymous Coward]

"The software is about the quality of what they use on the space shuttle." That might explain the Challenger and Columbia.

Re:Winnings

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

The slot machines have very clearly printed disclaimers that all malfunctions void the entire transaction. They will get the original bet returned. That's the equivalent of taking that defective shirt back to the store and getting a refund.
So using that logic after I pour several grand into a slot machine and don't win, I can demand that they pull the machine apart and if a defect is found they'll give me my money back? Didn't think so.

Re:Winnings

[OnePumpChump]

Power companies and clothing companies don't break people's legs. Car companies don't do so intentionally.

Re: Winnings

[flex941]

What are you smoking? I want it too! And btw, most of the politicians are not corrupted in any way.

Re:Winnings

[RobinEggs]

They will get the original bet returned.

Yeah, but getting the original bet returned still isn't fair; that was my unspoken point. Why is the defectiveness of the machine only worrisome the one second per year it costs the house money, and fuck all the months and months it's just costing the worthless patrons money? Do they send the machine to the gaming commission post-haste if it seems to be paying out too little? If defects void transactions, why shouldn't every single dollar anyone's put into that machine since it's last clean inspection be returned, or at least forcibly donated to charity?

This bullshit about malfunctions voiding the transaction only protects the casino, and it literally never protects the patrons.

Re:Winnings

[Perp Atuitie]

Oh well then -- that makes it all OK, as long as they said it wasn't their fault if they welsh on their bet. There was no malfunction until the Casino said there was after the fact. These guys are crooks. Period. Colorado should start a criminal fraud investigation and shut them and the certifier down. But it's Colorado. I do thank them for the tip, though. Next IRS return I'll put on a disclaimer that the entire transaction is void if I screw up the arithmetic. Think that'll work?

Re: Winnings

[camperdave]

Those were both hardware errors.

Re:Winnings

[LoverOfJoy]

I agree with you that in this case they should calculate the money made during the faulty period and either return it to customers if possible or donate to charity. They need an incentive to immediately fix a machine that shows any sign it is broken instead of waiting until the break hurts them instead of their customers. But I disagree that the rule NEVER protects the patrons.

I would guess that the majority of the time there's a malfunction (and probably the main reason for the rule) is when a person puts in a quarter, pulls on the lever and nothing happens. Maybe the quarter got jammed, maybe there's a short, who knows. In those cases, the patron can notify management that their machine isn't working and they'll return the person's quarter. If in the process of trying to fix the machine a bunch of quarters fall out the patron is not entitled to them. I think that's fair.

Re:Winnings

[MaskedSlacker]

Didn't think so.

Except the answer to your question was yes...

Re:Winnings

[Maxo-Texas]

Yes, it's dumping money in a hole.

And the couple was just lucky this wasn't 20-30 years ago. They may have never made it home.

Re:Winnings

[BitZtream]

If I get into a car accident, I can't claim it was a malfunction of the driver and walk away. I'm still responsible.

If I shoot someone, I can't claim it was a brain malfunction and walk away, even if it was. I'm still responsible, I maybe given some leeway, but I'll end up being punished.

Why is it that if I put an 'not responsible for accidents' sticker on my car, that I'm still responsible, yet they can say 'not responsible for malfunctions' and not pay, but still collect when there is a malfunction?

Why is it that a 'software glitch' in their favor means I lose, and a software glitch in my favor ... means I lose?

Re: Winnings

[WCguru42]

Those were both hardware errors.

Those were in most part human errors.

Re:Winnings

[Anonymous Coward]

The slot machines have very clearly printed disclaimers that all malfunctions void the entire transaction. They will get the original bet returned. That's the equivalent of taking that defective shirt back to the store and getting a refund.

Only if all previous bets are returned on all machines they have with the same defect to all customers.

Re:Winnings

[evilviper]

The slot machines have very clearly printed disclaimers that all malfunctions void the entire transaction. They will get the original bet returned.

Fine, so long as they refund ALL players that ever put money in that slot machine. You don't get to just pick and choose who gets a refund, and who does not.

Re:Winnings

[Vellmont]

The slot machines have very clearly printed disclaimers that all malfunctions void the entire transaction.

Well gee.. I guess that's that then. Printed disclaimers trump everything, right?

Pssst.. in the real world those disclaimers are mostly their to make people such as yourself believe them so they won't file a lawsuit. Half the time it's not applicable, won't hold up in court, or just a pure fantasy. It might be worth something, and I have no idea whether this case has any merit or not. But the idea that you present that the disclaimer is like a summary judgment is beyond ridiculous.

 

Re:Winnings

[Adrian Lopez]

It's disappointing for the people that they didn't win their jackpot, but the rules are presented very clearly beforehand.

Saying all transactions are void in case of a malfunction does not make things any clearer for the customer. The customer has no knowledge of the machine's inner workings and therefore has absolutely no idea how likely it is for the machine to malfunction. Far from making things clearer, the presence of such a label makes things more uncertain due to the player's inability to figure out the odds in light of the hidden information of the machine's potential for malfunction.

Re:Winnings

[Imrik]

They paid for a chance to win, and the machine told them they'd won.

They paid for a chance to win and they did, receiving an amount of money appropriate to their wager and the level of progression on the machine.

Re:Winnings

[Cylix]

I can tell you clearly how to identify when the machine is malfunctioning. In fact, it rings bells, throws up warning lights and generally behaves quite conversely to normal operation.

ie, when a slot machine is pouring money on the floor it is quite clearly broken. Seriously, why would they put all of those lights on there.

Re: Winnings

[Maxo-Texas]

While a really nasty comment, I don't think this is trollish. Perhaps even a little insightful!

Re:Winnings

[Cylix]

Actually, if you can prove it was a malfunction you are not liable.

I suppose you malfunctioned and picked up the gun, pointed it at the individual and then further accidentally fired 12 shots in the victim. This malfunction was further demonstrated by this unintended reloading of said pistol and thereby firing 12 more rounds. As long as you can convince a jury or judge of this behavior you are well to do. There is no clear yes or no in a trial, but rather probabilities of a specific outcome.

End user agreements are warnings are of course only laudable to a degree. Even then it is really dependent upon regulation and what a jury will believe. Same as the previous post really.

Finally, the "games of chance" is really just an illusion. There are tightly held regulations and very well known outcomes. It is unfortunately very easy for the house to know when this ratio is breached, but not so for the consumer. Unless it is not in favor of the consumer of course.

There hasn't been any real gambling going on for quite some time. Much like control the concept of being a winner in an establishment is very unlikely. Once the illusion is dropped it doesn't really have any appeal. Nearly everybody loses the moment they step into such a place unless you willingly enter only expecting entertainment.

Re:Winnings

[sjames]

As others point out, does it get inspected when you lose big and possibly void the entire transaction or do machine malfunctions simply add up to an undocumented vig?

Re:Winnings

[cynyr]

what about all of those that lost while the machine was malfunctioning? they should be able to get their money back too.

Re:Winnings

[stonewallred]

If you go to a casino for anything other than entertainment, you are screwy. If you go to toss dice, flip cards and have a good time, and only spend a reasonable amount, then it can be a blast. I'll go to a casino about once every couple of years for a week-end. They have a nice hotel, great swimming pools, good food and lots of folks to watch. Room is usually 45-55 a night, well worth it, since it has a large whirlpool tib, big enough for two, three if they are friendly, big TV and plenty of channels, and cheap room service with great food. I take two hundred bucks for gambling. Usually lose 100 playing blackjack, and the rest tossing craps. But I spend several hours doing so over the week-end. I had one weekend where I came home a huge winner. Brought home from my gambling money 204 bucks. Had another weekend where I shot craps, and took the "winnings" and spent almost 10 hours losing them playing 50 bucks a hand blackjack. Came home with about 30 bucks of my 200. Both weekends were great, as were the ones I lost my entire 200 dollar bankroll. I would just like to thank the compulsive and addicted gamblers who make visiting the casinos such a great deal and value.

Re: Winnings

[ultranova]

There are *very* strict legal certification and tamper-resistance requirements for gambling machines in the USA. The software is about the quality of what they use on the space shuttle.

I guess we now know what really happened to Challenger and Columbia.

I'll be astonished if the winners' case wouldn't stand up in court.

I'd be astonished if he who has more gold wouldn't win.

Re:Winnings

[ultranova]

And the couple was just lucky this wasn't 20-30 years ago. They may have never made it home.

This rises a question of just why anyone would ever want to visit a casino, if the best you can hope even with fantastic luck is to lose just money? Seriously, if you literally can't win what's the point?

Re: Winnings

[camperdave]

The Challenger accident, sure. The powers that be decided to launch in sub-normal temperatures. However, nobody thought that a chunk of foam that large would come off of the external tank, and further that it would cause that much damage.

However, the main point I was getting at was that neither was a software error.

Re:Winnings

[noidentity]

They paid for a chance to win, and the machine told them they'd won. It's like buying a new shirt, finding a giant hole in it, and Banana Republic says "Sorry, the sewing machine was miscalibrated! No, we won't take it back. Maybe you can use it as leg warmers or something!"

The machine incorrectly told them they'd won; they hadn't (don't ask me what exactly constitutes winning, though, maybe something in another universe). I'm thinking their criterion is basically "If the machine said you won something, it's malfunctioning, because it's programmed to never say that."

Re:Winnings

[PAjamian]

Yes, but they actually did get the jackpot, just not in the amount that they had thought they won, so the casino did the right thing, imo, considering they could have stuck by the legal wording on the machine and just returned the bet amount.

Re:Winnings

[slashqwerty]

The slot machines have very clearly printed disclaimers that all malfunctions void the entire transaction. They will get the original bet returned.

That reminds me of an old joke:

A city boy, Kenny, moved to the country and bought a donkey from an old farmer for $100. The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.

The next day the farmer drove up and said: "Sorry son, but I have some bad news. The donkey died."

Kenny replied, "Well then, just give me my money back."

The farmer said, "Can't do that. I went and spent it already."

Kenny said, "OK, then just unload the donkey."

The farmer asked, "What ya gonna do with him?"

Kenny: "I'm going to raffle him off."

Farmer: "You can't raffle off a dead donkey!"

Kenny: "Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he is dead."

A month later the farmer met up with Kenny and asked, "What happened with that dead donkey?"

Kenny: "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at $2 a piece and made a profit of $998.00."

Farmer: "Didn't anyone complain?"

Kenny: "Just the guy who won. So I gave him his $2 back."

Kenny grew up and eventually became the chairman of Enron

Enough with the perky summaries

[noidentity]

What's wrong with just writing a dry summary? It's more pleasant to read and lets the facts of the situation speak for themselves:

"MaryAnn and Jim McMahon of Cripple Creek, Colorado were playing at the Wildwood Casino, Tuesday, and hit an $11 million jackpot on a slot machine. Before paying the winnings, the casino turned the machine over to the Colorado Gaming Division for inspection. After deciding that the win was due to a malfunction, the couple was paid only $1627.82 in winnings."

Reading this revised version doesn't make me sick and want to punch someone for trying to be witty and entertaining (that is, annoying and stupid).

Re:Enough with the perky summaries

[AlgorithMan]

The "only" in there is judgemental, throw it out or it's not a dry summary... (disclaimer: I used the figure of speech "hyperbole")

Re:Enough with the perky summaries

[Djoulihen]

What's wrong with just writing a dry summary? It's more pleasant to read and lets the facts of the situation speak for themselves:.

What's wrong with literature ?

Re:Enough with the perky summaries

[owlstead]

It doesn't? They just introduce an error somewhere and *you* don't get paid after winning the jackpot? This makes me sick to the stomach. Let's just turn them over to the Gaming Division each time people loose or win a small amount, shall we? Maybe I was supposed to win the jackpot! Who can tell?

Re:Enough with the perky summaries

[painandgreed]

What's wrong with just writing a dry summary?

Dry summaries don't get hits, click throughs, and readers. Nobody wants to read a dry summary and if it had one, you'd be asking why it was even posted. Why do you think we have so many Apple stories here lately. While I do think that they are relevant, even the people who are sick of them are reading and posting. If they're reading them, they must want them. Topics with lots of posts will get listed and if sensational headlines will get even more readers. It's a fact of news older than journalism.

Re:Enough with the perky summaries

[MaskedSlacker]

Are you calling /. summaries literature? There's a difference between artfully breaking the rules of sense to achieve and intended effect, and breaking them because you're kdawson.

Re:Enough with the perky summaries

[maxume]

Droughts lead to fires!

Re:Enough with the perky summaries

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

What's wrong with just writing a dry summary? It's more pleasant to read and lets the facts of the situation speak for themselves:

"MaryAnn and Jim McMahon of Cripple Creek, Colorado were playing at the Wildwood Casino, Tuesday, and hit an $11 million jackpot on a slot machine. Before paying the winnings, the casino turned the machine over to the Colorado Gaming Division for inspection. After deciding that the win was due to a malfunction, the couple was paid only $1627.82 in winnings."

Reading this revised version doesn't make me sick and want to punch someone for trying to be witty and entertaining (that is, annoying and stupid).

You know what this summary is missing? Exclamation points! Exclamation points — and m-dashes. Perhaps a smidge of sarcasm, and an acronym! Here, let me fix this for you:

"MaryAnn and Jim McMahon — of Cripple Creek, Colorado — were playing at the Wildwood Casino on Tuesday, and hit an $11 million jackpot on a slot machine! Before paying the winnings, the casino turned the machine over to the Colorado Gaming Division (CGD) for inspection. After the CGD determined that the win was due to a "malfunction", the couple was paid only $1627.82 in winnings. :("

Also, I threw in a frowny face. Now it's dry - and yet somehow exciting and suspense-filled! A

Re:Enough with the perky summaries

[noidentity]

I sort of agree, but here "only" is referring to the fact that 1627.82 is less than 11000000.00. By adding that word, the reader is alerted to the fact that this is less than some earlier amount mentioned, adding redundant information aid in error detection.

Re:Enough with the perky summaries

[noidentity]

Learn quantum mechanics before you use a computer that operates on its principles. That's what your criticism amounts to. I contend that the style of writing is at a higher level and more important than fine points of grammar.

Re:Enough with the perky summaries

[Zontar The Mindless]

I contend that the style of writing is at a higher level and more important than fine points of grammar.

Having made my living for most of the last 20 years as a journalist, author, and editor, I contend that you should leave such matters to the pros.

Re:Enough with the perky summaries

[Zontar The Mindless]

This has nothing to do with "enjoyment" or "levels".

It does have quite a lot to do with saying what you actuially mean, and not expecting the reader to second-guess you.

Re:Enough with the perky summaries

[True Vox]

Pfft. Check this out - three ways to get your lit on:

"MeryUnn und Jeem McMehun ooff Creepple-a Creek, Culuredu vere-a pleyeeng et zee Veeldvuud Ceseenu, Tooesdey, und heet un $11 meelliun jeckput oon a slut mecheene-a. Beffure-a peyeeng zee veennings, zee ceseenu toorned zee mecheene-a oofer tu zee Culuredu Gemeeng Deefisiun fur inspecshun. Effter deceeding thet zee veen ves dooe-a tu a melffooncshun, zee cuoople-a ves peeed oonly $1627.82 in veennings."

"MaryAnn and Bo-Jangles McMahon uh Cripple Creek, Colo'ado wuz playin' at da damn Wildwood Casino, Tuesday, and hit an $11 million Buckwheatpot on some slot machine. What it is, Mama! Befo'e payin' de winnin's, de casino turned da damn machine ova' to de Colo'ado Gamin' Division fo' inspecshun. Afta' decidin' dat da damn win wuz due t'a malfuncshun, de codownle wuz paid only $1627.82 in winnin's."

"MaryAnn and Jim McMahon of Cripple Creek, like, Colorado were playin' at thuh Wildwood Casino, man, Tuesday, like, wow, and hit an $11 million jackpot on a slot machine. Before payin' thuh winnin's, like, wow, the casino turned thuh machine over to thuh Colorado Gamin' Division for inspection. After decidin' that thuh win was due to a malfunction, fer shure, the couple was paid only $1627.82 in winnin's."

Yeah, that's right - I went there!

Not winning?

[Fuzzums]

Have the machine inspected by your local independent hacker.
He'll find a glitch. Aha! You should have won 11.000.000.000!

No need to check the code...

[nunojsilva]

So now casinos just need something which they say that works in a way and if it works another way they don't pay the announced prize but what they say it should be (of course it's what the machine should have shown, but how do you know there really was a mistake?).

It used to be a good idea to check if a machine does what it is intended for, but this is supporting a I-don't-care behavior, because casinos can get rid of programming/coding errors by sending machines to some inspection *after* the error gets visible, and they aren't held responsible for it.

In fact, I wonder if I could just grab a machine and to the same kind of inspection on it to see if the 0 prize was really the intended one - or if the error makes the house win money noone looks at it?

I suppose this falls in some kind of breach of contract?

Re:No need to check the code...

[hedwards]

Unlikely, unless the machine listed the $11 million figure, I doubt that they have to pay it out. It's piss poor engineering if the "reset value" is shown to the person playing the machine. The house cheat enough as it is, if they're presenting the gambler with a claim of that much money, then they damn well better pay out.

Re:No need to check the code...

[Local ID10T]

It's only an error if it costs the house money.

Re:No need to check the code...

[Turzyx]

This is a ridiculous situation. Although harder to argue, a casino could claim that a card shuffling machine malfunctioned thus dealing a winning hand to a player by accident, or that a roulette table wasn't greased correctly so delivered the ball to the wrong pocket.

If it was me, I would get a court to subpoena the machine, get the error independently verified, and while they're at it, verify the winning odds the casino claim.

Oh, come on

[mbone]

Look, if they found evidence of fraud or tampering, throw the book at them. Otherwise, them's the breaks - pay the couple.

The casino deserves to be pilloried and lose their gaming license over this. It's bad enough you can be ejected or even banned for being too good at playing something. Now, it seems that they are extending this to games of chance. This seems a little too pat, as the casinos could avoid ever paying out anything by simply making sure that their slots always have some technical flaws.

Re:Oh, come on

[synaptic]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jUBbCgMWmE

Re:Oh, come on

[DNS-and-BIND]

Every slot machine in America has the following text written on the front: "Machine Malfunction Voids all Plays and Pays". This google search shows many stories such as the one in the title.

This forum discussion by casino workers is also informative.

Re:Oh, come on

[Martin Blank]

The number of people who are removed from the floor for being "too good" is very, very small. The justification for it is the possibility that the person is cheating, but that the casino hasn't figured out how. Lengthy winning streaks are good for the casino to a point, because they get other people enthusiastic that they might be able to pull off the same thing. Eventually, they become a bad thing because people are paying too much attention to it and not gambling, or the casino simply is losing too much money. It is technically possible that the gambler could go on a nine-hour winning streak, but it is at the same time very improbable.

Many of those who were kicked out were found later to have been likely cheaters, sometimes because the casino was able to figure out their scheme, often because they got busted at some later point at another casino. The odds of multiple long winning streaks being the result of cheating is much greater than the odds of actually achieving such streaks.

Re:Oh, come on

[stonewallred]

I got on the craps table and with a 5 dollar starting bet, made enough to spend 9 hours giving it all back on the 50 dollar a hand blackjack table. Streaks happen, but the odds are slim. And I made most of my "winnings" without touching the dice.

FTFA...

[phillymjs]

"MaryAnn and Jim McMahon thought their money troubles were over when they hit an $11 million jackpot at a Cripple Creek casino Tuesday. It turns out they were wrong."

Maybe it's just how I was raised, but the first thing I thought upon reading that was, "If you have 'money troubles' then why the fuck are you blowing what money you DO have in a casino, you assholes??? "

~Philly

Re:FTFA...

[binarylarry]

Way to be a judgmental asshole.

I think they meant "money troubles" in that they needed to have money to live on, whereas with 11 million dollars they wouldn't.

Lighten the fuck up.

Re:FTFA...

[pete6677]

This kind of thinking is exactly why people like this have money problems to begin with. Rather than proper financial planning, they'd rather hold out for "something big" which never quite materializes. Its a mindset of wishful thinking.

Re:FTFA...

[ChromeAeonium]

As one of my finance professors once told me, gambling (lotteries and casinos) is a tax on desperation and gullibility.

Re:FTFA...

[v1]

gambling is a form of entertainment. Even people with "money problems" (and they didn't discuss the magnitude, heck most people would say they have "money problems" of some sort) need entertainment. Gambling, done properly, can be a reasonably cheap form of entertainment. Particularly quarter slots.

But a previous poster was onto something when they said the previous players that day deserved a refund since they were also playing on a 'defective' machine that could have been meant to give out more than it did to them. "can't have it both ways" was the comment, spot on.

Taken another way, why can't *I* demand they take the machine to get inspected if I play it all day and don't win as much as I think I should have? If they can have it checked for faults not in their favor, and have them be binding, then so can I. You can't adjust the amount of review based on the outcome, which is exactly what they are doing here. It'd be like calling the opposing team for a review every time the refs made a call against you, but never when they made a call in your favor. In those cases both sides have equal power to call review. The same should apply here also.

Re:FTFA...

[Kjella]

If they really have money trouble I agree. Personally I suspect the journalist was trying to say was that they'd never have to trouble themselves with money ever again, as in don't need to concern themselves with it. He's trying to be dramatic and say it in as few words as possible, if it had said "their money worries were over" I'd certainly not react, most live within a budget and "worry" about what they can afford. With $11M in the bank you can buy almost anything you want without worrying. Let me just put it this way, I've seen how mangled theings get going from reality to article, and this would be somewhere around 3/10 on that scale.

Re:FTFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

I too, need profanity to get my points across.

Dick

Re:FTFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

You do have equal power. Going from the article, the machine was obviously busted and was paying several orders of magnitude more on a jackpot than it should have. This isn't a matter of "nuh-uh, we offer this jackpot, but you didn't really hit it" -- it's "wait, how the hell did you win $11 million on a machine whose progressive pays in the $1500 range?" That's a pretty clear indication of malfunction.

For your part, if you win something on a slot machine and it pays you 20 credits and the paytable says you're supposed to get 30, or if you press the bet 1 credit button and it bets 5, then you're within your rights to demand an inspection, and there really is stuff built into the machine for handing that procedure.

Re:FTFA...

[EricX2]

Needing to have money to live on is not called "money troubles", it's called living in the normal world. "Money troubles" would mean no job, or big debt... or compulsive gambler.

Re:FTFA...

[binarylarry]

If that's the case, the machines should say "You *might* have won X, please go check with the management to ensure this unit is functioning properly."

Truth in advertising and all that.

Re:FTFA...

[IICV]

Maybe it's just how I was raised, but the first thing I thought upon reading that was, "If you have 'money troubles' then why the fuck are you blowing what money you DO have in a casino, you assholes??? "

Here's how it goes: I still need to work for a living. That means I have money troubles. Doesn't matter if I have a nice apartment, eat well, and generally buy whatever game's on sale over the weekend even though I'll never play it since I'm too busy during the week; I've still got money troubles until I don't need to work for a living any more.

Re:FTFA...

[cynyr]

if you can even get 1% yearly in a savings account for 11 mil, you make 110,000 a year in interest. Thats quite a bit to live comfortably on. I know i could. As a side bonus if you budget well and spend less, say 80,000 a year, you would have 30,000 a year added for additional interest the next year. I would be willing to bet that you can safely do better than 1% compounded yearly. even after i paid all my bills bought 2 new cars(ones i would actually drive) i'd verly likely have 9 million or so left over to save. After pulling college fund out for my 2 kids i'd still have 7-8 million left easily, say 3% interest per year, on the remaining 7million, is 210,000 a year. I bet i can manage to live on that for the rest of my life.

So by "moeny troubles" I bet they meant no need to work anymore and bills will still get paid.

Re:FTFA...

[nacturation]

I too, need profanity to get my points across.

Dick

Thanks for letting us know, Richard.

Re:FTFA...

[Myopic]

Right. The question is whether the benefits of gambling (entertainment) outweigh the risks (addiction, destitution, crime). From where I'm standing as a non-gambler, the answer is yes, the benefits outweigh the risks.

I wouldn't want it to be legal everywhere in the country because I don't actually like having slot machines everywhere I look (which is the case in places where it is legal); but I don't mind having it legal in a couple states plus a couple other places.

Re:FTFA...

[v1]

I wouldn't want it to be legal everywhere in the country because I don't actually like having slot machines everywhere I look (which is the case in places where it is legal); but I don't mind having it legal in a couple states plus a couple other places.

Here in Iowa, there's a state run lottery and scratch ticket and soforth, and yes, every bar and most every kind of store has at least one of these machines in it. I don't see that as a bad thing. I favor the saying, "Support the Lottery, it's a tax on people who are bad at math". But there's the small entertainment aspect. You can't really expect that anywhere near 100% of the people that play the lotto etc are expecting to "win big". Most are happy with winning small from time to time while dreaming about winning big. That's really how the system should work. It's only when people are playing because they need to win that problems set in.

I don't even count "gambling addiction" because a person can become addicted to anything, there's no reason to beat up on gambling in specific because of addiction, it doesn't even count in my book any more than being addicted to stamp collecting. It's about as productive, and can be as costly. No excuse to think about banning stamp collecting.

Incentive to fix the machine?

[dr2chase]

Seems to me, that if the casinos had to pay out these jackpots, that the machines might get fixed.

Adding to the irony, when I clicked the link to TFA, it popped up a flashing box declaring that I am the 1e6th visitor, I am a winner, I have won a "FREE*" "WALMART GIFT CARD!!" "*see offer details". In the words of the great Ashley Morris, FYYFF. We really ought to hold corporations accountable for their advertising claims, and any disclaimers in a smaller (or non-contrasting, or scrolled far to the bottom) font do not count.

Re:Incentive to fix the machine?

[Myopic]

Let me be the first of many to recommend AdBlock Plus.

The other day somebody mentioned in conversation how Facebook is an ad-supported site. Although that fact is obvious, it took me a moment of thinking about it to realize why the heck I personally had never seen an ad on Facebook.

And What Recourse Do Players Have?

[Azarael]

Seriously, how often is it the case that machines pay out *LESS* than they are meant to. We'll never know and I don't anyone in the industry is looking very hard to find out. Code and electronics aren't perfect, but that isn't the player's fault. Perhaps players cannot be paid out in full in all cases, but the awarded prize shouldn't be miniscule.

Re:And What Recourse Do Players Have?

[Anonymous Coward]

The industry works very hard to find out, as it turns out. Every slot machine ships with what's called a PAR sheet -- this lists the actual odds of each pay for the machine, along with 95% confidence intervals on payout for various amounts of play. The casino will then have its slot technicians verify that the machines are paying exactly what they expect. There are legal reasons why they have to do this, but the self-interested incentive for the casino to do this is because they do not usually like to run their machines as tight as the law allows, because players can and will notice and you'll end up losing $20 over the course of 20 minutes when you could have entertained them with a few wins and wound up winning $100 over the course of an evening. A casino is going to be very, very upset if their machines aren't holding PAR due to a defect in the machine, regardless of the direction of error.

Funny story about how sensitive players are to changes in payback: one time, a casino wanted to loosen up their machines, ie. make them pay back more, in order to build up a more loyal following. So they have all their vendors reset the machines with more generous paytables. Their regular players freaked out and started complaining. They could tell that the casino changed the math, but couldn't tell for sure that the math was now more in their favor. They ended up having to go back to tighter math to keep their existing loyal players.

This is a tough spot for the casino. They don't make the machines, and they certainly don't bankroll 7-figure jackpots -- in this case, in sounds like a straight-up glitch that a number that large was ever displayed, but even when it's intentional, they're not the ones on the hook to pay the jackpot when it hits. They buy them from companies like IGT (the Microsoft of the casino gaming world, basically) that are in turn required to submit them for fairly rigorous testing and review from outfits like GLI which ensure regulatory compliance and just that the machine really works as advertised. Still, IGT doesn't have the pissed off customer that thinks they won $11 million when the machine is only holding enough money to fund $1627.82 -- I used to work at a smaller outfit that did bonus features on games. We installed a pretty ambitious project for us, and on our first night running in this brand-new casino, we had an issue happen where due to a ridiculously subtle glitch, our device gave away one luxury car as designed, and then on the very next play, gave away another. Understandably, the casino guys were pretty upset with us, and we ended up paying for the second car.

The article here is really badly written. The spokesperson is quoted as saying that the $11 million was the reset value, but I don't understand how a jackpot is going to be designed to reset from a hit at $1627 to $11 million. Usually, a progressive or mystery jackpot will be "reset" to some amount that a casino will pay -- like $1000 -- and then a portion of every wager will be tossed into a pool of money that's added to that reset value. I'd be interested to know 1) what machine this was, and 2) when did it first display $11 million?

Re:And What Recourse Do Players Have?

[Cylix]

I'm surprised the second car was awarded, but being a second night of opening I can understand not contesting it.

The horrible aspect of this is there is tons of information regarding games of chance. Yet, it's all been overlooked in favor of more knee jerk responses.

Regardless, the aspect of setting up that environment seems like it could be fun. Not sure I would guarantee my work against the likes of failure when people keep touching it.

Re:And What Recourse Do Players Have?

[Anonymous Coward]

submit them for fairly rigorous testing and review from outfits like GLI

GLI is paid for their certifications by the manufacturers. They can and are bullied by the manufacturers to permit exceptions on some compliance issues.

One area where there isn't much wiggle room is math. They verify the math rigorously under lab conditions. However, they don't really audit code quality. If some glaring bug fails to appear during GLI's testing process it will end up in the field and produce yet another news story about Bob the slot player NOT collecting his 13 zillion dollars if only because there are legally mandated limits on the size of awards.

Re:And What Recourse Do Players Have?

[Myopic]

Yeah, I can see both arguments, but in the end I think if a machine displays a payout amount, the casino should be obligated to pay that amount. If it is a machine error, then the casino has a valid tort against the distributor of the faulty machine, or the testing company, or somebody; but the consumer shouldn't be on the hook.

I'm curious about the "ridiculously subtle glitch". I bet I'm not the only person on Slashdot who would be interested in any details you can remember.

Mitch Hedberg called this one

[PKFC]

"I saw a billboard for the lottery. It said, "Estimated lottery jackpot 55 million dollars." I did not know that was estimated. That would suck if you won and they said, "Oh, we were off by two zeroes. We estimate that you are angry!""

Re:Mitch Hedberg called this one

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I be angry at winning 5.5 billion dollars?

Re:Mitch Hedberg called this one

[wygit]

It's "estimated" because the lottery winnings are a percentage of all tickets sold, and they haven't yet sold all the tickets for the next lottery.
They usually close the sales 15 minutes before the drawing.

Re:Mitch Hedberg called this one

[raynet]

That sounds kinda silly way to do lottery. Here the pot is known in advance cause it consist only of the previous weeks lottery tickets. Also the pot is paid full to the winners, not over 20 years or so.

Re:Mitch Hedberg called this one

[JamesP]

Why would I be angry at winning 5.5 billion dollars?

Angry about what the IRS asks on it.

Re:Mitch Hedberg called this one

[Em Ellel]

"I saw a billboard for the lottery. It said, "Estimated lottery jackpot 55 million dollars." I did not know that was estimated. That would suck if you won and they said, "Oh, we were off by two zeroes. We estimate that you are angry!""

FYI, Most Lotto jackpots are dependent on the number of tickets sold, so "Estimated" numbers are used until ticket sales are stopped as they cannot know in advance number of tickets sold.

-Em

Re:Mitch Hedberg called this one

[fotbr]

You know, if I won $5,500,000,000 I actually wouldn't mind paying the IRS their 50%. Or even 75%. I'd still be left with more money than I could realistically spend.

Re:Mitch Hedberg called this one

[davew666]

i think he meant $0055 million

Re:Mitch Hedberg called this one

[Nesman64]

Federal tax is about 60% of the gross. State tax is the other 60%.

What about when it tells you that you lost?

[LoudMusic]

What about when it tells me I lost? I'd like to have it examined because maybe I should have won $11M.

Don't play slots - they're a waste of time anyway. Stick to the tables.

Let the market decide.

[jms]

Let's see if the Wildwood Casino experiences a drop in customers. There's no way in hell I would play the slots there.

Turnabout

[LoverOfJoy]

So if the couple had lost, could they have requested the machine be inspected by the Colorado Gaming Division and gotten the $1627.82?

Casino's blaim bugs all the time. Its a scam!

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

A woman recently won like 42 million in a jackpot and they refused to pay her saying it was a bug.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/colorado-42-mil-jackpot-winner-jack/story?id=10235836

A quick google shows that this happens all the time, whenever someone wins a large number its always blaimed on a bug, and for some magical reason the winners do not get paid.

The casino's are ripping winners off.

Re:Casino's blaim bugs all the time. Its a scam!

[proverbialcow]

What's more, the $42 million dollar win-that-was-a-glitch also happened in Colorado.

Re:Casino's blaim bugs all the time. Its a scam!

[CaroKann]

Colorado sounds like a bad place to gamble. Gamblers should just stick to Nevada.

Re:Casino's blaim bugs all the time. Its a scam!

[Delusion_]

The above post paid for by the Nevada Gaming Control Board.

Re:Casino's blaim bugs all the time. Its a scam!

[ral315]

As has probably already been stated, that's 4.2 billion pennies - i.e. an integer overflow. I agree that slot machines shouldn't have these issues, but by the same token, if a machine whose posted top prize is, say, $10,000 says that I won $42 million, I would expect that there's an error. Similarly, if my bank has a computer error and tells me that I have an extra $1 million in my account, I wouldn't expect them to honor the error.

Re:Casino's blaim bugs all the time. Its a scam!

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

If my bank account suddely told me I had that much money, I'd take it out and put it in an Euro bank immediately.

Something similar happened in Argentina

[VuduZen]

I live in Argentina and about two or three years ago a woman won like 3 million Argentinian Pesos in slot machine. The casino claimed it was a fault of the machine. They went to court and the woman won because it didnt matter if it was a machine error, she did not cheat or anything. So whatever the problem was, it had nothing to do with the woman. She played, she won, she should receive her prize. The real problem was between the casino and the company they bought the slot machine from. So the woman was left out of the equation.

Re:Something similar happened in Argentina

[Renraku]

United States corporations work on extortion. The legal system favors corporations far too much to have a fair chance in court. If you bring suit against a large company and lose you'll probably have to pay their legal fees too, and 80% of the citizens here could not ever hope to afford those kinds of expenses. The result is that not many people file suit, and most of the ones that do are just plain crazy and have no qualms with being a million or more in debt for the rest of their lives.

This is EXACTLY THE SAME as saying, "Sorry, no refund on your car. The welding machine messed up and welded the doors shut. We aren't responsible for what our machines do." and then saying, "We sent this to our legal department and they agree that it wasn't our fault the welding machine messed up so we don't have to pay you."

Re:Something similar happened in Argentina

[fnj]

Congratulations for living in a country that does not have a corrupt legal system. Wish I could say the same.

Re:Something similar happened in Argentina

[Anonymous Coward]

+5 funny please!

I'm Argentinian, and here there isn't less corruption than in the US, perhaps worse in some areas like environmental and health regulations. There's a reason big corps put highly inefficient and contaminant factories in the third world, their legal systems suck, And governments even gladly pay them subsidies for staying here. How can they refuse that?

Pay them

[DaMattster]

Tough shit on the casino, pay them! Don't operate a casino and the scream robbery when someone eventually wins! There ain't no bug!

Re:Pay them

[JamesP]

Tough shit on the casino, pay them! Don't operate a casino and the scream robbery when someone eventually wins! There ain't no bug!

You're right, it's probably a feature

If they aren't going to pay out...

[Anonymous Coward]

...maybe they should just open a bank.

Upon further investigation...

[Ozlanthos]

After pissing all over the message boards about how unjust this action was, I investigated further. To my dismay, it turns out that this is a popular practice among casinos. Apparently one of the problems with going to digital slots is that ANYTIME there is a huge win that the casino doesn't want to pay out on, they cop this "it was a glitch" excuse! I was given the impression that this is happening EVERYWHERE!!! I think it is time that we implement some sort of law or gaming regulation that states that if someone wins that they are ENTITLED TO THE FULL SUM DISPLAYED on the screen! The only exception would be that if the casino can prove that the win was "artificially" created/induced by the player via some "device" designed specifically to fuddle the machine. The penalty for not paying out the sum within 24 hours would be that the casino would be immediately CLOSED and their gaming license REVOKED for a full calendar year, or until the full sum was paid to the player! If you can't stand to lose, don't play the game....The same should apply to the casinos!

-Oz

Re:Upon further investigation...

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

you clearly aren't familiar with the Nevada Gaming Commission rules then.

Smaller places cap progressive payouts, and larger places are big enough that millions in a single payout aren't going to break things.

Re:Upon further investigation...

[Ozlanthos]

Apparently they don't apply to casinos in other states... And to their credit, I hadn't seen anything to indicate that this was an issue in Vegas. As for caps, I am not against them, but then again, if there is a cap in place, maybe the machines should be programmed not to exceed them (if they aren't already).

-Oz

they should sue the fuck out of the Casino.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

and the gaming board.

being a progressive jackpot, it probably had a big lighted board showing the prize. If they didn't realize it should've been reset, that's their fault. Pay the damn payout.

Winners?

[Petersko]

"The casino's are ripping winners off."

I'm reluctant to classify slots players as "winners". When I look at slot machines I see rats in cages desperately pushing the dispenser in the hopes of getting a food pill. Soemetimes they get a food pill, but more often a little blade comes out and cuts off a piece of the rat.

But we can soften it a bit... they're "people who were awarded a slot machine jackpot". ... or, at least were supposed to be awarded one...

Re:Winners?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, but if the 'experimenter' snatches back the food pill, then he's just a dick.

"There's more to science than being cruel to animals, but frankly it's the part I like best." (from a Dilbert comic)

Re:That's why it's called gambling

[Darkness404]

To put it in more accurate terms, this would be like those self-check outs saying that a $100 item was $1 and paying for it without tampering/stealing and then the store trying to retroactively get out of the agreement. Just because your employee put in the wrong price doesn't mean I shouldn't pay that lower price.

These days playing a slot machine is like playing with a random number generator. If your generator is broken and gives the winning amount, pay it. You should have made a better RNG.

Maybe?

[goobenet]

Maybe the machines were sold to the Casino under the guarantee that the machines would *NEVER* hit a jackpot, which is why the machine was handed over to the gaming commission in the first place, that's the bug!

Re: That's why it's called gambling

[Black Parrot]

Every slot machine has a "Malfunction voids all pays" warning.

Actually, ever slot machine in the USA has a sticker stating that it is certified. Next time you're in a casino, look for a paper sticker on the side or lower front of the machine.

If a casino is running uncertified machines, there's probably a jail cell waiting for their designated fall guy.

there are strict Illegal certs on them also

[RobertLTux]

Back In the day a miscalibrated machine could get somebodies legs/arms/neck broken

Re:Buggy title, should be:

[The_Wilschon]

Well, since Nuuk has certified that the title is buggy, that absolves me from any obligation to RTFA, right?

Re:I'm calling bs

[canajin56]

No, you're misunderstanding. They didn't get their prize revoked because the machine said "Win" when it should have said "Lose". They lost the money because it's one of those progressive machines that has a sign on it that says what the current total is. If you win, you get some percent of the current jackpot, which is itself a percent of the total money people have been betting. And, if you hit the jackpot, you get whatever the sign says.

So, they saw a machine that says "11,000,000" on it, they won, and the casino is saying "Sucks to be you, that was a typo, it should have said eleven hundred not eleven million, here's your money now fuck off". Nobody was losing anything, because the error was that it the jackpot wasn't being computer properly; either it wasn't being decremented when people won, or it was incrementing incorrectly when people were playing.

Security Only As Good As Physical Access Control

[cmholm]

twistedsymphony hints at a major point: the McMahons or a trusted representative didn't retain control of or an eyeball on the device between the gaming floor and the offices of the Colorado Gaming Division.

Insurance

[adbge]

Shouldn't the casino have some kind of insurance against this type of thing? Say, they have to pay out, but the insurance covers it since the machine was faulty. I suppose the manufacturer is probably ultimately responsible, so perhaps the manufacturers insurance should cover it.

At any rate, it doesn't seem very okay that the manufacturer can just ship faulty machines and not be held accountable.

Re:Insurance

[owlstead]

Lets see: there is a casino operating on the fact that you pay good money to have a relatively small change of winning a lot. For this to work you need to have a good stock pile of cash to pay out. Now compare this on how insurances work. Right. So all they are doing is shifting the profits to the insurance company.

As for the manufacturer: they will happily send a new machine over to the casino, because I don't doubt that that's their limit of responsibility. And rightly so, because they don't have any influence over the slot machine once it is installed. Of course, the bad press will certainly alert casino's and they will probably not buy too many new ones from them. IF they screwed up, they probably get what's coming to them.

Unfortunately, the casino is not getting what coming to them, they are let off the hook.

Why do errors end up as big numbers? is the slot d

[Joe The Dragon]

Why do errors end up as big numbers?

Is the slot denomination being changed in error so it be coming something like $0.01 but the rest of the game is in $1 or higher mode?

RNG out put ending up in the win memory location?

game code overflows?

hackers in the network?

free spins paying the jackpot on each spin so you go over the games max payout for 1 bet?

This is BS.

[TavisJohn]

The casino is responsible for the maintenance of their gear. If their equipment is out of order, and it is still in operation, then they should be forced to pay out what the machine states.
If the casino had done regular checks of their equipment, then this would have come up during one of those checks, and the casino would not have had this issue.

I think the casino should have to pay all $11 million. They should not be allowed to claim later, 'Well the machine has a small problem..."

Hell for all we know the casino offered the company that did the inspection a couple million to "Find a problem".

UK fruit machines they are not the same as US game

[Joe The Dragon]

UK fruit machines they are not the same as US game as they pay out to a target % and do cheat you on high / low and other bonus games.

http://www.fairplay-campaign.co.uk/fruit/

Why does anyone play slots?

[/dev/trash]

Seems boring to sit there and pump quarters into a machine for 8 hours and then go home with -20 in your pocket. Table games!

Foxes watching the hen house

[tdc_vga]

There seems to be a slight conflict of interest here (slight might be the wrong word). Honestly, isn't this encouraging the companies producing these machines to intentionally include bugs in their code? Your code is filled with bugs, we'd like to procure your services:

Casino: Someone won the jackpot!
Game Producer: What machine revision?
Casino: Money Sucker R12
Game Producer: No problem, checkout line 112 -- I think you'll find something you like...

Given that these jackpots only occur once every couple of years, it wouldn't be that big of a problem. Plus, everyone here knows that no code is perfect. The people won, give them their money...

Ridiculous

[flimflammer]

I don't think they should be able void the prize even if it were a mistake from the machine. They played legitimately. If the prize can actually get that high, then they should have to honor it. How many times do you think the players are losing out to these errors in favor of the Casinos? What is their recourse to get their money back that they lost due to errors? There is none. Why should there be for the Casino?

If the machine couldn't get that high to begin with then I can see them getting out of it, but if it is a number that's fair game, they should have to honor it.

Re:Ridiculous

[Myopic]

Yeah, of course, any right-thinking person would agree with you; I sure as hell do. I'm sure 98% of citizens would agree with you. But what the heck are 98% of citizens supposed to do to affect the gambling laws? Alas, there is nothing we can do.

The stacker game is rigged and if has good stuff i

[Joe The Dragon]

The stacker game is rigged and if has good stuff in it I will wait for $ in it to be at the level of the people who are running it set the price $ to Before letting you have a chance at winning it.

Re:That's why it's called gambling

[Manos_Of_Fate]

Even that analogy is flawed, because it could be argued that you should have known that something that would normally be priced $100 would never be that cheap. With the slot machine, how are you supposed to know when it's not working correctly?

As I understand it ...

[BitZtream]

This isn't how it works in Vegas.

A win shown on the machine is a win, regardless of bug, and they have to pay out.

Why? Because the bugs go both ways, sometimes they are in favor or the casino, sometimes they are in favor of the player. I mean real bugs, not cheating casinos.

I certainly could be wrong, but it was always my understanding that in most gambling states they have to pay what the machine says they have to pay unless the PLAYER cheated by doing something like holding a magnet (not that it would work) up at the right time.

I know for a fact that most gambling states have laws that require the payout odds to be known and fixed, not adjustable on the fly. I.E. Slot machines have to pay X percentage of their winnings back out over a specific period of time and that the odds are posted for everyone to see.

Either way, I've yet to gamble and not come out ahead, but thats mostly because I play nickel slots and make sure I drink more than I spend, though I have actually came out with more money than I've lost so far, my plan is only to drink more than I spend. Take in one $100 bill and leave when you are completely sloshed or broke AND completely sloshed :) And remember to tip the waitresses/bartenders a little each and every drink so they don't water them down :)

Re:As I understand it ...

[Myopic]

Are you sure that those are the rules in Vegas? Why do you think so? Do you have special knowledge, like you live there or gamble there a lot or work in the gambling industry?

(This is not facetious. I have no idea, I would just imaging that Vegas would be equally corrupt as other places.)

Re:As I understand it ...

[fotbr]

Hey, someone with the same gambling method I use, although I generally start with $20 and the penny slot machines.

Cheaper to play and lose at the penny slots than it is to pay at the bars in Vegas.

Wow, Litigation Lotto!

[istartedi]

OK, it's not lotto, but close enough. The phrase "litigation lotto" becomes almost literal. Place your bets. Round and round, and round the lawyers spin. Where they stop, nobody knows... because any settlement for emotional distress will probably be kept quiet.

Re:That's why it's called gambling

[uncqual]

I think the self-checkout case is a quite different case. In that case, if the store catches it, they simply inform you that the item is $100 instead of $1 and you can then decide to hand the store $99 and take the item or you can hand them the item and request your $1 back. Also, grocery store checkouts are not intended to be a "gamble" - they are intended to be an exchange of goods for money at some market value.

So, while I'm okay with a grocery store correcting their error as long as you can respond "Rollback Transaction", I think the casinos who evaluate, buy, maintain, and operate the machines should have to payout when those machines report an erroneous win. This is especially true if the payout is not outside an advertised or reasonable expectation range -- for example, if the machine has a big sign saying "Max Payout $1000" and the machine pays out $1M in error, it's probably reasonable to limit the win to $1000 (even if the machine should have paid nothing on that particular play) as that was the maximum reasonable expectation of the consumer.

Some gambling table errors are a bit different. If a dealer inadvertently pays out too much and the video clearly shows that the cards or dice didn't support that payout, then that error should be correctable in most cases if done quickly before the patron has relied and acted on the win - for example, before the next play. The difference is that in these cases if the dealer underpaid or overpaid the player can easily detect it.

It also seems to make good business sense to payout even if it was an error. How much less likely are gamblers to use the machines if they know that wins are sometimes blamed on errors and rolled back (while, of course, patron losses are not routinely examined to make sure they were not in error)?

Of course, I didn't RTFA and, as an informed consumer, I know the /. summary is untrustworthy and almost certainly wrong in several respects. Therefore I have no idea if the casino "should" have paid out in this case.

Simple trick to win at roulettes

[AlgorithMan]

Do you want to know how to win at roulettes? it's really simple: open up a casino...

Re:Simple trick to win at roulettes

[JamesP]

What I find surprising is that at some cassinos they use a 'fake roulette' machine, that is, a roulette on the computer

I would never play such machine, never. If I want to play the roulette I want a real ball spinning there goddamit!

Best thing they can do:

[Aaden42]

Stand on the street corner, *just* off the casino's property on the public sidewalk / shoulder of the road / etc. Hold a huge sign stating nothing but the facts of the case: We played the slots, the machine said we won big, the casino claimed technical difficulties and reneged on the large payout for a comparatively minuscule one. Stand there quietly with the sign, don't harass anyone approaching the casino, and only respond purely factually to any questions that any would-be patrons or other passers by might ask. Embelish nothing; use simple, unemotional, declarative statements. Say nothing that could vaguely be interpreted as opinion or that would be impossible to verify.

Say nothing untrue, nothing emotionally charged, stay *off* the casino's property, and do nothing to block anyone or prevent them from going about their business as they see fit.

See how long that takes to get at the very least a settlement offer. I'm guessing the casino manager would have legal on the phone in under 10 minutes and an offer made in under an hour. Might have to sweat them a little longer to hold out for a *reasonable* offer, but they'd definitely walk away a fair bit richer than the insult the casino gave them.

Re:Best thing they can do:

[fnj]

Yeah, right. Do that and you're not going to get a settlement offer. You'll have a pair of brass knuckles walk up to you and get beaten to within an inch of your life. Or if you're unlikely you'll get a 45 slug in your kneecap.

Re:Best thing they can do:

[Bruha]

There is not room on cripple creek's sidewalks for a large sign, better off wearing a tshirt.

Vegas pays up when there is a mistake, these little places seem to do the opposite look up indian casinos as well, I've seen plenty of that going on.

Re:Best thing they can do:

[Khyber]

You misunderestimate the power of crowds.

Especially if perhaps a couple of your buddies are cops and they happen to be in that crowd.

Re:No risk for business?

[bussdriver]

They run a gambling machine and yet THEY can't gamble on it working properly?? I say they pay the 11 million because their machine said the person won that much it is their risk as part of their business. Its not like they run an unpredictable business like almost every other business out there--- that is, they have less risk than everybody else, there is a reason the house always wins and its not chance. Real business actually has some risks involved so I don't see why a sure-thing like a casino can't handle a little risk... Naturally, the result will be gambling hardware that is more solid than the military or banks...

Re:I'm calling bs

[BobSutan]

So? How is that different from stores putting the wrong price on goods? IIRC they're required to honor, although it could vary state to state.

Easy fix

[failedlogic]

Here's an easy fix for the casino. Rename them machine: "Feel Like a Millionaire". In the small print somewhere add that the "Maximum payout is $1627.82". You'll feel like a millionaire, for that brief second you though you won $11 million. And then, rejoice in your whopping $1627.82 winning after putting $1627.82 into the machine.

Re:UK fruit machines they are not the same as US g

[Attila Dimedici]

In the U.S., in every jurisdiction I am aware of, slot machines are by law fixed to pay out a certain percentage of the amount that is put into them. I do not know the numbers, but a slot machine, by law, may not pay out more than a certain percentage or less than a certain lower percentage of the money played in it.

Tribal courts

[clyde_cadiddlehopper]

Or am I missing something important here?

Most US casinos are operated by native American tribes. Their reservations are their own legal jurisdictions. If you have a problem, your recourse is to sue them in tribal court ... which, of course, is operated by the casino owner. Good luck with those odds. Pity the customer. And how about the employees? The casino employees I know here in Minnesota are keenly aware that their employment rights are severely limited.

Re:UK fruit machines they are not the same as US g

[DaveGod]

Or you could try going into a bookie and placing a bet, which is unenforceable. Google for your bookie of choice with the words "refuse to pay out" for plenty examples.

Your friendly language Nazi!

[Anonymous Coward]

Its BLAME not BLAIM!

Re:Your friendly language Nazi!

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

I wish you were a spell checker plug in for Firefox.

I wrote that while in between rounds of modern warfare2.

Blow me world... blow me.

Re:Your friendly language Nazi!

[Myopic]

As long as we're talking about composition mistakes, you also have an errant apostrophe in the original post.

I'm a grammar nitpicker, so please excuse the intrusion. Be well.

Obligatory xkcd link

[zill]

http://xkcd.com/221/

int getPayout(){
return 0;//chosen by a fair jackpot machine, guaranteed to be correct
}

Re:Why do errors end up as big numbers? is the slo

[Imrik]

Because when the errors are $0 people point it out to the officials and the machine is inspected without anyone playing it, hence no news.

Pay It Anyway

[Doc Ruby]

The $11M payout is the absolute #1 marketing that keeps people coming to the slots at casinos. It probably takes that casino less than a year to make $11M profit on its slots - maybe less than a month. Once it becomes known as the "indian giver" casino, slots players will go elsewhere in droves. If it got known as the "unearned jackpot casino", it would attract even more slots players. Slots have terrible odds, so its profitability is directly proportional to such simplistic logic that drives marketing.

This casino will lose much more than $11M by showing its market how it operates, rather than by just paying this unexpected marketing fee. Evidently slots operators aren't much smarter than their customers.

Re:Pay It Anyway

[stonewallred]

slots, at least in Vegas, have the best odds of any game. They tend to pay out between .96-.98 cents of every dollar played.

Re:Pay It Anyway

[Doc Ruby]

Please cite your stats.

Vegas slot machines max out at 93.42%, and are mostly below 93% payouts. I don't see any reason to believe that some Cripple Creek casino has better odds than Vegas.

Using correct blackjack basic strategy brings dealer advantage down to 0.5%, which is a payout of 99% before card counting makes it a reliable money maker over time.

The machine manufacturer should have the liability

[Joe The Dragon]

The machine manufacturer should have the liability then. The construction company was sold a 100% working machine and it's not there flat the some software / hardware fail made it kill people.

what are overflow errors doing in slots? autopilot

[Joe The Dragon]

what are overflow errors doing in slots? autopilot software is well tested to not have them of go into a fail mode that does display / try to use false info.

Why errors don't get jackpot payouts

[SEE]

If they're paid, it becomes easy to use a casino for money laundering. Walk into the casino with a bunch of cash you obtained illegally, dump it as a high roller at the craps table, hit the deliberately-broken slot machine your accomplice in the casino management set up to get most of your money back, and when you go to the bank and have to explain where you got the money you're depositing, hey, you won it from a slot machine, perfectly legal source.

To stop that, when a big payout is hit, the machines are audited by the gaming commission and checked for errors. If there is one, you don't get the payout, so a crooked casino manager can't set up a broken machine as part of a money-laundering operation.

Re:Why errors don't get jackpot payouts

[mbone]

I understand the rational here, and I am sure that these inspections were originally done to guard against both casino and player malfeasance. However, it is very easy for this good purpose to slide into a protect-the-corporation racket. Again, if there is evidence that there is trickery, prosecute, but if there is not, I think that the casino should pay.

To put it another way, I trust neither the corporation, nor the state gaming commission, to be on the side of the citizenry.

Re:Why errors don't get jackpot payouts

[Anonymous Coward]

That already happens, you just don't hear about the ones that get caught doing it because the gaming commission in Nevada keeps all of it's investigations tightly wrapped so the Whales will keep beaching themselves in Vegas.

Re:Why errors don't get jackpot payouts

[Santzes]

If you can rig slots to give you jackpots, where do you need the other illegal money source?

Re:Why errors don't get jackpot payouts

[SEE]

Stealing from casinos is an activity that ticks off casino owners; money laundering is a business that profits casino owners. Which activity do you think casino owners are more likely to organize, or to wink at if some of their employees organize?

The government doesn't have to make regulations to discourage casinos from organizing or tolerating theft from the casino. They do have to make regulations to discourage casinos from organizing or tolerating money laundering operations.

Re:Why errors don't get jackpot payouts

[TheTurtlesMoves]

So then if a machine is defective then why isn't the casino boss charged or at least investigated for money-laundering?

Because it BS excuse not to payout. But hay you know the score when you are about to enter a casino, so i do wonder why people keep going to these places.

Re:Why errors don't get jackpot payouts

[Anonymous Coward]

Far easier to set up a chain of cash businesses than launder thru an industry that is heavily scrutinized by the authorities.

Ever wonder why there seem to be 1000's of short lived store front businesses for finger nail care? One might think this business model wold have been debunked decades ago.

Re:Why errors don't get jackpot payouts

[firewrought]

If they're paid, it becomes easy to use a casino for money laundering.

Or bribery.

Re:Why errors don't get jackpot payouts

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I can see about a million problems with that idea. First of all there's the trillion or so cameras the casinos have watching every square centimeter of the floor. Then there's the fact that if illegally owned cash that needs to be laundered keeps turning up in the casinos deposits, law enforcement is going to want to have a look at those video records. Then they'll spot you, doing your thing and they'll get the casino for their collusion in your scheme.
That said, casinos probably are a decent place to launder money since the slot machines are all rigged. In most jurisdictions casinos required to have a minimum average win to loss ratio. Something around 80% near where I live. Usually that's across the whole casino, so to guarantee that ratio, the casinos rig the slot machines to act as a sort of pressure relief valve. So if people are losing their shirts one day at blackjack and roulette and other genuine games of chance, then the casino just increases the payout on the slots, maybe even above 100%. If people are doing really well in the other games and cleaning the casino out, then they drop the payout on the slot machines. So, after an 11 million dollar payout, it might be a bad idea to play the slots for a little while until the casino has recouped its losses. Other than that though, over time and with enough people playing at enough machines, the slots are a pretty good investment if your goal is simply to swap the money you have for other money. Hire a bunch of homeless people to go in and play the slots with your illegal cash and you get your money laundered at about a 25% loss (5% going to salaries). Not too bad. You might have to slice up one of your mules every now and again for skimming as encouragement to the others, of course.
Over all, the casinos are pretty crooked. They generally act within the law these days, it's just that the law itself is crooked. The government has decided that gambling is a vice and must be restricted and controlled for the protection of gamblers... and to funnel as much of their money as possible into the state coffers, or at the very least into the pockets of corrupt politicians and regulators.

Re:UK fruit machines they are not the same as US g

[allo]

yes, they may not pay out more than 100% and not less than 0%.

Nice scam of a business

[klui]

It's a great scam. When it says you win, you really lose or don't win what it says you win. I wish I thought of it first.

Casinos are rigged

[jollyreaper]

The only difference here is we see the rigging out in the open. They're designed to fleece money from the ignorant and stupid. If ever there was a time for that War Games winning move quote, this is it.

Subject

[Legion303]

Everyone relax. I'm sure Wildwood turns machines over to the Gaming Commission every time they lose, too, to be perfectly consistent.

dave and busters

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

which i avoid the machines where this mechanisms are in place.

Every time a new machine arrives in Dave & Buster's it comes in untouched so my quick fingers can win jackpot like 20 times in a row or something. Next week I come back and the machine will be all screw up. Timing was off. You can feel the delay when you press the button to stop the light.

Re:I'm calling bs

[Myopic]

To me, the details of the glitch are irrelevant. If the machine says you win X, then you should get X. If it's a machine error, then the casino has been wronged *by the machine manufacturer*, and the casino should sue that manufacturer, because they are the people who caused the problem. If the consumer follows all the rules, then the gambling overlords should protect their winnings.

Re:The machine manufacturer should have the liabil

[Khyber]

Why should they have the liability? It could be the case that the ORIGINALLY 100% working crane was poorly maintained after sale, which caused the malfunction.

6 words

[pak9rabid]

"Malfunction voids all pays and plays" Look closely...you'll see this in fine print on all slot machines. Legally, if the casino can prove that the machine malfunctioned, they're not required to pay out. Yeah, it sucks, but an intelligent person would already know slot machines are a racket anyways.

Re:6 words

[TheTurtlesMoves]

I find it strange that so many people seem to "trust" casinos....

Re:Info from someone who makes these games.

[bugs2squash]

Lets hope it has the necessary 7 bits of memory to store those game states.
Let's also hope that nothing electrostatic happens to the machine on the way to being tested after its 'glitch'.

I've actually seen this happen

[symbolset]

When it hits the jackpot, the machine reboots over and over to void play. The player gets some trivial payout and usually is none the wiser. BTW: Most Vegas digital slots run Redhat. Were you expecting Windows CE?

Re:UK fruit machines they are not the same as US g

[Peil]

That article is out of date, the Gaming Act of 2007 superceded the Gaming Act of 1845 and bets with a bookmaker are now legally recoverable.

Jackpot size decides

[symbolset]

A $5k jackpot is a win that a player will brag about long after they've lost $50K more. It keeps them coming back. An $11M jackpot is a prize where the winner moves to a new home and changes their name, giving up gambling forever - it provides little advertising benefit.

Re:Jackpot size decides

[nabsltd]

An $11M jackpot is a prize where the winner moves to a new home and changes their name, giving up gambling forever - it provides little advertising benefit.

There are many people who win those kinds of large jackpots who later end up broke, with a good chunk of the losses coming from gambling.

Let's be fair here...

[matunos]

If this were a story about an $11M parking fine, you guys wouldn't be screaming that the recipient had to pay it.

Re:I'm calling bs

[BobSutan]

Fully agree!

Re:Mistake

[Praeluceo]

Uhh, I hate to break it to you, but it's a slot machine. It -is- a scam. Lottery games should be played for entertainment purposes only and not investment. The same sort of entertainment you get from going to an arcade for hours on end: the thrill of pushing the buttons on the screen/controller.

They pay out a fixed percent, and the lottery commissions work extremely hard to ensure that the percentage is perfect. I can't imagine a casino being any less stringent, or being more fair, than a government-run lottery commission. On the flip side, most of those lottery machines run Linux, and watching a dmesg scroll across one of their screens is quite enjoyable, especially when you enter its test mode and play the ogg files on it that make up the background tracks, or watch the game load a series of png graphic sprites. That "Walk Like An Egyptian" song sure does get stuck in your head after a few hours of it though.

Re:Why do errors end up as big numbers? is the slo

[owlstead]

Yes, and why are sharks always in the news when they are killing people? That's a bunch of vicious animals!

Basically there are 2 reasons: 1) machines don't get inspected if they work as expected (i.e. not delivering any money) and 2) even if they are, they won't make headlines.

Re:That's why it's called gambling

[JoeInnes]

Certainly in the UK, that's not true. A shop does not have to sell you an item for the price they advertise it at - they are allowed to correct their mistakes. You would, however, I would speculate, get it for that price if you were able to complete the transaction before a shop assistant questioned you - if you were prepared to fight. The reason I think this is that although a shop does not have to sell you an item for the price they advertise it as, once you have completed the transaction, they already HAVE sold it at that price. They would probably challenge you, call security, probably the police, might even take it to court, but I think the court would find that the shop have essentially authorised the machine to complete transactions on behalf of the shop, and that it's the shop's responsibility to ensure that it does not make mistakes, or to absorb the cost of any mistakes it does make.

Re:That's why it's called gambling

[mr exploiter]

Wny not using a car analogy instead? No that would be retard. Like this.

This is like a bug in a slot machine made it give a larger jackpot that it should. Why do you have to over complicate this, it's has noting to do with retail stores, and it's simple enough.

And it's perfectly fine that the casino didn't pay it. A simple bug, probably made by a sloppy programmer, shouldn't be the cause for the casino to change hands to some looser slot player.

Yes, the "Storm Stopper" is trivial to rig

[sirwired]

In high-school I was a game tech at an arcade across the street. (A dream job for a geek! Much better than McD's, even though McD's paid better.)

The manual for Cyclone/Storm Stopper, etc. explicitly let you set the number of mSec the jackpot light would be lit. The manual also included suggested payout layouts and jackpot light times for maximum play at specific average payouts. (i.e. if you want five tickets average per play, set up the non-jackpot lights like this, the jackpot minimums and increment like that, and jackpot light time for another value.) It was a delicate balancing act involving many tradeoffs. Starting the jackpot large and incrementing quickly gets a lot of players attracted to the machine, but the ensuing need to drop the non-jackpot payouts causes players to leave quickly. Setting the jackpot timing too fast means some moron who puts a couple of hundred tokens in the thing will take his compulsive gambling somewhere else. (Yes, we had compulsive gamblers at a kiddie arcade; we had a setup where you could "bank" tickets long-term, so you could save tickets over months to save up for a CD player or a TV. We dropped the average ticket value for the higher-end prizes to keep highly-skilled players from costing us too much.)

Our arcade machines were not bright enough to adjust parameters based on average payout, but they were all adjustable, which we did by monitoring the token and ticket counters for each machine on a weekly basis. If a machine paid out too high or two low, we would adjust the odds and/or payouts.

For the arcade overall, we shot for an average of 7 tickets (worth about a penny each) for each token (worth about 21.7 cents each.)

SirWired

Re:Start at 5 million. Half (or more) goes to taxe

[nabsltd]

It doesn't matter.

You should easily be able to get 5% on a $5M investment. Assuming 50% taxes on the interest (way high for the US), and spending $300K/year, you have 22 years before the money runs out.

Setting the tax rate to a more realistic 30% and spending $250K/year gives you 33 years before the money runs out, while dropping to $200K/year spending is 55 years of money. For many, that's the rest of their lives.

Re:A Strange Game

[maxwell demon]

I didn't know you could start a thermonuclear war with a malfunctioning slot machine.

The two rules of gambling:

[Rambo Tribble]

1. The house always wins.

2. See 1.

OK, There's A Problem? The House Didn't Pay a Bet?

[LifesABeach]

If the House can't pay, then the House has a new owner. This is not the first time that a Gambling House didn't pay the winner of a Bet. Never has the Better(sp?) had to rely on the functioning of the gambling device, that was even in the bet itself. It's a business loss, pure and simple.

Gubmint, son!

[newdsfornerds]

Because the casino owners also (partially) own the local gubmint. And the state gubmint. We have the best gubmint money can buy.

Re:Mistake

[makomk]

I hate to break it to you, but it's a slot machine. It -is- a scam.

Nope. The interesting thing about organized gambling is that, while it's quite possibly horribly unethical, it's generally also honest (with some exceptions) - and that still doesn't stop the companies running it raking in money from the clueless masses.

Re:UK fruit machines they are not the same as US g

[mabhatter654]

Except these are on a network, so the payout is determined by the server over a group of machines, not an individual machine.

Essentially the computerized slots are more like lottery tickets, all the results are known you get a random one when you pull the lever. The programming will pay out, but by "group" and not by machine. The regulators are OK with this because they vet the code. That's how they know an error was made.. because the server didn't TELL the machine to display a win.

What is entertaining about it?

[MikeFM]

I lived in Las Vegas for a while. I could never figure out what was entertaining about gambling and especially slots. You put your money in a machine that essentially just blinks and very cheerfully says you have given it your money. You don't really get to play a game or anything. I'd rather play skee ball where there is no illusion that what I'm doing will make me wealthy but actually requires some interaction beyond dropping coins in the slot.

WTF

[hesaigo999ca]

If the machine says they won, they won...end of story, bring the casino to court....the fact they know the re was a screw up in the programming without even opening up the box, means they knew there was never supposed to be a winner, because they programmed the machine to never win, except the programmer made a mistake , hence why they say it was a programming error without even opening the box. So can you either bring them to court for false advertising...chance to win xxx money here...or bring them to court for not paying the prize won....either way they should be punished, and now I know i will never go to a casino in my life.