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Surely when Charles Fey built his first slot machine in 1896 he never
could have envisioned where the contraption would travel and how it would
transmogrify. In fact, for a hundred years his innovation hardly changed
at all, except cosmetically. The external design, consisting of an ornate
metal box was wrapped around the mechanism and became fancier or plainer,
larger or smaller, in attempt to attract the eye. But as always, when
a player primed the machine with coins and pulled the handle, the reels
spun randomly and, governed by stoppers eventually came to a halt. Each
reel was decorated with a variety of symbols that, when matched according
to a pay schedule (printed somewhere on the face of the machine), the
player won; when no matching symbols appeared, the player lost.
Though Fey is given credit as the Father of the Slot Machine, prototypes
existed years before he came up with the idea of converting them into
gambling device--which he believed would enhance the profits on his sales
routes. These early "amusement devices" could be found in saloons where
polite society would not be exposed to them and where proprietors stood
on the edge of breaking the law.
These first apparatuses had a major drawback. They were designed in
such a way that after a certain number of coins were inserted the weight
of these coins would tip the scales and some of the stored coins from
previous play would spill out, thus providing a winner. It didn't take
long for street-smart players and wise guys to figure out that the coins
would come out automatically with a little pushing and shoving and slamming
the machine around. So it was back to the drawing board where clever
builders devised first a metal bar to help prevent "tilting," and then
came up with smaller devices that could be bolted to a counter top or
wall.
Meanwhile, in dignified establishments such as grocery stores and mercantiles,
a similar piece of equipment began popping up and being played by even
the snootiest of patrons. Called the trade simulator, this machine operated
much like other contemporary devices except that the winners produced
could be exchanged or traded for goods within the establishment--thus
the name "trade," perhaps a forerunner to the modern cents-off coupon.
Playing slots was (and is) both a tactile and sensory experience involving
the feel of the coins and the touch and pull of the handle. It involved
the sense of vision, the sense of hearing, and the innate sensation of
anticipation.
Winning and losing depended on a simple mechanism that included symbols
(usually fruit of some kind, perhaps bars and/or sevens, and of course
hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades, Fey's original choice) affixed to
the three reels and a shaft. With ten symbols per reel, the machine was
capable of a thousand possible combinations.
A feature is triggered when 3 or more
scattered Banana symbols occur in sequence from Left to Right
or Right to Left. The game screen changes and the feature game
screen opens up. In the bonus game Mighty Monkey has a total of six obstacles to negotiate to reach the
top of the skyscraper. Each obstacle successfully passed will give you prize money
equal to the sum of the prize(s) received in the previous feature
rounds. The prize awarded for the successful completion of the first
obstacle is four times the original bet amount.
In a modern slot machine,
the odds of hitting a particular symbol or combination of symbols
depends on how the virtual reel is set up. As we saw in the last
section, each stop on the actual reel may correspond to more than one
stop on the virtual reel. Simply put, the odds of hitting a particular
image on the actual reel depend on how many virtual stops correspond to
the actual stop.
In a typical weighted slot machine, the top jackpot stop (the one with
the highest-paying jackpot image) for each reel corresponds to only one
virtual stop. This means that the chance of hitting the jackpot image on
one reel is 1 in 64. If all of the reels are set up the same way, the
chances of hitting the jackpot image on all three reels is 1 in 643, or
262,144. For machines with a bigger jackpot, the virtual reel may have
many more stops. This decreases the odds of winning that jackpot
considerably.
The losing blank stops above
and below the jackpot image may correspond to more virtual stops than
other images. Consequently, a player is most likely to hit the blank
stops right next to the winning stop. This creates the impression that
they "just missed" the jackpot, which encourages them to keep gambling,
even though the proximity of the actual stops is inconsequential.
A machine's program is
carefully designed and tested to achieve a certain payback percentage.
The payback percentage is the percentage of the money that is put in
that is eventually paid out to the player. With a payback percentage of
90, for example, the casino would take about 10 percent of all money put
into the slot machine and give away the other 90 percent. With any
payback percentage under a 100 (and they're all under 100), the casino
wins over time.
In most gambling
jurisdictions, the law requires that payback percentages be above a
certain level (usually somewhere around 75 percent). The payback
percentage in most casino machines is much higher than the minimum --
often in the 90- to 97-percent range. Casinos don't want their machines
to be a lot tighter than their competitors' machines or the players will
take their business elsewhere.
The odds for a particular
slot machine are built into the program on the machine's computer chip.
In most cases, the casino cannot change the odds on a machine without
replacing this chip. Despite popular opinion, there is no way for the
casino to instantly "tighten up" a machine.
Machines don't loosen up on
their own either. That is, they aren't more likely to pay the longer you
play. Since the computer always pulls up new random numbers, you have
exactly the same chance of hitting the jackpot every single time you
pull the handle. The idea that a machine can be "ready to pay" is all in
the player's head, at least in the standard system.
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