46 Fun Facts About Slot Machines

What is the classic nickname for a slot machine?

One-armed bandit refers to the side lever, yet most modern machines are started with a button or touchscreen, and some keep a lever mainly for show.

What are slot machines called in Australia and New Zealand?

Pokies are officially called gaming machines, and in much of Australia they stand in ordinary pubs and clubs, not only in casinos.

On a modern slot machine, what decides where the reels stop?

A random number chip picks the result first, and the reels are then stopped to match it, so they only look as if they land by chance.

On which card game was Sittman and Pitt's five-drum, 50-card machine based?

Poker hands were the aim, and the 50 cards usually left out the ten of spades and jack of hearts, which ruled out a royal flush in two of the four suits.

In early Las Vegas, casinos mostly saw slot machines as a way to keep whom busy?

Gamblers' wives and girlfriends were the target, yet by 2010 slots and other gaming machines earned about 70 percent of US casino revenue.

Why couldn't Charles Fey patent his three-reel slot machine in California?

Gambling was illegal there, so rivals copied his designs freely, and Fey kept control by running his machines in saloons himself rather than selling them.

Which famous early slot machine was named after its top-paying symbol?

Liberty Bell copies spread so widely that 'bell' became the everyday name for almost all three-reel slot machines for half a century.

What destroyed Charles Fey's San Francisco slot machine factory in 1906?

An earthquake and fire flattened it, and by 1909 San Francisco had banned slot machines outright, silencing more than 3,000 of them across the city.

What had happened when a Colorado slot machine told a woman in 2010 she had won $42.9 million?

It had malfunctioned, and regulators found she had really won $20.18, since slot machines carry warnings that a malfunction voids all pays.

Why can a 'penny slot' cost far more than a penny a spin?

Players bet many credits per spin across several lines, so a penny machine taking 500 credits at once is really a $5 machine in disguise.

Why did lemons, cherries, oranges and plums appear on early slot reels?

The machines dispensed fruit-flavoured gum, or at least claimed to, so makers could pass them off as gum sellers where gambling was banned; the bar symbol is said to have begun as a gum-pack logo.

Which number, shown on every reel, forms the classic jackpot line on slot machines?

Seven is the number dice players watch: it is the most likely total of two dice, since six of the 36 possible rolls make it, and the opposite faces of a die always add up to it.

Which New York mayor smashed seized slot machines with a sledgehammer for the cameras in 1934?

Fiorello La Guardia had told New Yorkers 'Let's drive the bums out of town', and that autumn more than a thousand seized machines were heaved off a barge into Long Island Sound.

What could Bally's Money Honey slot machine of the 1960s do that earlier machines could not?

Pay out big wins by itself: its motor-driven hopper could drop up to 500 coins, so winners no longer had to wait for an attendant to arrive with the cash.

What does the 'slot' in 'slot machine' originally refer to?

The opening for coins: the name is short for 'nickel-in-the-slot machine', a label that once covered ordinary vending machines too before it narrowed to gambling devices.

Around 2010, the United States had about twice as many slot machines as which other machines?

ATMs: CBS counted close to 850,000 slot machines in 2011, double the number of cash machines, so devices that take money outnumbered the ones that hand it out.

In B. F. Skinner's experiments, often compared to slot machines, which birds pecked for unpredictable rewards?

Pigeons worked hardest when food arrived at random rather than on a fixed count, and Skinner himself likened the box to a slot machine: the uncertainty keeps the lever moving.

Which TV game show became the biggest licensed brand in slot machines, starting in 1996?

Wheel of Fortune slots were built with a partner firm whose earlier hit, Wheel of Gold, already had a bonus wheel on top, and the slot maker bought that partner outright in 2001.

What is the chart on a slot machine that lists winning symbol combinations and their prizes called?

The pay table is printed on the glass of older machines, above and below the reels, but on video slots it hides behind a 'help' or 'i' button on the touch screen.

What does RTP stand for on a slot machine?

Return to player is the share of all money bet that a machine is built to pay back over the long run, so a 95 percent machine still keeps five cents of every dollar played.

Mississippi and New Jersey law each set which requirement for slot machines?

A minimum payout rate: over time Mississippi's machines must hand back at least 80 percent of the money bet and New Jersey's 83, which still leaves the house up to a fifth of every stake.

Some slot machines in US tribal casinos are, by law, electronic versions of which game?

Bingo: on these 'Class II' machines the spinning reels are only for show while a linked bingo game between players decides the result, a design that escapes the limits states place on ordinary slots.

In the 2010s a Russian crew beat casino slot machines around the world by secretly filming them with what?

Their smartphones sent footage of the spins to a server that decoded each machine's number pattern, then alerted the player when to press spin; members were later jailed in the United States and Singapore.

On a casino floor, what does the flashing 'candle' on top of a slot machine signal?

An attendant is needed: the candle lights when a player wants change or help or the machine has a problem, and a coloured band on it often shows the coin size the machine takes.

Which word for a slot machine fault comes from the switches that caught players rocking old machines?

Tilt outlived the switches: they are long gone, yet technicians still call any fault on a machine a tilt, even a door left open.

What is a payout made by an attendant, rather than the machine, called?

A hand pay happens when a win is too big for the machine to pay out; in the coin era staff had to verify the win and fetch the cash, which could take half an hour.

What does TITO stand for on modern slot machines?

Ticket-in, ticket-out machines print a barcoded voucher instead of dropping coins, and makers added a recording of clinking coins so that cashing out still sounds like a win.

What is a prize pool that grows with every play until it is won called?

A progressive jackpot grows with a slice of every wager until someone wins it; machines are often linked across casinos so it grows faster.

Ronald Harris was convicted in the 1990s of rigging slot machines while holding which job?

State gaming regulator: his job at the Gaming Control Board was to keep slot machine software honest, yet he rigged some machines to pay out and ended up in the Black Book, barred from the casinos he once policed.

Which US state allows slot machines in its convenience stores and at its biggest airport?

Nevada treats a few machines as a normal sideline for shops, and visitors flying into Las Vegas can start playing in the airport terminal before they have even collected their bags.

Which Australian state first legalised slot machines, for registered clubs only, in 1956?

New South Wales let only registered clubs run them, and since the clubs were non-profits, the takings went back into the premises and built some of them into large complexes.

Before slot machines could pay out coins, what did a winner usually collect instead?

Drinks or cigars were the usual prize: the earliest machines had no way of paying out, so the barman settled up over the counter, and what a win was worth depended on the house.

Which Australian state keeps gaming machines out of its pubs and clubs, allowing them only in its one casino?

Western Australia confines them to Crown Perth: fears of addiction have kept the machines out of every pub and club in the state.

In The Simpsons episode where Springfield legalises gambling, who gets hooked on the slot machines?

Marge, normally the family's voice of caution, tries one machine while waiting for Homer to finish his shift as a blackjack dealer at Mr Burns's casino, and is soon neglecting the family to keep playing.

Which feature of British fruit machines lets a player move a reel on by one symbol?

Nudges are handed out after a spin, and each one turns a reel of the player's choice on by a single step, letting the player try to pull a losing line into a winning one.

Which arm of the US government runs its own slot machines, but only outside the United States?

The military runs them on overseas bases and spends the millions they earn each year on recreation for the troops; Congress banned slot machines from bases on home soil in 1951.

Pachinko parlours, Japan's answer to the slot hall, may not hand out money, so how do winners get paid?

Prizes resold for cash: winners trade their haul for small 'special prize' tokens inside, and a separate window just outside the parlour buys them back, which keeps the parlour itself within the law.

When Russia outlawed casinos and slot halls in 2009, where were they still allowed?

In four remote zones: Putin's law pushed gambling out to Kaliningrad, the Altai, the far east and the Azov coast, and the industry said closing the city halls overnight would cost some 350,000 jobs.

Which video game company grew out of a firm that imported slot machines to Japan in the 1950s?

Sega is short for Service Games, an American-run firm that set up in Japan in 1952 to bring in slot machines; only after a 1960s merger with an arcade importer did it begin making arcade games of its own.

How big was the Megabucks jackpot that one Las Vegas slot machine paid a single player in March 2003?

About $40 million: the $39.7 million prize fell at the Excalibur on a Megabucks machine, one of a statewide network of linked slots that pool their stakes much as a state lottery does.

Slot cheat Tommy Carmichael's 'light wand' emptied machines by doing what?

Blinding the coin-counting sensor: the wand was little more than a camera battery and a tiny bulb, but shone up into the machine it left the hopper unable to tell how much it had paid, so it kept on paying.

What does anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll call the absorbed state that regular slot players say they play to reach?

The machine zone is a trance of unbroken play in which time, space and the self seem to fall away; regulars told her they play to stay there, not to win, so designers cut out anything that interrupts.

What was the name of the pinball game that gave Bally its name in 1932?

Ballyhoo borrowed its name from a popular magazine of the day: Raymond Moloney launched the game because Gottlieb couldn't turn out its hit Baffle Ball fast enough, and the Chicago firm he named after it went on to build slot machines.

Where in England was the UK's only 'super casino' due to be built before the plan was scrapped?

Manchester was the surprise winner over Blackpool in 2007, but the plan was scrapped a year later, so the 1,250 unlimited-jackpot slot machines the casino was allowed never arrived.

Which of these US states bans every form of gambling, slot machines included?

Utah writes the ban into its constitution, which stops the legislature approving any game of chance or lottery 'under any pretense'; Hawaii is the only other state with no legal gambling at all.

What term do researchers use for slot outcomes that pay back less than the wager but still trigger celebration?

Losses disguised as wins: bet a dollar, get back 50 cents, and the machine still flashes and chimes; in University of Waterloo tests, players' skin responses to these were as strong as to real wins.